At Shawn Ryder Digital we closely monitor Google Analytics for dealers - daily, weekly and monthly traffic.
Going to share a tip every day in 2022! Digital marketing is an amalgamation of strategies aimed at a number of channels, like SEO, PPC, social media, and so on. Lots of tips coming every day! #AutomotiveMarketingTips #SEO
Many times when we think of content on a website, our brains automatically think of boring content. But it does not have to be that way. With automotive SEO, you can have content that is engaging and interesting to your readers.
To have this type of content, you need to plan for various kinds of content on your site. Having just one kind of article can make your website suffer.
One way your content can awe potential buyers is to show your dealership’s expertise. A fun way to do this is to add tidbits of fun information to your website. If you have an Audi dealership, you may let your readers know that Audi means to hear in Latin or that they were the first company to crash-test their cars. This shows the reader that you know about the brand that you are offering.
Polls are a great way to engage with your customers. One place that is great for polls is social media sites. You may take a poll on what the best color is for the Audi Q4, which safety feature is the most important on a vehicle, or what is the best family car?
Quizzes are also an important piece of content that can pay off when it comes to automotive SEO. You could ask a question and then provide three or four answers for the reader to pick from. Examples include “What year did the Audi company form?”, “What was the Toyota company originally formed to do?” or “What was Sakichi Toyoda’s first vehicle?”
Frequently asked questions are also another form of content that is helpful on a site. This may include the following for automotive SEO: “How often should I change the oil in my Toyota?”, “When should I check the tire pressure on my car?”, and “When should I change the transmission fluid in my Audi?”
Perhaps your dealership offers to finance to those that qualify. You can have some content about what type of loans or financing you offer, what your interest rates are, and if you lease vehicles. Providing this information can help to ease many car buyers’ minds as financing is where many individuals struggle the most in the car buying process.
As you can see, automotive SEO can pay off greatly when it comes to content. Individuals looking for information can find it on your website, which can lead them to your business.
A dealership customer has taken time out of their day to say something nice about your service or sales process. It’s therefore only common courtesy to respond to them, or at the very least to thank them for their time to do the review. People like being noticed and appreciated and there’s a good chance you could end up promoting further engagement with that customer following a response.
Remember, if they’ve left a positive review they already like you and your product. Engaging further with them will only strengthen the relationship with them and could prompt them to share more reviews of you in the future as well.
By responding to positive reviews you’re telling search engines that you’re a dealership that likes to engage with its customers, and those that engage tend to provide better customer service overall.
Try to make your dealership available to review on as many platforms as possible and definitely allow reviews via Google. The search engine giant will always prioritize reviews submitted via it’s own platform and the more reviews that have responses the better.
I have put together some responses that I use with clients when managing their Google My Business – a free download to help you engage and respond to your own dealership reviews!
Send download link to:
Today, Auto dealerships around the world can extensively benefit from an automotive email marketing campaign. It’s simply because most customers accept communications through emails more positively than other platforms. Even in the auto dealership industry, email marketing has been proven to effectively develop customer bases, increase sales, and accelerate ROI. Of course, those success stories always refer to the correct email marketing campaigns held by the auto dealership. Check out practical email marketing tips for auto dealerships below.
The essential element of automotive email marketing campaigns is the quality email list that refers to up-to-date relevance, accuracy, prospects, and other factors. You can’t have a successful email marketing campaign with an outdated list as the email owners have changed the address and provider. Auto dealerships are one of those businesses that lack an accurate email list. While maintaining the list could be tricky, you better focus your resources on this task to have a strong base for your email marketing.
Who doesn’t hate spam emails? Customers would delete your email whenever it appears as spammy or not personalized content. Your consumers would only read a highly customized email with some key elements: name, occupation, car model, phone number, address, lifestyle, service records, etc. Personalization is essential for auto dealership SEO email marketing to keep your emails relevant to the targeted consumers. You can use your database to personalize email marketing content and boost its effectiveness to drive leads.
Most people sync their email accounts on their mobile phones and read emails from the mobile email app. If your emails aren’t optimized for mobile reading, consumers will delete them. Most cases are when the emails don’t fit their phone display due to enlarged font, incompatible images, or not proportional outline. Not only would consumers hardly read the email, but they might also be annoyed with your subsequent emails.
Since manual email marketing could be tedious, you can employ automation proportionally. You can set indicators and dynamics that would trigger the emails. These include the consumer’s bio, the car model they’re driving, retention, lifetime value, per-email revenue, and so forth. Triggered emails work very close to fully personalized emails. Most customers would likely open and click through this kind of email.
Last but not least, the auto dealership’s customer support must be responsive to any reply or email inquiry. They must follow up on any complaints, feedback, or questions to make their automotive email marketing work as a whole.
