Automotive digital marketing is no longer optional for dealerships. If you are running a growing car business and need to build a strong online presence, you need to place strict emphasis on the digital marketing of your brand. This form of marketing includes SEM, SEO, PPC, and video marketing to create a strategy that uses key concepts for growing your business.
By focusing on a variety of aspects for attracting your target audience, you can boost website visibility. This will allow you to gain a significant increase in web traffic, and eventually SERP rankings. For more information, look at these tips below for creating a powerful automotive digital marketing strategy.
Define Your Dealerships’ Mission/Objective
To ensure everything goes smoothly from the start to end, your digital marketing mission must fit into your grand plan. This makes it crucial for you to define your car dealership’s objectives. Figure out how you want to position your automotive business. Understand what customers you will be targeting. Define the clear set of goals to make things easier for them.
Set & Measure Your KPIs:
When it comes to furthering your business intentions, you need to identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Determine the figures you will be held accountable for achieving. Analyze your marketing efforts and get realistic with your KPIs. This will ensure that you aim for a positive change, while preventing limitations. Once you have figured the KPIs, consider finding a suitable method for measuring each.
For instance, you can use Google Analytics for tracking engagement, measuring conversions, or identifying target audience or a tool like BuzzSumo to monitor the success of your content marketing strategy. Make sure you specify each goal of your KPIs. This means, if your goal were to increase traffic, a handy KPI template would be: (Increase Traffic) by (Insert Figure in %) in (insert number of months).
Similarly, analyze other aspects of your car business you want to improve, and focus on creating new strategies. Monitor the success of those strategies by specifying each goal of your KPIs.
Analyze Your Past (& Learn From Your Mistakes)
When it comes to creating a powerful automotive digital marketing strategy, you need to figure out your past mistakes. It is vital to be aware of where your business is lacking. This means, you should never go into the planning period in the dark. Analyze your past to figure out the strategies that brought you success and mistakes that led to failures.
Digital marketing is all about altering and customizing your strategies on a consistent basis. Therefore, choose a time you would like to analyze. This can be the previous year, month, or quarter. Once determined, set your Google Analytics calendar to match the timeframe. Compare your progress to competitors by checking out Google’s Benchmarking Reports.
Don’t hesitate on analyzing the strategy of your competitors too. You can create a spreadsheet of their online activities to figure out what works for them. For instance, you can use SEMrush to identify the keyword strategy of a particular business. You can figure out what keywords are driving the largest volume of organic traffic to their website. You can also compare the paid and organic traffic from different website to determine how they are moving with the SEM strategy.
Market to Your Target Audience
While it is a good habit to plan each step and process of digital marketing, it is imperative that you don’t get away from the people you’re trying to reach. You already know who your target audience is. Make sure you tailor all your marketing efforts into attracting them and customize your KPI settings, budget fretting, and channel selection.
Put your audience at the heart of your automotive digital marketing strategy and cater to their physical/emotional needs. Satisfy their desires by offering special deals and discounts on new and used cars, while creating a useful and friendly persona. It isn’t necessary that your automotive business uses one persona only. Try your best to get all employees on the same page and make efforts towards them participating actively online.
Note down all the demographic information about your target consumers location, age, and gender. Dig a little deeper and determine the problems you can solve for them. Create specific personas your employees can use for communicating with your target audience. You must document all factors that can make prospects think by delving into their aspirations, goals, and desires.
This can be done by diving deep into the “Audience Reports” from Google Analytics. This can help you identify the key characteristics of your target persona like career, sex, and age.
Reach out to Your Prospects with Video
Digital marketing means more than using the same redundant strategies for promoting and advertising your car business. You need to go the extra mile with your content marketing by adopting video into your strategy. Avid car-buyers and speed-enthusiasts will always get attracted with a visual strategy. This is why most dealerships always go the extra mile in delivering high-quality images and videos for attracting prospects.
Therefore, don’t hesitate on trying to create a video to send a message. This can be done by recording short, informal interview videos of your sales manager, service team, service manger, and receptionist and then extend to complete reviews of cars. Humanize your dealership by giving your video a voice from friendly and charismatic staff members.
You can start by recording short and informal interview videos of your service team, receptionist, service manager and sales manager to showcase their personalities. Post these videos on your main website or social media pages to humanize your dealership. For boosting results, try choosing the most charismatic and friendliest folks for videos.
Last, but not the least, create a digital marketing calendar and share it with your team members. Clarify beforehand the goals and aims you want to achieve within a certain timeframe. Highlight the key campaigns you will be creating and promoting throughout the month or year. Document the digital channels needed for ensuring the success of each campaign.
