For any car dealership, getting people through the door is undoubtedly the most important goal of the business. Without visitors, there are no sales. Unfortunately, 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 four 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 become a useful 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 four pillars show you 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 these 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. This ties directly into having a good reputation, making social media management an essential part of attracting customers to your car dealership.
#3 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 is 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).
#4 Rank Above Your Competitors in Search
Sure, it is easy to pay for ads that show up on the top of the Google results page, but there are many users who will scroll right past those 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 search engine results page (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 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.
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 can help you excel in every area and make the most of your dealership’s entities.
Contact Us at Wikimotive Today
If you are interested in working with a car dealership marketing agency that will help your website and social media pages stand out from the crowd, contact us at Wikimotive. Our Performance Management team will give you a demo and show you how our services can grow your business. Warning: you may be shocked!
So what’s stopping you? Learn more about how you can succeed with online marketing today.