Car Dealer Marketing
Grow your auto dealership with marketing solutions that scale.
One of the most important aspects of any automotive business, car manufacturers and dealerships included, is its branding. Strong, consistent branding is a must for any business in the automotive industry. While automotive brands, such as Audi, Honda, and Tesla, maintain very strong branding and presence. Unfortunately, local car dealerships often have a much more difficult time with this same level of branding. Luckily, investing in digital car dealer marketing is one way to boost your business’s visibility and presence in your community.
Traditional forms of marketing can only take automotive brands and businesses so far. To maintain relevance, it’s incredibly important to maintain strong branding across traditional and digital advertising avenues.
Your automotive marketing strategy should set you apart from other dealerships, which will attract more potential customers. A strong, consistent image can also help your business retain customers and close more sales.
To learn more about how to craft a strong brand for your automotive business and how automotive marketing can help improve your company, keep reading.
What is Car Dealer Marketing?
You’ve probably seen car dealership billboards, various commercials on television, and maybe you’ve even heard automotive experts advertise on the radio. Those are the more traditional methods that many local car dealerships use to drive leads, gain more traffic, and reach more customers.
But what about automotive advertising in the digital space? How can those operating in the car dealership industry take advantage of the benefits that digital marketing has to offer?
When you work with a professional automotive marketing agency, you can expand your reach through SEO (search engine optimization), paid media, paid search, reputation management, local search engine optimization, content marketing, and more.
Digital marketing is a highly complex combination of a number of different types of strategies aimed at ensuring your web design is optimized, creating paid ads that have high conversion rates, and growing your company.
Our automotive advertising agency has extensive experience helping and managing local dealers’ marketing efforts, and our automotive marketing clients have seen great success.
These success stories result from a lot of hard work and dedication, which is precisely what we can provide for your company. If you want to increase your market share, generate more leads, and grow your business, continue reading below.
Do I Need a Website for My Business?
As digital marketers, we’re often asked, “Do I need a website for my business?” For those looking for the short answer, we’ll help you out–YES!
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Top Auto Dealership Marketing Company
Digital Marketing Services to Drive Car Dealership Sales
Depending on your specific company needs, you might benefit from certain marketing services, while you might not benefit from others. Our automotive marketing agency offers several marketing services that can help you achieve the growth you want for your business.
Some of our most popular automotive marketing services include the following:
Do Car Dealerships Need Digital Marketing Services?
Many auto dealers wonder if it’s necessary to work with automotive marketing agencies in order to grow the brand. While automotive marketing isn’t a requirement to find success, it can certainly move the needle much faster than sticking only to traditional advertising methods.
By utilizing digital and social media marketing techniques, you can expand your reach even further.
Most consumers will look online, either on their phone or computer, to look for businesses that sell the product or services they need. They’ll read reviews, visit that business’s site, and likely decide whether or not to purchase based on what they see in search results.
Digital marketing allows you to take advantage of this ease of access through a combination of social media marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), content marketing services, lead generation, and many other digital marketing strategies.
While it isn’t technically a necessity, you’d be amazed at how you can boost your revenue by working with an automotive digital marketing agency.
5 Tips for a Successful Automotive Marketing Campaign
The best automotive marketing agencies truly understand that digital marketing isn’t an exact science. But at Digital Logic, our agency has a very good idea of what search engines like to see from auto websites. We’re able to use the years of experience we’ve gained by helping companies succeed online to create personalized content to help our clients in the auto sales industry compete against other local dealerships.
If done well, your online marketing strategy can give you a leg up on your competitors, especially when it comes to local dealers marketing.
Below, we outline the five essential tips and tricks that all automotive marketing agencies should include in their marketing strategy.
Know Your Target Audience
The very first step to crafting your marketing strategy is to identify your target audience.
What types of people are most likely to purchase the cars you sell?
Vehicles vary greatly in terms of price, style, gas mileage, and countless other factors. So, if you sell more affordable vehicles, you won’t want to target an audience that is looking for luxury vehicles.
Figure out the needs, wants, and potential questions of your buyers. Then, take those factors into account when you make your marketing strategy. This will help ensure that you are marketing to the right audience.
Customer segmentation can help you break up your customer base into smaller, more manageable groups. That way, you can market to different groups in different ways.
Build Your Brand of Car Salespeople
Another important aspect of every automotive brand is its sales team. Most people think of talking with salespeople in person when they envision themselves buying a car.
Having friendly and knowledgeable sales staff is incredibly important because buying a car is a big choice. Give your exceptional salespeople the chance to shine in your marketing campaigns. Include them in your social media posts and put a face to your brand while also celebrating your team. This will strengthen your brand’s relationship with your customers and make you more appealing to future customers.
