Those days are long gone where businesses used traditional marketing mediums like radio, TV, and banner advertising for attracting customers. These methods of targeting customers often proved to be incredibly expensive for startup companies looking to make a name in the marketplace. This is when people started adopting digital marketing. Now it’s become incredibly crucial for any type of business to have a personal website and work on their SEO, SEM, PPC, Content, and Visual Marketing.
Customers are no longer interested in the same old, redundant advertising campaigns. Nowadays, your prospects want to have direct dialogue with the company. They want to interact with you before moving forward in the buying process. This goes true, especially for dealerships. You need to work on your interactive marketing, if you want to develop a huge customer base. When prospects get a chance to engage and interact with you, they will definitely be more open to shopping.
Interactive Marketing Tips for Dealerships
Know Your Message – and Stick to It!
Interactive marketing requires dealers to have a clear message and remain consistent while spreading it. Tell your customers why they should shop from you. Communicate with them and show everything conceivably possible about buying a certain make/model, feature, or accessory from you. Bear in mind though that attention spans are short. This means, it is essential to hone your message down to its core, before presenting it to your audience. Particularly on your home page, your goals and aims should be written in a concise and effective manner. Avoid adding fluff or content just for the sake of adding it. Work hard on being engaging, supportive, and interactive through the message you try to deliver.
Design According to Your Audience
Interactive marketing means that you should be as engaging and open to communication to your prospects/customers as possible. This means, you need to design your entire website according to your target audience. Know exactly what areas customers will want you to focus on and make it easier for them to reach you by sharing links to social media profiles, forums, and communities. Be sure to keep the design unique and appealing, yet consistent and clean. This way, you can feel assured that customers will approach you when requiring professional advice or acquiring a product/service.
Keep Things Fresh
Now that we have entered 2017, it’s become more important than ever to come up with unique and relevant content. Dealerships need to keep their content looking fresh and as distinctive as possible to attract their audience. Nobody likes reading the same old stuff they find on every other website. Posting done and dusted topics can seriously hurt your business. Give your audience the feeling that you are on top of your game by giving them something nobody else is. Provide the latest automotive info, which can relate to recent events, news, car shows, model releases, feature information, etc. Be authoritative rather than competitive.
Use Those Stats
Unlike other media strategies, the internet presents various opportunities to dealership owners and webmasters to figure out detailed data and statistics about the effectiveness of various interactive marketing tactics. Use these statistics to learn about the habits of your visitors. Study the number of people visiting your pages, the times of day in which you receive the most traffic, and the click-back rates of different pages. This can help you in figuring out which interactive marketing strategies work and which don’t.
Social Media Opportunities
Much of interactive marketing depends on your capability of using social media to its fullest capacity. Since social media platforms are the best places for you to communicate with your target audience, generate creative discussions, and direct them to your website for purchasing a certain product/service, it is necessary for you to create accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Each of these platforms presents plenty of opportunities for you to communicate with your audience and allow them to participate in dialog. You can even create social media communities that mainly focuses on the service you sell. This can generate healthy discussions between your fans/followers, leading to more referrals and prospects to your business.
Interactive Marketing Benefits for Dealerships
Offers Personalization
Interactive marketing is all about understand the needs of your target audience and tailoring your marketing messages, services and content accordingly. This creates kind of a personalized experience from your brand that customers are guaranteed to enjoy. For instance, if your prospects are into tuning and customizing their ride, you can provide them the option for selecting the brand of color, car, and additional features they may want to get. These customization tools make it easier for customers to make a decision on whether they want to shop with you or not.
Engages Customers in the Process
Since interactive marketing is about two-way communication, you have plenty of opportunity for engaging customers and vice versa. In many traditional marketing activities, there is zero customer participation. Brands just used to blabber on about their services and products. Customers never had the opportunity of asking important questions. Interactive marketing isn’t the same. You can use various platforms for communicating and engaging with your audience. This can improve your chances of boosting sales and conversions.
Discovers the Customer Needs
As customers begin communicating and engaging with their target audience, they learn more about the needs and wants of customers. By tracking information like preferences, likes/dislikes, shares, and comments, dealerships can learn what kind of info people are looking to find in your automotive website. This can help you in making your interactive marketing strategies more effective. You can use various forms of image and video marketing to further improve engagement give your brand a more personal feel and approach.
Last, but not the last, interactive marketing for dealerships presents more opportunities for sales and conversions. The various tactics for engagement are likely to enhance your brand reputation. So, if you want to boost your dealerships profits, don’t hesitate on improving your interactive marketing.