As we have already mentioned in our auto digital marketing essential guide that 95% of car buyers use the internet at least once in their auto-buying journey.
It could be social media, reviews, blogs and vlogs that influence the buyers.
But two platforms are compelling when it comes to car dealership business marketing. One is Facebook, and the other is YouTube.
That doesn’t mean that other social media platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit, lack value. All of them has their worth in marketing a car dealership business.
But according to research, 84% of the car buyers are Facebook users, and 23% used Facebook for the purchase. Other than that, car buyers analyze different models on YouTube. So it’s easy to target them with YouTube ads.
So if you are in the auto dealership business, you can use social media as your most powerful tool to get huge sales.
Special Note: It’s found that auto sale with digital marketing is ten times cheaper than with traditional marketing. But it’s not for all. Only experts know how to make an ad cost-effective and get more sales. Shawn Ryder is an expert who is offering digital marketing services for your local business.
In research, it’s found that if someone watches an ad seven times, he is more likely to remember that brand for a longer period.
That means your top priority should be to run a branding ad with a localized audience.
People should know your name and why they should come to you for their auto purchase. This will also build trust between you and your targetted audience.
You can run ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn.
It looks like an extra cost, but it’s way cheaper than spending on BillBoards.
Facebook has over 2 billion users right now. It seems like everyone is using Facebook. So it’s easy to target anyone on Facebook. That’s why every business finds it essential to be on Facebook. People use different ways to tag a business on Facebook.
So it is essential for you.
The reason is that by utilizing this powerful tool, you can get many leads for free.
Other than that, Facebook ads have become one of the most powerful ads in the world.
There are two main reasons behind this.
1. Facebook ads are way cheaper
2. You can run more personalized ads
So with your personalized ads, you can get cheaper sales for your auto dealership.
It’s found that over 500 million users use and watch Instagram stories daily.
That means it’s an excellent opportunity to target your audience with Instagram stories.
You have 3 different ways to use Instagram stories to target your audience.
1. Start your Instagram page, and start a series of exciting car stories
2. Run ads to target your local audience
3. Reach influencers to run your stories
LinkedIn is a platform for professionals as professionals have more buying capacity, so could be your targetted audience.
LinkedIn also provides you with many data to target your audience. You can target them on your LinkedIn ads with your given data.
Pinterest has 454 million monthly active users.
Most of them use Pinterest to add and find pictures especially related to design, model and art.
There are two ways to target your audience on Pinterest.
1. Add Pins
2. Run ads
In both ways, if a professional handle your account, it can get you branding and leads easily.
Pinterest could be powerful because people usually search pictures on Pinterest only once they need to work on them.
For instance, if someone is searching for cars models, they are more likely to purchase.
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world.
All those who don’t want to read stuff, they search on YouTube to listen to it.
Especially when it comes to auto, it could be the most powerful tool because people spend much time watching reviews and specifications of cars.
You can easily target them.
You can use YouTube in 3 different ways.
1. Start your informational channel
2. Run ads on YouTube
Running ads on YouTube could be decisive.
The reason is that as YouTube is available worldwide, you might get many users, but that might not be your customers.
With ads, you can set and target people with location and other details.
It’s been a long when people use to ask friends for their purchases. Now they use the internet. So if you want to increase your sales and more leads in your car dealership business, it’s far better to target them on the internet.
You can target them with different techniques, but the best ones are using social media. You can use the above given social media marketing strategies to target your audience quickly.
Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is the fundamental element of automotive businesses to increase their online exposure. Car dealerships and manufacturers must have solid SEO for automotive strategy. There’s no one-size-all solution to automotive SEO as it’s continuous processes and efforts, but you don’t want to waste time and resources on something that doesn’t work. Check some best SEO practices for the automotive industry below.
To findable in the search engine results, you must select only quality keywords that refer to their relevance, precision, and importance. You’d have to incorporate words or phrases that come from specific auto niches like the brand, car models, locations, and other factors that capture the interests of your targeted audience. Create particular web or blog content to accommodate these keywords, and you’re ready to go.
Robot-generated or poor content would ruin your dealership business. Consumers are looking for organic information relevant to their auto business. At this point, you can create informative blog posts on your website as a part of your dealership SEO and enable the comment section so you can interact with visitors. While website visitors appreciate information on your blog, you’re optimizing your automotive dealership SEO.
It would help if you only used keywords and anchored texts proportionally. No one would read a collage of keywords, and they’d leave your site once for all. At this point, you must optimize other elements like met descriptions, title tags, URLs, and even the title/text of images you’ve used for the content. Don’t forget to associate your dealership name when applying your keywords to those elements to increase its online exposure. It would help if you also used Google My Business to improve your locality exposure for people looking for an auto shop nearby.
