What is Digital Automotive Marketing?
admin | Automotive Marketing |
Digital marketing is the future of marketing, especially in the automotive industry, where more and more consumers are searching for cars and how to service them online. So, as a dealership, it is crucial for you to be on top of the latest digital marketing trends and how they impact the automotive industry.
While we don’t have the time to go through all trends in digital marketing, this article will discuss three of the most important aspects of digital marketing in the automotive industry, along with a few tips for each. We will also discuss how you can receive outside help on your digital marketing efforts to more effectively optimize your marketing.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an excellent way to reach lots of consumers all at once and for a low cost. In the automotive industry, we recommend using email marketing as a way to engage and follow up with current customers. To illustrate, you can use email marketing to invite customers who bought a new car from your dealership for service check-ups, oil changes, and more. You can also use email marketing as a way to promote service discounts and upsell products and services.
Moreover, sending these emails is easy, as you only need to create one email template that you can send to as many people as you’d like. You can also create different email campaigns for different types of customers to better target your messaging.
To create effective email marketing campaigns, we recommend using email marketing software companies such as HubSpot, Constant Contact, or MailChimp. These platforms allow you to organize customer data and create easy-to-use email marketing templates. We also recommend seeking outside help from experts in the field who can help optimize your campaign based on industry best-practices. We’ll discuss this further at the end of this article.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Paid advertising is a huge aspect of digital marketing and usually comes in the form of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or other online advertising platforms. This is referred to as “pay-per-click” advertising because as the advertiser, you usually only pay for ads on which consumers click. In other words, your ad could be shown 10,000 times, but if it is only clicked on five times, you only pay for those five clicks.
Pay-per-click advertising can be effective for two main reasons. First, because you are paying for exposure, it is much easier to reach consumers who may be interested in your products or services. Secondly, it is easy to target your ads to a specific audience to ensure that only certain people see them. To illustrate, with Google Ads, you are able to target your ads to people who search for specific phrases (or “keywords”) on Google.
For example, as a dealership, you may decide to advertise a discount for oil changes. If you do, you can target your ads to Google searchers in your specific geographic area and only show your ad to people searching for “oil change near me,” “cheap oil change,” and other related keywords.
Social Media Management
As you are well aware, social media is everything in today’s world. All of your customers and potential customers live and breathe Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more. So, it is crucial for your dealership to be active on social media to reach customers where they interact the most.
While managing your dealership’s social media, there are many things to keep in mind. Here are three of the most important tips to remember:
- Respond Quickly: Social media is all about communicating with your customers. So, if a customer asks you a question or interacts with a picture or post, you should respond right away to keep them engaged.
- Employ Different Strategies for Each Platform: Not all social media is the same, as each platform has different guidelines and ways it operates. For example, Instagram is entirely picture-based; Facebook has almost no organic reach; and Twitter is about being as brief as possible. We won’t go through the ins and outs of each platform here, but be sure to study each platform before you use it and employ unique strategies for each that are tailored toward that specific platform.
- Commit to Your Social Media: If you are going to be active on social media, be sure you devise an all-out strategy that will allow you to take advantage of each platform. In other words, don’t “half-ass” it. Either spend the time and money to fully optimize each platform, or don’t bother wasting your energy. We highly recommend the former, as social media is where your customers are most active.
Enhance Your Dealership’s Digital Automotive Marketing with Customer Traac
If you are looking for digital automotive marketing help for your dealership, or if you would like to speak with an expert in the field to learn more, please reach out to us to see how we can help. At Customer Traac, we work with you to understand your specific goals and needs, so we can provide a personalized service that optimizes your dealership’s marketing and communication efforts. We offer a full range of automotive marketing services, including a full-charge contact center, appointment scheduling, outbound calling campaigns, and a full-service automotive BDC. Our agents go through extensive training to make sure they provide the best customer service and help your business grow.
We partner with dealerships across the United States. Please call us at 763-553-2989 or fill out our contact form to learn more.