Have you invested in digital marketing for your dealership but you’re not sure if it’s giving you better results than traditional marketing?
Do you want to understand what makes this an important part of what you should do to attract more customers? If you have questions regarding your online strategy it’s time to review why you need to put time and effort into this area of your advertising.
Car Shopping Starts Online
You need to be where your customers are and they are online. Whether that means engaging with social media, email marketing, videos, or SEO content, nearly all car shopping is starting online these days. This means you need to have a digital marketing strategy that will ensure you can reach more users and give them what they want to see when shopping online.
Where should you be online? As mentioned you need to be everywhere your customers are. Make sure you can be seen and found easily. Does your content show up at or near the top of search engine results pages? Are you active on local social media pages? Do your YouTube videos include your location with the city where your dealership is located? It’s important to make sure you can easily be found on all platforms so that your audience can quickly link to your website.
You Lose the Ambiguity with Digital Marketing
With traditional marketing strategies, you didn’t have tools to offer you the impact and ROI of the marketing as a true figure. The best you could hope for was for customers to fill out your survey and tell you how they heard about your dealership. This gave you some insights but often didn’t answer all the questions regarding whether the cost you put into your advertising was worth it.
With digital marketing, you can have tools that measure the true return on the investment you put into advertising your dealership and what you have to offer. You’ll know exactly what links a lead came from, how much time users spend on your web pages, which social media posts are getting the most clicks, and which videos are being watched the most often. Implement the tools that will measure where your leads come from.
Targeted Advertising is a Huge Part of Your Strategy
How often do you see television commercials that don’t pertain to you? Do you notice billboards during your drive that offer items you’ll never need? Have you read a magazine and simply turned pages past the ads that are contained? These ads are being paid for by companies but aren’t truly being targeted to any specific audience to create a lead from them.
With the right digital marketing tools, you can target the audience that is shopping for a new or used car, needs to have their vehicle serviced, or wants to find the right financing for a vehicle. This targeting allows your marketing to bring more value to your dealership because the audience that will see your advertising is looking for what you have to offer. You can’t get this type of direct reach with the use of traditional marketing efforts.
Create Your Own Online Marketing Budget
The price of a billboard is set by the company offering it and the price of advertising on television is set by the station you want your ad aired on. These are items you have no control over when you’re trying to advertise for your dealership. That’s not the case with digital marketing. You can set your own budget and stick to it every month.
Whether you choose to offer a more affordable version of marketing by using email as a primary way to reach your audience or you start by using free social media accounts, you have control over how much you spend for online marketing every month. This control makes a huge difference in the overall bottom line for your dealership and the marketing budget you set.
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