Update and Maintain Your Car Dealership’s Online Presence
As we mentioned previously, your business’s online presence is very important to potential customers.
If a potential customer searches for a place to buy a car, they’re much more likely to choose a dealership with a strong and active online presence. On the flip side, if a customer searches for information about your business online and they find next to nothing, they’ll likely “bounce” or leave your site.
This highlights the importance of optimized local web design services.
Move Budget From Traditional Marketing to Digital Marketing Solutions
Traditional marketing methods include TV commercials, radio commercials, billboards, and even verbal referrals. Most car dealers heavily rely on these outdated forms of advertising.
But if you’re ready to grow your business, you’ll need to invest in a marketing strategy that is more current.
Most of your target customers now base their purchasing decisions based on what they see or read online. They no longer pay attention to numerous television advertisements, as most of the general population has grown numb or can simply skip past them.
Instead, most consumers research major purchases online.
If you want your business to grow, you’ll need to reach your audience using modern technology, not outdated tactics that every other dealership uses.
Consider this: a potential customer is deciding between two dealerships they’ve heard good things about from their friends and family.
Dealer A is Green Line Automotive. It is very active on social media, has a lot of positive Google reviews, and has a good website. Dealer B is Blue Line Automotive. It hasn’t been posted on social media in two years, only has a few reviews, and has a very outdated website. Potential customers are more likely to choose Green Line Automotive, as they have much more information about them compared to Blue Line Automotive.
Keep Track of Online Reviews for Your Dealership
Online reviews can often make or break local businesses.
This is especially true when it comes to Google reviews, as Google is the largest search engine in the world.
In other words, online reviews matter a lot to potential clients. It’s important to manage all the reviews your company gets. Why?
Because Google favors businesses that have a lot of positive Google reviews, businesses that frequently respond to customers on those reviews, and also businesses that have taken the time to thoroughly fill out their Google Business profile.
Be sure to monitor reviews so that you can emulate these techniques.
Automotive Marketing Services
By this point, you’re probably wondering what essential digital marketing techniques would be best for your automotive business.
There are a number of innovative technology solutions for all of your marketing needs. Several of those solutions include the following digital marketing techniques:
PPC Advertising for Car Dealers
PPC (pay-per-click) is a form of digital advertising. As the advertiser, you can have a search engine host your ad and pay a fee every time a searcher clicks on that ad. It is a very effective, cost-friendly way to advertise your company online.
We recommend that you partner with a reputable automotive marketing agency with industry experience, like Digital Logic. When you partner with a reputable marketing or advertising agency, the agency will ensure that your marketing budget is used strategically.
Since our advertising experts have years, if not decades, of experience, we can guarantee a better outcome in the long run, while saving you time and money.
Your advertising strategy needs to focus on attracting qualified leads from local consumers that are actively searching for the vehicles or services that your company offers. Your marketing budget won’t stretch too far if you are wasting your budget to get clicks for consumers halfway across the United States.
By using the pay-per-click advertising system, your company is able to tailor a specific message based on your selling preferences and then target your ads based on specific variables, like audience demographics, keywords, and geographic location.
Benefits of PPC Ads for Car Dealerships
A few benefits that PPC advertising offers include the following:
- Cost-efficient but high ROI: With paid online advertising, you only pay when a potential customer clicks on your ad. So, if you work with a reputable advertising agency, every single person that clicks on one of your ads should be a qualified lead.
- Targeted ads: As a business owner or in-house marketing specialist, we’re sure that you don’t mind spending part of your budget on services that are guaranteed to bring in more potential customers. When you invest in this technology, you’re delivering highly specific messages to highly targeted consumers in your geographic area. Google offers an impressive amount of data and analytics. The issue is that if you don’t have extensive experience with this form of marketing, you won’t understand how to use this information to benefit your company.
- Ad extensions: Additionally, when you run paid advertising with Google, you’re able to harness the power of ad extensions. These help increase your ad visibility, reach more consumers, and generate more leads for your company. Ad extensions allow advertisers to insert a phone number, location, and specific messages for each specific ad group. This technology gives you more control over your message.
SEO for Car Dealers
93% of consumers start their search for a product or service on Google. Half of all organic traffic goes to the first three organic listings. Furthermore, the first listing can take up to 95% of that traffic. So, if your company website isn’t on the first page of Google, then quite frankly, you might as well not be there at all.
That’s where search engine optimization comes in. Search engine optimization helps your website rank higher for specific industry-related keywords.
