Automotive Marketing: 9 Strategies and Tactics to Drive Leads and Revenue

More and more, car buyers are shopping online. These car dealership marketing strategies will help your dealership get found and gain new customers.

Podium’s AI BDC helps dealers transform potential interest into concrete actions like booking test drives and scheduling service appointments. Engage every lead with meaningful conversations to drive sales with Podium’s best-in-class conversational AI Employee. Watch a demo today. 

Why Online Automotive Marketing Matters

The move toward web-based interactions has hit just about every industry, but potential car buyers in particular are taking to the Internet to make the best purchasing decisions possible. The automotive industry is one of six industries where the majority of offline purchases are consistently preceded by online research, which includes looking at reviews. 

By focusing on online automotive marketing, you can get found and chosen by shoppers in your area, whether they’re looking for new or used cars. Only 8% of used car buyers rely strictly on salespeople at your dealership to make decisions. The other 92% are largely swayed by the information they find online.

As we move forward, car purchases may begin to occur online as well. Already, 54% of Americans would prefer to complete the car buying process from the comfort of their homes, which means car dealers must begin catering to shoppers who want convenience first. 

Spending extra time thinking about your online marketing strategy will allow you to control how quickly car shoppers find you, as well as what they see, so you can gain leads and convert them faster. 

9 Top Automotive Marketing Strategies and Tactics

Given that modern car shoppers are largely starting their customer journey on the web, automotive marketers must take their strategies online, too. This isn’t just an extra task added to your to-do list. Digital marketing provides a handful of unique opportunities to showcase your products, target a different demographic, and convert leads you may have never previously reached. 

Below, we’ll outline our top four digital automotive marketing strategies to help you promote your dealership and make sales.

1. Video Marketing

Video content is king in the auto industry. For many car shoppers, seeing is believing, so they need to understand the complete look and feel of a vehicle before they can envision themselves in a new car. Whether you’re adding video to your website, sharing it on social media, or uploading it on YouTube, online video can offer your potential buyers an experience that persuades them to buy before they leave the house.

The effectiveness of video in encouraging consumers to take action is proven. Research from Google shows that over 40% of auto shoppers who watched a video about cars or trucks ended up visiting a dealership as a direct result. With your video doing much of the work, your on-site sales pros will simply need to give a final push to persuade visitors to buy.

Online videos that produce the most results for car dealerships typically showcase a vehicle’s build and best features. These may include video test drives, accessory demos, and even 360 virtual reality videos that fully immerse viewers inside the car set. Overall, this automotive marketing strategy is all about showing rather than telling.

2. Online Review Management

As trust in car dealerships continues its steady decline, keeping up with your online reputation management is a great opportunity to get more car buyers to your dealership. A big part of this is responding to your online reviews (even giving professional responses to the negative ones) and actively working to increase the number of positive reviews you have. 

In addition to general review sites like Google and Facebook, auto marketers should also be paying close attention to feedback on auto dealership review sites, including CARFAX reviews. These platforms are destinations for serious car buyers, who are more likely to choose your dealership if your customers have good things to say. After all, online reviews are just as powerful as a peer recommendations—but they also can reach thousands of consumers at once. 

When you pair your automotive marketing strategy with Podium Reviews, your customers will automatically receive invites to review you on all the platforms that matter. As you start getting more reviews, you can respond to all your customers on a single platform for a more streamlined process. 

3. User-Friendly Web Experience

More than half of people visiting your website through mobile phones will leave if the site does not load within three seconds. Hence, making your website user-friendly is essential in capturing your target audience’s attention, making them stay on your website longer, and possibly completing an action like filling out a form. 

For a website to be user-friendly, it should have a simple navigation scheme. It means your website visitors should be able to find whatever information they are looking for instantly. Making the menu bars visible, removing acronyms and abbreviations in the navigation menu, and including a search box are just some of the things you can do to make site navigation easier.

And as previously mentioned, your website also needs to load quickly because most people won’t wait even a minute for your site to open. Also, all information on your website should be readable on all devices, including smartphones and tablets. 

The color of your website matters as well. Research reveals that consumers make sub-conscious judgments about a product within 90 seconds of initial viewing. At least 62% of that judgment is based solely on color. If you want to make a good first impression, choose website colors carefully.

If you already have a website, you can hire a skilled and experienced developer to test the site’s performance and make any necessary adjustments to make it user-friendly. 

4. SMS Marketing

With nearly 80% of Americans owning smartphones and the majority of all online traffic coming from mobile devices, catering to this consumer behavior can put you ahead of your competitors. Smartphone users spend hours each day on their phones, leading to an average 82% open rate for all text message marketing campaigns. Using SMS marketing will help you reach your potential buyers on a platform where they’re actively looking for messages. 

In fact, 68% of car shoppers are very open to chatting online with car dealers. This means car buyers want to interact with experts—as long as it’s convenient for them. This is an opportunity for your representatives to have a direct influence on shoppers while they’re still deciding where to visit.

With Podium Webchat, you can blend the best of live chat and SMS by adding a button to your site that captures leads and allows you to continue your conversation through text. This powerful tool enables your dealership to build relationships while helping shoppers move further through the customer journey in real-time.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Digital marketing professionals aim to bring their website to the top of Google’s SERPs (search engine results page), no matter their niche. Competition is high in the automotive industry. Being at the top of Google’s SERPs means your potential customers see your website first. Research even shows that the top website result from Google gets 33% of search traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is what you will need to get your pages to rank higher in search engines.  

