As featured in AutoSuccess Magazine.
25% tariffs! 35% tariffs! No tariffs on Canada and Mexico? Just kidding, 10% tariffs! But maybe not for USMCA-compliant cars… Ah, heck, pause them for 90 days and just pile all the tariffs on China!
It’s been a moving target, for sure. Tariffs were the hot topic into early April, and then the 90-day pause dialed down the hype, but I’ve seen this movie before. There will be more to the story, and we should be prepared for the marketing and car sales realities that are looming over the horizon.
Urgency
Especially when tariffs are in the news cycle, the buy-now urgency is real, and it’s a good idea to capitalize on it. It’s almost certainly a true statement that car prices will NEVER be as low as they are today — after all, that’s pretty much always the case, tariffs or not. At Wikimotive, we do the organic and/or paid search for about 200 dealers, so I had no shortage of dealer partners coming and asking how we could do SEO or SEM for tariffs when the news was all tariffs all the time. This is an interesting ask, and you want to be careful with this…
You see, many vendors, 20 group peers and self-proclaimed experts were running around with Google Trends graphs showing how much interest had spiked around tariffs, which has been a justification for plowing marketing budget into this. The problem is — just like with “pre-order” when supply dried up post-COVID — there isn’t actually any search volume. Google Trends works on a percentile basis, and that means if search volume goes from 10 searches per month to 100, it will show a 1000% increase in the Google Trends graph. The problem is that 100 national searches are nothing. 100 searches in a local market isn’t even that much. The point? There is no consumer search happening for “no tariff cars” or anything similar to that. SEM and SEO should be your solution to a lot of your market share needs, but they’re not your solution for tariff awareness marketing.
The play when the news is tariffying is to leverage email marketing, direct mail and social media. These are marketing channels that allow you to feed an outgoing message to consumers without relying on them performing the search. Use these channels to drive buy-now awareness and direct traffic to an informative page on your website.
Tomorrow Effects
So far, with tariff news softening, only a limited number of 2025 sales have been pulled forward to a purchase sooner than the consumer planned on. So far, this pull-forward effect has been small enough that it’s unlikely to create a sales slump later — at least not one big enough to notice over regular seasonality. That’s so far…
If tariff urgency does return, just be mindful of the knock-on effects of pulled-forward sales. If 10% of sales that were going to take place in the second half of the year were to pull forward to June to beat any possible price increases, we’d have HUGE June sales. We’d probably have big July sales, too. But sales pulled forward don’t get back-filled by sales later. This is the opposite of pent-up demand, and urgency buying will lead to a sales slump later in the year. If that happens, a slump will also lead to suppressed used car prices, so be prepared for both realities as you do your forecasting.
Don’t get me wrong, if tariff urgency is there, you want to get your share of it, so there is marketing and messaging you should deploy to do so!
Prepare But Don’t Despair
Tariffs are not going to be a major problem for dealers, at least as long as you’re prepared for the ups and downs that tariff news might cause. In reality, tariffs appear to be more of a political lever than something that will materialize and then stick for long enough to have a large impact. Price changes caused by tariffs are likely to be only marginally more than those that come from regular inflation pricing anyway. Remember that consumer search patterns for this topic are not there in ways a dealer can capitalize on, but consumer search data for car purchase keywords remain high, so SEO and SEM are still your friends — you (or your vendor) just need to focus on the real data and separate it from the hype.
Want to figure out how you stack up in SEO rankings or SEM performance for the keywords that matter? Wikimotive offers a free analysis of both, with actionable insights you can take back to your vendor or marketing team. Just request one on the site, and we’ll set you up with a consultation time to help you better navigate your marketing in 2025.