While other agencies may offer some form of search engine optimization services, few are as experienced and qualified as Digital Logic. Most marketing companies understand the basics of search engine marketing, but at Digital Logic, we consistently research, monitor algorithm updates, and stay on top of Google’s best practices for organic growth strategy. This makes us one of the top SEO agencies out there.
When you partner with our digital marketing agency, we’re able to drive interested consumers to your site and help convert those visitors into paying clients by employing search engine optimization techniques that are specific to the auto sales industry.
Local SEO for Auto Dealerships
Ranking high for auto industry terms at the national level will no doubt help your company immensely, but this takes time. For dealerships that are more focused on securing more local leads, we recommend investing in a local search engine optimization strategy.
At Digital Logic, we offer the following services as part of your monthly SEO package to help ensure that your auto business appears at the top of Google’s local listings and other map listings:
- Conduct extensive keyword research: Our marketing agency uses auto industry-specific keywords that have a much higher chance of converting searchers into paying customers.
- Optimize your Google Business listing: Your Google Business listing will power a good bit of your local online traffic, when it’s optimized correctly. To ensure that your Google Business listing will rank higher in local search results, our marketing agency will update photos with coded markup, select the best primary and secondary business categories, ensure that the NAP (name, address, phone number) is consistent across all of your other directory listings.
- Optimize your site structure: As part of your SEO strategy, we will make sure that the critical aspects of your site include the specific keywords that your company is trying to rank for. This may include optimizing page headers, adding meta information, and including target keywords on both. This helps Google understand where your auto dealership is locally. Google will then use this information to highlight your company for local relevant searches.
Website Design for Car Dealerships
Not all dealership websites are created equally.
If you’re investing in any digital marketing strategy, then your website is the foundation on which all of those marketing solutions are built. Apart from online reviews, your site may be the single largest factor for those searching for vehicles.
As with any company website, having an old, outdated, non-responsive, or even poorly designed site can be detrimental.
At Digital Logic, we offer web design, web development, and graphic design services from our very talented team of web developers. Our team can make changes to your current site or create an entirely new website.
When Digital Logic builds websites for our clients, we take the time to truly understand what your digital marketing goals are. Then, our web design team creates a design that offers solutions for all of your business’s pain points.
Our web development team works with our graphic design team to ensure that every web design is professional, eye-catching and has fast loading times. Additionally, unlike other marketing agencies, we ensure that all websites are optimized for search engines since we understand the importance of having an organic search strategy.
Once you have your perfect website, our organic marketing professionals can even produce and market the content on your website, since publishing new content online is essential for growing your traffic.
Social Media Marketing for Car Dealers
If you want to have an active and branded social media but you just don’t have the time to manage it, our account management team can handle those social media accounts for you.
Our marketing team creates professional and well-branded social media graphics with captions, schedules them, and ensures your business maintains active social media accounts.
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Let us know how we can help you with your dealership marketing efforts.
How Much Should You Spend on Digital Marketing to Secure Enough Car Sales?
It’s safe to say that advertising to and engaging with your target audience online is increasingly necessary to grow your business.
To define which digital marketing services you need to really give your business an edge, it’s important to evaluate what you’re already doing well.
For example, if you have a brand-new site, chances are you don’t need to pay for web design or development.
However, ensuring that your new website is optimized for search engines is just as important. If you haven’t done any SEO work or had someone else do it, now is as good a time as any to start. Search engine optimization is essential for businesses that want to grow their organic traffic. All forms of SEO, including local SEO services, technical SEO services, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO, are important for the organic success of your site.
It’s also important to make sure that you’re making the most of your marketing spend.
Dealerships get countless phone calls about scheduling test drives, ordering parts and add-ons, and even asking questions about inventory. By using a combination of call tracking and conversion intelligence, you can help customers along their journey toward a purchase.
Last but certainly not least, your content marketing game should be on point. When searchers find your content online, it should be free from errors, easy to understand, and helpful. If your content doesn’t answer their questions, they’re likely to leave your site to continue their search.
Content marketing is absolutely essential if you want to expand your reach in organic search results.
Work With the Best Automotive Digital Marketing Agency
To succeed in all of the above digital marketing techniques, you’ll need considerable time and energy, as well as background knowledge, to do everything well. Working with an experienced automotive marketing agency can save you precious time and money, as well as deliver stellar results.
The team at Digital Logic can handle all of your car dealer marketing needs, including social media marketing, search engine optimization, web development, customer acquisition, content marketing, and so much more. Our full-service digital marketing agency is here to boost your dealership’s reach and help you rise above the competition.
Ready to become another one of our success stories? Give us a call at 318-678-5020 or request a free SEO audit.
