Digital Marketing for Auto Dealerships – a Primer

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Digital marketing is a world all it’s own in the realm of advertising. Strategizing the best ways to reach audiences and determining just who those audiences ought to be can take months if not years to feel completed to a degree of satisfaction. Are there any shortcuts you can take? What are the optimization steps that even a small dealership can take to best reach appropriate consumer bases? Let’s take a look at this quick “101” on digital marketing for auto dealerships.

If one were to search on Google the phrase “best auto dealer near me”, it’s likely that the first 3 to 5 results on the first page would be paid ads.

While investing in paid advertising on search engines is a reliable strategy to produce an increase in traffic, make sure that your strategy is concise. When developing paid advertising with Google, you have a plethora of options to refine exactly what search terms pull your advertisement as well as what search terms will not generate the appearance of your ad. Utilizing the blacklisted search terms is an underutilized aspect of search engine advertising which can make all the difference in hitting your relevant audiences. 

Positive Customer Reviews are Essential – Do Everything You Can to Get Them

As important as paid search advertising is, there is nothing as important to a business as customer reviews.

There is emerging evidence which suggests that younger audiences especially do not trust paid placements on search engine results. This lack of trust varies between industries, but the best thing you can do in order to establish trust in an audience is to encourage your current customers to leave you reviews. Consumers have an established record of considering the experience of others heavily in their decision making process when seeking a product or service. If your dealership provides top quality customer service, potential clients should hear that from current customers! 

Building on the need to have published, trustworthy reviews, consider building in promotions to the buying experience.

Customers love a deal. Providing an audience with an incentive to share their experience with your business often yields better results on review pages such as Yelp! and Google Business ratings. Utilizing promotional deals is a classic strategy that remains relevant, even in the digital age. With the ownership of an automobile being integral to many peoples’ livelihoods, there are countless households which are simply looking for the best deal on their next car. Providing $1000 off for recent college graduates or providing $0-down deals helps drive sales, especially when bringing in new customers.

Know Your Audience

Having your promotions planned is a great step, but how do you determine your audiences?

The first step in any successful marketing strategy is to identify which market portions from which you’re already garnering attention. When you know this, you can devise the best plan to draw in new market segments which your current strategies are not attracting. The most efficient way to determine these statistics? Data. Data-driven marketing is the key to digital marketing success. When you know exactly who your audiences are, what marketing strategies which you’ve used already are most effective, and specifically for what products and services consumers are attracted to your business, developing the future of your digital marketing campaigns becomes easy. 

Invest in Professional Marketing Assistance

Looking for your edge in the seeming chaos of the digital marketing world? M1-Data is here to help. Our expert team has spent years developing a multitude of tools which help gather and extrapolate your market data and set guidelines and specific targets for your future digital marketing campaigns. To see how M1-data can help your dealership grow, contact us today!