No SEO implementations are perfect. You better monitor the performance of your SEO for automotive whether or not you drive traffic to your dealership website, boost your rank in the search engine, or provide you with convertible leads. You can plan a monitoring timeframe to evaluate your SEO strategy incrementally and apply necessary adjustments or improvements. With these practices, you can develop robust SEO implementation throughout time.
SEO doesn’t work like medicine. You must treat SEO for automotive industry practices as a regular task in your automotive marketing strategy. You need to consistently allocate resources and put effort into this area to get lasting results and ensure it’s on track to reach your marketing goals. SEO should be a common element to make your business more visible online.
Whether you sell economy sedans or hatchbacks, or luxury-class vehicles, as salespeople, your only goal is to get your inventory shown to as many people as possible in hopes of making as many sales as possible.
In the past, the best way to do this was to put up a sign at the nearest road, tie a few balloons to it, and hope that people would stop in to browse your inventory.
And rather than using traditional advertising methods, like billboards and signs, salespeople and auto dealerships have a much better chance of attracting potential customers by advertising their products and promotions on social media.
In the following article, we’re examining the importance of social media marketing for car dealerships and how you can get started today, attracting as many people as possible to your showroom.
Facebook alone is said to have approximately 2.85 billion active monthly users.
YouTube, known as the second most popular social media platform, has a slightly smaller number of active monthly users with about 2 billion.
That said, with only these two platforms, car salespeople and dealerships have the potential to reach nearly 5 million social media users every month.
And that’s not even considering the handful of other social media platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Linked In, which add several million users, and potential customers, to the equation.
Therefore, one of the biggest reasons that your automotive dealership should be advertising on social media is that it can put your business in contact with several billion potential users.
Another reason social media marketing is so important is that almost every person on the planet is already using social media.
Whether they’re using Facebook, YouTube, or any other platform, most adults spend a considerable amount of time scrolling their social media feed for entertainment every day.
Therefore, as salespeople, it can work wonders to spend your time marketing and advertising on social media simply because your potential customers already spend a lot of time on these sites.
Plus, many consumers tend to research a business on social media before deciding whether to make a purchase or interact with them.
Therefore, if you don’t have a social media presence, these people will most likely move on to the next auto dealership that does.
When you use traditional advertising methods like a billboard or newspaper ad to promote your products, you’re relying on the fact that billboards are placed in high-traffic areas or that many people read the newspaper.
However, you don’t have any control over who is going to see your advertisement.
In other words, your ads are almost guaranteed to get a large number of impressions. But the quality of those impressions isn’t all that great.
On the other hand, when you use online advertising and social media marketing, you can refine your target audience so that you will only show your ads to people who are already likely to be interested in what you’re offering.
Social media marketers can target ads based on many factors, such as age, gender, geographic location, hobbies, interests, and more.
For instance, if your dealership is planning to run a sale on sports cars, and you know that most people who buy sports cars are men between the ages of 34 and 45, you could customize your advertising strategy to show your ads only to people who fit within that demographic.
On platforms like Facebook, you could even go one step further and target your ads to only be shown to men between the ages of 34 and 45 interested in cars and follow other Facebook pages related to automotive racing, repairs, or accessories.
In the end, showing you ads to these people, rather than just anyone, is one of the absolute best ways to maximize your chances of making that next sale!
In 2021, renting billboards and publishing ads in your local newspaper doesn’t have the same kind of impact that online advertising and social media marketing can have on your target audience.
With a massive percentage of people already using these sites, there’s no denying that when a social media marketing campaign is properly planned and implemented, the results will get your vehicles in front of more people, which means a better chance of sales and revenue for your automotive dealership.
Like many industries, automotive to has been going via remarkable transformation in recent years. Mobile and digital channels are rising influencing customer behaviour and decision-making when they shop for trucks and cars, not only in Canada but globally.
There are many factors why the automobile industry is looking at digital marketing more seriously than even in recent years. Anyway, a big motivating factor is that while digital marketing brings in more profit per car sold, it also costs much more. Car dealers in Canada could end up spending up to ten times more than needed when they stick to traditional techniques.
Here are some of the areas where digital marketing help are:
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are some of the platforms where people talk about automobile purchases, tips and experiences. You need your own voice on these platforms to make people alert about your brand and the work you perform. People, despite their reliance on user reviews, want a reliable and strong voice in their midst. The social media team will engage and interact with these potential or existing customers.
The automobile industry thrives on industry status. People buy automobiles on advice, other than personal choices. Bad online reviews can damage your chances of making a sale. Similarly, badly handled customer support problems can steer away from people from your brand because no one wants a car with a brand that does not bother with after-sales service. Online reputation management can take care of this issue.
