The automotive industry is undeniably one of the most competitive in the world. With hundreds of manufacturers and millions of dealerships, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd. Doing so has only become more complicated over time as the internet becomes a bigger player in the game. That is where automotive marketing companies come into play. Partnering with a business that will focus on drawing in the right online audience for your car dealership is absolutely essential for your continued success.
The Different Types of Auto Marketing
When you are considering signing on with a vehicle marketing agency, you will see various different options available to you to help you reach your desired audience. There are many things to consider, from content production to search engine optimization (SEO) to social media management. Keeping each of these elements in place and running successfully by yourself is quite challenging, but with the right agency by your side, maintaining each facet will become much easier.
What is Content Management (Content Marketing)?
In short, content marketing is just as it sounds: written content that describes a topic that relates to your business or explains something that your dealership offers to the consumer. While this may seem rather simple, this type of marketing involves a lot of research, planning, writing, editing, and publishing expertise. You can write whatever you want and publish it on your dealership’s website, but that does not mean it will generate traffic. Knowing what to write about comes from researching topics and keywords, and figuring out what consumers want to know about your products and services.
Once a topic is identified, the content needs to be written in a way that answers the question a user is looking to find with their internet search. This needs to be in-depth and provide something useful to the reader, and link out to other pages they may be interested in to go further into a topic. With this type of structure, your website will satisfy the needs of humans performing research and search engines attempting to understand the structure and authority of your site. Of course, before anything should ever be published online, it needs to be edited for quality. Old online habits included stuffing search terms into content rather than focusing on answering a query and writing naturally, but doing the latter is essential and how content marketing should look.
All in all, content marketing is all of the above: research, planning, writing, editing, and publishing. Though, content management is nothing without good SEO.
The Ins and Outs of SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is another major player in the marketing world. In fact, it is only becoming more essential as time goes on, with the first organic result on the SERP garnering over 25% of all clicks. With that said, it is evident that this type of marketing is vital, but how does it work? While this is a complex topic, it is quite simple to get a general understanding of its importance. SEO is the compilation of tasks aimed toward making your website show up in the organic search results for various keywords and queries before your competitors.
There are a lot of pieces to the SEO puzzle, the first being: research. In order to know how to cater your site for the customer base you are attempting to reach you need to know what they are searching, why they are searching for it, and how you can be the best resource for them. After figuring those out, many more things must be done to optimize the site.
The best SEO will include the frequent addition of content that answers important search queries, an in-depth linking structure to tie all of your pages together into a comprehensible web, title tags with keywords, and so much more. Well-structured automotive SEO can make your site more powerful and rank better in search.
Managing Your Social Media Presence
There is no denying the fact that social media management is an essential part of marketing in the modern world. By building an audience on various social media platforms, your dealership will be creating brand awareness and connections with the online community. In turn, this will lead to more website traffic, meaning more leads and conversions. While SEO captures those already looking for something automotive-related, social media allows you to hit an audience that may not have previously thought about getting behind the wheel of something new.
By working with an agency that specializes in automotive social media marketing, you will be open to a whole new space. Social media experts will be able to learn about the followers you currently have, see what area could be expanded, and then customize the content to your audience. Between regular weekly posts and paid ads to retarget those who may have shown interest in the past, social media is there to grab the attention of large groups of people and can make all the difference in the world when it comes to generating new leads. Social media truly is one of the strongest assets in modern marketing.
Do I Need Marketing for My Dealership?
Oftentimes, car dealerships ponder on whether or not they really need to market their vehicles and services. No matter what happens, people will still need transportation, so you are bound to get customers anyway, right? Not necessarily. While it is true that the need for transportation, including automobiles, is consistent and likely everlasting, that does not mean inevitable customers on your lot. As previously mentioned, the auto industry is competitive, so if your neighboring dealer is going all out on marketing and you are staying silent, you may lose out on a large number of customers, especially with many people doing online research before heading over to a dealership.
When push comes to shove, yes, you DO need digital marketing for your dealership to stay ahead of your competition.
Contact Wikimotive for a Demo Today!
If you are ready to have quality content added to your website, to show up above your competitors on Google, or build your social media presence beyond what it has ever been before, contact us at Wikimotive today. We will get you set up with one of our friendly performance managers to show you where your dealership’s site is now and where we could take it.
So what are you waiting for? When you are ready, we are ready.