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4 Digital Marketing Tips for Your Dealership

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Back to School Basics Every Dealership Should Practice

September is the time of the year where temperatures begin to slowly drop, the leaves start to turn color and the silence in most homes is much appreciated as kids are back in classrooms. Even for dealers, it’s a time of year where routines are put into play and “back to basics” are practiced. For car dealerships, digital marketing is an ever-evolving subject and even for the most experienced marketer, an advanced subject. From a website’s user experience to SEO and SEM, there is constantly new marketing technology and best practices being introduced, which makes a basic dealership digital marketing refresher course much-needed. In this blog, Mastermind shares 4 auto dealership marketing ideas and how to implement them at your store:

  1. Ask the right questions
  2. Convey the right marketing message
  3. Identify accurate buying personas
  4. Produce quality content 

  

1.) Ask the Right Questions

Before you begin a digital marketing strategy for your dealership, you need to ensure you’ve asked all of the right questions so you can get the real results you want with your online marketing campaign. Here’s an idea of questions to ask about your dealership:

·         What value do you offer to your customers?

·         How can you make customers want to come back to you by rewarding loyalty?

·         What is your key competitive differentiator?

·         What services can you offer that will make the online process smooth and enjoyable for your customers?

These are simple questions you should be asking when you’re trying to optimize your website, maintain your branding and values, and gain and retain traffic with your marketing.

2.)    Convey the Right Marketing Message 

With the answers to the questions above in mind, knowing what type of content your customers want to engage with is the single biggest challenge of marketers. In most cases for growing businesses, this intel is acquired over time. However, in order to get the most out of your marketing dollars, here are a few tips for a successful digital marketing campaign:

  • Ensure every one of your website’s pages has a strong call to action (CTA) to guide customers through the car buying sales funnel. Examples of strong CTAs include a lead submission forms or a link to an inventory or vehicle description page 
  • Use descriptive and original images and banners, avoiding generic stock photos. You want to catch your customer’s eye and have them focus on your distinct product offering rather than being overlooked by coming off as “stock”. 

3.)    Identify Accurate Buying Persona

If one thing has been made evident so far, it’s that your audience is extremely important. You want them to choose to visit your site when presented with an ad, you want them to remember it, and you want them to come back again. Eventually, you want them to take action on one of your offers. However, if you’re not targeting the right audience in the first place, you’re not going to achieve any of that. People will simply visit your site and bounce off it quickly thereafter because they believe the information presented didn’t match the offer that got them on the site.. The way to combat marketing to uninterested parties is to identify your accurate buying personas. This is accomplished by carrying out extensive research on your current customer base and ideal buyer persona so that you can understand them as best as you possibly can. By segmenting interests, behaviors and demographics, you can tailor content and target these personas, resulting in generating relevant traffic to your website that keeps users around.

4.)    Content is King

We already mentioned  content to some degree, but just how important it is for your dealership’s online marketing deserves to be emphasized. Your marketing strategies can be cutting-edge, but if your customers don’t find relevance in your blogs, emails, website content, etc. it’s simply wasted effort. Here are a couple of questions to keep in mind regarding content for your dealership:

·         How often and when will you post content?

·         How can you add value to the content you create by sharing your expertise?

·         How can you make sure your content is shared across social media platforms?

Creating high quality content is a must. You can create articles, videos, and even take pictures. Whatever you do, you must know the best times to post for each platform for your audience, and ensure you are consistent. Focus more on quality than quantity, though. Try to stay up to date with search engine and social platform algorithms, as they change and can affect who sees your content. Don’t forget to regularly check your analytics so you can work out what type of content your audience wants to see more of. When you pay close attention to your analytics, you’ll be able to tailor your online marketing effectively.

With these 4 dealership digital marketing tips, you can improve your dealership’s marketing efforts, increase website traffic, get more conversions, and strengthen your brand. Using an automotive marketing tool such as Market EyeQ by automotiveMastermind can help segment and define your audience  in order to accomplish all of your goals. Our market-leading data, sophisticated marketing, and in-depth dashboard plus expert consultative service team gives you all this knowledge as the palm of your hand with an exclusive 360° market view. Contact us today for a free consultation.