Online marketing service providers can perform online surveys for your brand to ascertain what your possible buyers may be thinking about your services and products. These surveys are helpful before launching new products, or to know if the item will fit the demands of the market.
You must be wondering why digital marketing is essential for your automotive dealership business? Or you might be curious why some of your competitors are becoming more popular and getting more sales and how to compete with them?
A couple of years ago, when the digital world wasn’t crowded, people used to ask friends and fellows before making the purchase. But the trend has changed. In recent research, it was found that 95% of the buyers use online search before making the purchase. And 67% of buyers ‘ journeys are completed online (that means buyers are ready to buy after analyzing things online).
For example, some buyers, who are addicted to reading blog posts, search for articles, and review websites, and those who use YouTube, follow vloggers recommendations about an auto before making the purchase. It actually depends on whom they trust.
In another survey, it was found that 81% of the people discovered new brands after Covid-19. Actually, Covid-19 played the role of a catalyst in the digital world. People became more habitual of completing their buying journey online. So if you are still in traditional marketing then you’re not only paying more but you’re losing at least 67% of the buyers completely..
It’s also researched that digital marketing conversions are 10x cheaper than traditional marketing like marketing on billboards, newspapers, TV, and radio, etc. That means those who are available in the digital world are making more profits from their automotive dealership than those who are still relying on traditional strategies.
If you believe that you should get into these news strategies but don’t know how to start then here is a brief guide for you.
Digital marketing means marketing a business through digital means that may include classified ads posting marketplaces, websites, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing (SMM), email marketing, content marketing, and YouTube, etc.
Here are the best digital marketing strategies that can lead your automotive dealerships to massive growth.
Do you know there are millions of users of classified ads posting marketplaces as Craigslist? The appealing thing for such websites is that most people use them for local purchases, and the targeted audience for automotive dealerships must be the local audiences. You can’t sell an auto to any other city or state because many dealers must be there to cover that area. Does it make sense?
So if you want to give digital marketing a shot then you can start with classified ads posting sites like Craigslist.
A website is a store where buyers finally come to make purchases. For example, an automotive business website will be a store of your available vehicles, where you can add the best possible information of your vehicles so that if a buyer comes, those images could result in conversions.
After the completion of the first most important step (the interface of the website), the next step is to bring customers to the website. That’s not a one-time process. You will either request an SEO expert Shawn to bring targeted visitors to the website, or you can go for search engine marketing.
SEO experts use different tools to find the best possible keywords for your website and bring local traffic to bring sales.
You also start a blog on your website to engage your visitors during their buying journey. You can easily find an experienced freelance writer who can do this for you.
Let me give you an example to make you understand why SEO and SEM both are important.
According to Ahref there are about 1.3M global searches for the term “auto”. 34% of them go for organic results that come with SEO and 8% of the people choose to click on Ads that appear before organic results due to SEM.
Those who are into it already know that SEO takes time, it can take from 6 months to years to compete for a competitive keyword, but you can market your product on search engines with search engine marketing.
Not every ad is clicked and not every click converts. So you can’t just login to your Google or Bing Adwords account and publish your ad.
When experts create ads, they take care of everything. Make it clickable and less expensive by utilizing the data they are extracting each day.
Do you know there are over a billion active users on Facebook? And millions of active users on the other top social media platforms? The other great thing is that social media ads are cheaper than Adwords.
There are even free local groups and a marketplace on Facebook. You can target all of them to bring more sales and conversions. But it becomes complicated when you promote your store or automotive dealership business on social media platforms. You need an experts’ assistance so that you could target the right people to boost conversions.
Business owners don’t often use social media, and they don’t even Google stuff. They focus more on expert advice, and their best medium is email.
So if you are in an area where you want to target business owners, then SEO, SEM & SMM might not work properly. You need to target them with email marketing. Any expert can guide you on how he can help you target your premium audience with email marketing.
It’s been so long since YouTube was started as an entertainment platform. Now it’s the second-biggest search engine in the world. Yes, people now widely use it to learn stuff and get visual information.
So when it comes to the automotive dealership business, Youtube could be the best platform to promote your business because those who are interested in buying an auto must be searching for some different models and looking at the price charts.
Automotive dealers can target YouTube audiences with their dedicated channels as well as they can target the audience with YouTube ads.
The world has changed, if you’re not online that means you are far behind your competitors who are using digital marketing strategies. There are billions of users out there and you can target them with the help of an expert.
The conversion with digital marketing is far cheaper than the traditional ones. So those in the automotive dealers can follow the above discussed best strategies to bring massive growth in their business.