Inserting keywords throughout your site and blog copy is one of the most effective SEO strategies you can adopt. It will not only help you rank higher for relevant terms but will also allow you to give car shoppers the answers they need. Consider what features they may be looking for—for example, “best gas mileage” or “best luxury cars,” depending on your target audience.

When developing a user-focused SEO strategy, you should always consider local SEO. Car buyers tend to shop for dealers near them, which means a complete Google My Business listing can make a big difference. You can get our local SEO checklist to ensure your listing is set for attracting nearby buyers.

6. Pay-Per-Click Advertising Solution

In addition to organic SEO, you can add Google pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to your automotive marketing strategy. Google actually offers a Model Automotive ad format, which is designed specifically to target car buyers and leads to a 30% higher engagement rate. These Google ads will catapult your company to the top of search results pages for the keywords you’re targeting, helping you generate more leads faster.

The PPC process involves bidding on keywords for an opportunity to show ads at the top of Google SERPs. Once you win the bid for a keyword, you pay each time someone clicks your advertisement. It’s a straightforward but often costly strategy that may not be ideal for small businesses.  

If you are ready to pay the current PPC rate, consider actively managing your negative keyword list to maximize your ad spend. This strategy will make your campaign highly targeted. It means your ad won’t appear to customers searching for terms similar to your keywords but refer to a different product.

7. Look at Trends and Adjust

Marketing tactics that worked wonders many years ago may not have the same effect these days. Automotive marketing is an ever-changing landscape, and businesses in this industry need to adopt the changes because it’s one of the ways to grow and stay ahead of the competition. 

These days, car buyers typically go online to find information about the new vehicle they like before closing a deal. Marketers, therefore, invest in digital marketing tactics like content marketing to meet potential customers where they are. 

Many trends in automotive marketing arise every year. Don’t miss out on any opportunity. Make sure to watch out for these trends and determine which one you can add to your marketing efforts.

8. Optimize Your Website

Your dealership website can be a great tool for getting more customers, nurturing your relationship with leads, and making more car sales. But that’s only possible if you build your website right. 

There are various ways to optimize a dealership website. SEO and mobile optimization are among them. But if you want to get more out of your website, add a live chat widget.

As previously mentioned, modern consumers tend to visit a dealer’s website before buying a car. They probably want to see photos of the vehicle without visiting showrooms, get detailed information about it, and make comparisons. If they don’t find the details they are looking for, they likely would want to talk to your customer service or sales team. 

But to have someone on the line 24/7 to talk to customers can be costly. Live chat can fix that. You can program it to provide answers to basic questions or initiate a conversation with site visitors. It can also save you money since live chat agents can handle multiple conversations simultaneously, which is impossible with phone support. 

Aside from that, live chat’s satisfaction level is at 73%, while communicating with customers via phone only has a 44% satisfaction rate. With Podium Webchat, customer experience can improve, and conversion rates can increase.

9. Improved Communication Channels

The rise of the internet has opened up many channels for communication. Gone are the days when automotive companies can only send promotional materials and communicate with leads and existing customers through newspapers, direct mail, Yellow Pages, and other traditional channels. These days, consumers have many options on how to reach out to you. 

Your business’s communication channels are an important element of successful automotive marketing campaigns. All media channels can work and fail as well. The outcome often depends on how well you integrate and deliver your promotional materials. 

To ensure consistency in your messages, coordinating your communication channels is a good idea. Podium Inbox makes this process easier. No matter the communication channel you use, you can have everything delivered in a single Inbox. 

Speed to lead is critical in today’s fast-paced market, and Podium’s AI BDC offers an unparalleled advantage by ensuring dealerships engage with leads within a couple of minutes—guaranteed. 

Reach Your Ideal Customers 

To become the most popular car dealer in your area, your automotive marketing strategy must prove to car shoppers that you’ll lead them to a successful car-buying experience. By using modern channels to promote your dealership, you’ll stand out even in a saturated auto market.

Of course, understanding your audience is always necessary when creating a marketing plan. Learn more about your leads and customers by collecting customer data through SMS surveys, blog subscriptions, chatbots, social media, newsletters, and CRM software.

Getting to know your customers’ journey before you start your marketing will allow you to meet them on the right platforms at the right times. Here is the Ultimate Guide to Cars.com for Dealerships to help you update your strategy.

Once you’re done creating your marketing strategy and choosing marketing channels, the next step is finding the right tools to optimize the process. As an all-in-one solution, Podium can be a great help in terms of review management, text marketing, and payment processing. The platform also has tools to help you maximize your OEM benefits and drive more leads to your automotive business. 

Bring speed and efficiency to every customer experience and sale with Podium’s AI BDC. Watch a demo now.

FAQs

Q: What are the 4 P’s of marketing cars?

A: The 4 Ps of marketing cars are product, price, promotion, and place. These four Ps have been the core tenet of marketing since the 1950s, but three more were added in the early ‘80s: People, Packaging, and Process. These are important factors car dealers must consider to succeed in the automotive industry.

Q: What are the trends in automotive marketing?

A: Trends in automotive marketing change constantly. But this year, the top trends include artificial intelligence, personalization, influencer marketing, video content, social media advertising, and augmented and virtual reality, to mention a few. 

Q: What are some examples of vehicle marketing?

A: Vehicle marketing includes strategies such as online ads showcasing features and performance, social media campaigns for engagement, car shows for direct interactions, and influencer collaborations. Test drives, interactive websites, and personalized offers also engage potential buyers while emphasizing safety, efficiency, and style.