Do you actually know what your digital marketing agency does for you, or are you just trusting that it’s working? If you don’t truly know what’s being done or how success is being measured, you might be paying for work that isn’t moving the needle at all.
Sometimes it’s hard to know what your vendor should be doing or what questions you should be asking to make sure they’re on top of things. This is why I put together this guide of five questions you should be asking your automotive marketing company to help get you started.
#1 What does success look like and how will you measure it?
If an agency can’t clearly define success or explain how they’ll measure it, that’s a red flag.
Finding alignment between your business goals and what your marketing agency offers is essential for long-term success and expectation setting. Establishing clear benchmarks and understanding which metrics will be tracked gives you a more accurate picture of your marketing partner’s true value as time goes on.
I asked Wikimotive’s Senior Strategic Account Manager, Sommer White, how she would answer this question, and she said, “I’d ask them to define success. Success in SEO is rankings growth and increased clicks for discovery and transactional keywords. If they only want to talk about sales, well, that has more to do with their internal process.”
This kind of transparency helps our dealer partners understand the distinction between marketing performance and sales performance, which is an important line to draw early on. Marketing puts your dealership in front of the right audience; converting that visibility into sales depends on many additional internal factors.
Having this conversation upfront ensures everyone is on the same page and working toward shared, clearly defined goals from the get-go.
#2 How are you balancing paid and organic efforts?
If your agency doesn’t put a focus on balancing paid and organic efforts, you may be throwing away money.
When it comes to search marketing, there are two major sides: paid (rented) and organic (earned). Too often, we see dealers who are bidding on the wrong keywords on the paid side and throwing away money because their vendor or vendors aren’t balancing the two efforts. Making sure your agency isn’t muddying the waters between the two can save you tons in the long run. So, seriously, ask this question.
Generally speaking, our philosophy at Wikimotive is to use paid search as a hole filler. If you’re not ranking organically somewhere, that’s where you should be renting space. As your organic visibility improves, those paid efforts should be adjusted.
Once you’ve earned strong organic positions for a keyword, continuing to pay for clicks on that same term often means wasting budget rather than gaining additional value. Monitoring organic rankings and shifting paid spend accordingly is key to keeping both strategies efficient.
A strong agency should be able to clearly explain why paid search is being used, where it’s filling gaps, and when it makes sense to pull back. If your agency can’t articulate how paid and organic efforts work together, there’s a good chance your budget isn’t being used as effectively as it should be.
#3 What are you doing for AI?
The online landscape is changing. While AI hasn’t yet had a massive impact on transactional search related to car dealers, it still is a huge part of the conversation.
While artificial intelligence isn’t currently having a massive impact on transactional search related to the automotive industry, it’s still important that your vendor is staying up to date on best practices. As of late, there are two aspects your marketing agency should know and be able to tell you.
First, Google’s AI Overviews aren’t currently impacting regular search results for transactional queries, which are those for which you should be aiming to rank; these are the searches that drive sales.
Second, when it comes to ranking in AI Overviews or in chat-based models like ChatGPT, it’s traditional SEO tactics that are really going to be impactful. As you have strong content and technical SEO—especially optimized Schema—being published and implemented on your website, you should be good to go.
If your agency simply says “it doesn’t matter” or claims it has had a massive impact on car sales already, they may not be as in touch with the industry as you need.
#4 What kind of input or involvement do you expect from me as the client?
A marketing “agency” should be a marketing “partner.”
When you hire an automotive marketing company, you shouldn’t feel like you’re hiring someone to manage something; you should feel like they understand and care for your business. Remember, there is significant importance in aligning your goals with what your vendor has to offer.
The locations you want to pull business from are important. The models you aim to sell the most of are important. Whether you want to prioritize new vehicle sales or used vehicle sales is—yes, you guessed it—important!
In fact, any valuable marketing partner will want to know what your priorities are so that they can align their efforts with your business goals. With that said, your agency should also be able to look at a location, a model, and current performance and tell you where the data backs—or doesn’t back—what you’re requesting.
When it comes down to it, an agency that uses your input but doesn’t rely solely on it is going to bring you the most valuable results and a valuable relationship.
#5 What sets your agency apart from others in the space?
Every agency is different. The uniqueness of the one you work with should resonate with you and your business.
No business operates the same as another. Understanding what sets your agency apart from others is essential to knowing whether they are the right fit for you. Are you looking for someone to run the marketing show in the background? Do you want someone collaborative who will listen to your ideas?
When asked what makes Wikimotive different, Zach Billings, Co-Founder and CRO at Wikimotive, said, “Human experts manipulating the knobs and levers. In a vendor space crowded with automation and cookie-cutter solutions, we have long differentiated ourselves with tangible results that you can only generate when you don’t cut corners.”
If you want real people working to drive real customers to your website, Wikimotive is the right digital solution for you. Contact us today to learn more.