Whether you are already invested in automotive SEO or just getting started with digital marketing, working on your content strategy is imperative for helping your dealership increase its visibility in search results. If your website doesn’t have any content, Google won’t have anything to crawl. This directly leads to your website being sidelined by both: search engines and users. This is why you must work on creating blog posts, landing pages, articles, PRs etc for providing VALUE to customers.
Bear in mind that almost all individuals now shopping for a vehicle do their research online. If your site is unable to impress viewers with its content, chances are you may never be able to receive business. Content is crucial for allowing your dealership to be found by customers. By focusing on your automotive content marketing, you can make sure that your site is visible to the right people. Quality auto leads are able to naturally discover what makes you different.
If your automotive marketing strategy helps customers realize YOU have the expertise, vehicles, and services they require, you can count on them to get in touch with you rather than you having to initiate the communication. For more information, look at this guide below:
What Is Automotive Content Marketing?
Automotive content marketing involves creating useful blogs, articles, PRs, etc and distributing it towards a targeted audience to leverage a loyal following. It requires car dealerships to come up with unique, interesting, and appealing content that provides value to consumers. By doing thorough research and helping customers via free resources, you can receive paid compensation later. This is why dealerships are told to regularly post engaging content.
Everything from your articles to your marketing messages should resonate with the people who care about what you have to say. If your messages are irrelevant to the needs of your consumers, chances are you may never receive businesses. On the other hand, if you do your research on your target audience and create relevant content, you can feel assured that viewers will respond. Bear in mind content that informs leads, instead of interrupting them will set you apart as a dealership.
It doesn’t matter what type of service you are dealing in buying/selling, repair/maintenance, accessories/features, you first need to establish your ideal audience, pinpoint their unique problems, and create content that solves these problems. Once you offer solutions free, you will begin generating trust among consumers. Soon enough, they will start recommending you to their friends. This sets the future of your dealership.
However, what kind of content should an automotive business be promoting? Well, content can come in a variety of forms. This can include eBooks, white papers, landing pages, emails, social media, blog posts and more about the latest specials/offers, educational topics, customer testimonials, model-by-model comparisons, detailed reviews on cars/technologies/accessories, or news pieces about the latest happenings, events, and changes in the automotive industry.
Why Does Automotive Content Marketing Matter?
Automotive content marketing is an awesome for dealers to get tons of impressions, visitors, and consumers at a low cost. By creating unique content and posting it on your website blog or on social media platforms, you expose your content to a huge audience, minus the high costs. This enables you to build solid relationships with potential customers.
As you create unique content and regularly post informative and authoritative blogs and articles, you can set your dealership apart from the competition. This creates a culture of trust and brings you new leads with an ROI that is more than triple of what you would make with paid search efforts. However, it is imperative that all your messages be carefully targeted.
You can’t just come up with any topic to fill up your websites blog. Each piece you produce and post should be of the utmost high quality. It should include pictures, infographics, and videos too for enabling better understanding of content. Being an automotive dealer, you have to be as visual as possible. Even for a simple how-to guide don’t hesitate on adding pictures for each step or an entire video highlighting the process. Your content should demonstrate your expertise in the field, as it’s the only way for customers to trust your service.
How to Create a Successful Automotive Content Marketing Strategy?
Identify Your Target Audience
As mentioned earlier, an important part of automotive content marketing is to identify your target audience. You need to make sure you are speaking to the right market segment. This means, you need to know whom you’re speaking to. What services are you offering to consumers and how do you think it might attract the most? For instance, if you are selling reasonably priced vehicles with special deals and discounts, you might want to target students and budget-conscious individuals.
If you specialize in selling large vehicles like minivans, SUVs, and full-size sedans, you might want to target individuals with families. For luxury vehicles, your focus would be more on executives, seniors, or military/civil servants. If you sell all types of vehicle, you can create separate landing pages for targeting different audiences.
Identify Their Needs, Questions, Concerns
Once you have figured out who your target audience is, you need to identify their needs, questions and concerns. For instance, if you are targeting families, think about what features they might be looking for in a vehicle. Usually, individuals with family demand more convenience features, safety technologies, seating configurations, fuel economy, and space/cargo. Align your content to their needs by giving them suggestions about vehicles that could best fulfill their needs.
Have an Objective Always
One of the biggest problems with any content marketing strategy is having no apparent objective. Bear in mind that anything you post should accomplish a certain goal with the reader/viewer. The information you post should provide value. This means, if you are writing a blog post, get creative with a call-to-action so that they know WHO to contact if they need help. If you are posting a video on YouTube, make sure to add a link to your website.