For any car dealership, getting people through the door is undoubtedly the most crucial goal of the business. Without visitors, there are no sales. Unfortunately, though, bringing customers to your showroom is not as simple as unlocking the door during your open hours. In fact, it is not even as easy as having a website and telling people about the business. To get drivers into your dealership and to sell the most vehicles, you will need a solid marketing strategy, which can be a large undertaking for an in-house team. By working with a car dealership marketing agency, you get the best of both worlds: you keep your internal team focused on face-to-face interactions with customers while continuing to take advantage of every opportunity to bring more customers to your door.
How Do Car Dealerships Attract Customers?
There are numerous ways to attract customers to your car dealership, with five crucial pillars of strategy to consider. First and foremost, you need to have a good reputation with your past and current customers and community. The second piece is to ensure that you represent your dealership accurately and professionally on social media platforms. Third, you need to craft and implement a solid advertisement strategy. Fourth, you should be a reliable resource for shoppers in the research stage. And last but certainly not least, your website needs to show up above your competitors for common search engine queries related to your business. These pillars are the foundation of a successful marketing strategy for your dealership, but how are they achieved?
#1 BOOST YOUR DEALERSHIP’S REPUTATION
If your dealership has a poor reputation, you will not sell cars. It is as simple as that. With today’s unprecedented ability for people to share their experiences online, it is essential that every interaction with a customer, or even a potential customer, is a positive one. Good reviews give future customers faith in your business. Unfortunately, this sometimes ends up out of your hands. It is possible for something to malfunction with a vehicle you recently sold, even if it was not an evident issue before it left the lot. This can, in turn, lead to a poor review. Getting at least a few bad reviews is typically inevitable.
Handling poor reviews with grace and proving to the customer and the public that you want to work to come up with a customer-focused solution will ultimately have more weight than the review itself. Prove to previous and prospective customers that you are dedicated to providing the best products and services possible by responding to each and every review, whether good or bad. Solid reputation management is a sure way to help retain a customer base and attract new shoppers as well.
#2 REPRESENT YOUR DEALERSHIP WELL ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is a massive part of today’s world; very few adults are not active on at least one platform. Typically, those in the market for a vehicle will check out your dealership’s page to learn more about your business, how you interact with the public, and even what kind of authoritative presence you hold online. With that in mind, you want to create profiles for your business that accurately portray your offerings and display good relationships with your online community. Social media management is essential.
There are a number of ways to ensure you are putting your best foot forward on social media. You first need to have the bones: a profile picture that represents your brand, a bio that explains your offerings, and your contact information. Not only does having these things easily accessible help your social media profile appear legitimate, but it also is helpful to users as they sift through your page. The other piece to this is building and maintaining an audience through insightful and interesting posts. Posts about the vehicles you have for sale on your lot and links to your most recent blog posts can be perfect social media content. And with a strategy in place, you can continue building relationships with customers and potential consumers.
#3 IMPLEMENT AN AD STRATEGY
Undoubtedly, one of the most important pieces to getting your dealership noticed online is through an ad strategy. Paid advertising, whether through Google, social media, or other platforms, is a way to use your money in a directed way to reach a target audience.
Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising placements are particularly effective as they show up at the top of the search results for your target keyword, and, as suggested in the name, you only pay when someone clicks the ad. This allows you, as a car dealer, to target specific keywords related to your inventory, services, and location so that you only put your money where it will be useful. There are also retargeting ads, which appear for users who have previously visited your website, keeping your business at the top of their minds.
Social media ads, which are different from just managing your business page, provide another avenue for your brand to show up to potential customers. The ad management system on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram even allow you to target consumers down to their demographics, interests, and behaviors, which can be extremely helpful as you try to gain traction from a certain set of individuals without overspending.
There are also other facets of online paid marketing, such as display ads on websites and apps, as well as sponsored content on relevant publications, but Google and social media will be the best places to start as they are typically more effective and intuitive. These ad platforms give you the opportunity to show your dealership to the audience that will help your business grow, making it an essential part of your car dealership marketing strategy.
#4 BECOME A USEFUL RESOURCE FOR CAR SHOPPERS
When drivers are first thinking about purchasing a new vehicle, they are likely going to research various options that will fit their car needs. You want to be the one to provide the information they are inquiring about—this is called content marketing. The first step to being successful in this area is to perform research and find out what the users in your area are searching online; what questions do they need answered? These questions will likely come from a mix of knowledge about your particular business and market trends, as well as information provided by tools to tell you whether or not terms or questions are being searched.
After you have found topics that need to be covered—whether it’s a question no one else has answered or a query that gives you a chance to outshine your competitors with your answer—it is time to write the content. Within your landing page or blog post, you want to be sure you are providing the most relevant information and expertise on the topic. Proving expertise, having authority, and being a trustworthy source are going to increase your chances of showing up in searches and of readers continuing to use you as a resource (and potentially converting into sales).
#5 RANK ABOVE YOUR COMPETITORS IN SEARCH
While paid ads are important to a marketing strategy, there are many users who will scroll right past them on the SERP (search engine results page) to look at the organic (non-paid) listings. Most of those who do go to the organic results will then click on the first, second, or third URL, making grabbing ahold of those spots essential for getting traffic on your site. A significant factor in ranking well on the SERP is the previously explained content marketing, but technical search engine optimization (SEO) plays another major role.
Technical SEO is a beast of its own, combining a multitude of tactics to help a website rank well. These tactics include things such as building a robust internal linking structure, updating metadata to include keywords and viable target locations surrounding your dealership, and even writing alt text for images on the site. That said, it is important to note that SEO is not only made up of on-site actions, as much of it is research: finding keywords to target, analyzing page performance, and more. Plus, SEO can be used in actions off-site, such as writing YouTube video descriptions that link back to your website and vying for external links where appropriate on other websites. Overall, SEO is important because it holds hands with content marketing to make your website stand out and perform better on the SERP.
Why Does My Dealership Need a Marketing Partner?
There are many areas of work that fit under the marketing umbrella, making it challenging to take on all efforts internally. Your dealership needs a marketing partner in order to cover all of the bases that form a successful marketing strategy, from reputation and social media management to paid advertisement, content marketing, and search engine optimization. Not only does working with a marketing agency save your internal marketing team’s time, but it will also give you a level of expertise on each subject that you would not get otherwise. Imagine leaving social media advertisements up to someone who has never worked with the platform before. That could be detrimental to your budget if something goes wrong; having knowledgeable professionals handling it is best.
While general marketing professionals are beneficial to your dealership and should not be replaced by an agency, the addition of a team with specializations will make your online presence stronger than you may have realized was possible. Car dealership marketing agencies have departments that focus on core pieces of the puzzle, dedicating time and high-level knowledge to each. This means that rather than having a little bit of work done in each area by one over-stretched team member, you will have individuals putting full work into every part. This saves your team time in the day and can help you excel in every area of digital marketing, making the most of your dealership’s entities.
Trust Wikimotive With Your Dealership’s Marketing
Here at Wikimotive, we are a full-service car dealership marketing agency that is here to help you take your business to the next level. Whether you want to learn more about how to manage your dealership’s reputation or want to go ahead with a high-quality SEO strategy, we have your back. With over a decade of experience in the automotive marketing industry, we get it and will work tirelessly to build and implement marketing strategies that improve your numbers.
So, what are you waiting for? Contact us today for a free website audit or to learn more about what we have to offer. We look forward to hearing from you and can’t wait to help your business grow!