It’s no secret we’re in a digital age. Accelerated by the pandemic and ensuing social distancing, the digital marketplace is more expansive and necessary than ever. For dealerships, a stellar digital presence is paramount to success in the emerging virtual world. With so many facets, it can be overwhelming to consider an effective digital marketing strategy- but fear not! With a simple audit and potentially a little course correction, you can crest the wave of digital marketing and expand the reach of your dealership in a way that’s sustainable and certain to provide results. Today we’ll explore digital marketing strategies for success through your website, social presence, email outreach, and digital advertising.
Website
Your website is the beating heart of your digital spider web. While social media, email, and advertising will generate attention for your dealership, the ultimate landing place for any potential client is your dealership website. Some basics your website must include are car listings, current offers, information about your dealership, and service scheduling. But, if you’re looking to grow your client database, it must also include a direct call to actions and offer real value to its visitors- plus information about what sets your dealership apart. Tools like payment calculators, trade-in value calculators, and financing calculators all provide something of value while giving you an opportunity to request contact information. Beyond the offering on your website, it’s important to identify and communicate a niche within your operation. For instance, if your identity is a family business, it’s crucial the website tells the story and features the identifiable brand images. If you’re wanting to be known as EV experts, make sure that’s front and center.
Social Media
Social profiles are odd in that on one hand, you have to have them both as credibility and as a way to share ongoing updates, but on the other hand they often don’t generate a huge response. It can be tough to feel motivated to put much attention or resources toward social media with little to no response from the community- yet if your pages are outdated or irrelevant, it discredits your dealership and can put-off potential customers. If you’re already posting to social media regularly- great! If not it’s better to start slow and purposefully than to blast daily posts that may not inspire much action. A good rubric for social content is asking yourself the question ‘would this post inform, update, or provide something to the viewers?’. The more personal to your dealership the post is, the better. Pictures of your dealership displays, happy clients, recently sold vehicles, success stories, and staff shout outs are all top-tier social content. If you’re struggling to collect content from within, the next best are industry updates (articles), inventory updates, current offers, and holiday greetings.
Email is your customer retention super-power. Once you’ve collected contact information, staying in touch with potential or past clients can generate consistency and loyalty. As with your website and social media, it’s crucial that you both create consistency, but that you also balance that with a light hand and not sending useless information. Emails MUST include value to clients, otherwise they will just simply unsubscribe. Offers, events, inventory updates, and industry updates are all examples of valuable content. Less is more when it comes to email, weekly is the most frequent you’d want to blast- though bi-weekly and monthly can produce better engagement by increasing demand.
Advertising
Depending on your market area, dealership size, and marketing budget you may or may not want to conduct paid advertising for your dealership. Because of the high saturation of dealer ads in any market, paid advertising works best for marketing a specific offer, expanding your brand (niche marketing), or marketing to a pre-established list of potential customers. With all digital marketing, but advertising specifically, it’s helpful to be adaptive and always consult the data of what performs best to dictate how you move forward. Try marketing on three different platforms and seeing which perform best, then run your next campaign on the best performing while integrating one new until you’ve refined your strategy. Then, mix it up every once in a while, but stick to what works.
PartsEdge gives dealerships the support they need to ensure all parts of their operations are thriving. Created by a Fixed Operations Director and a DMS Specialist, they realized the DMS can and should do more to create the perfect inventory, but getting the DMS to work well takes way more time than anyone had. With our monthly service, you can give your parts operation an invaluable tool that produces the most profitable parts inventory to service your customers at exceptionally high levels. As a result of our inventory optimization tools, our clients see an average 20% drop in total inventory, 15% less idle inventory, a 50% increase in ROI, and a 20% increase in parts sales. Our reporting is clear, simple, and informs proactive decision making. If you’re ready to put our parts power-tool to work, send us a message! We’ve been helping dealerships for over 20 years and our testimonials speak for themselves.