Did you know that around 95% of car sales are made at a dealership in today’s time, but the search result is the prime place people go to begin their buyer’s journey?
With the ongoing marketing trends, it is very much clear that people search online before buying any product from the market. Thus, automotive marketers also believe that online advertising is the main key to bringing new leads into the dealership. Apart from this, these automotive marketing strategies come with a huge expenditure and many challenges.
One of the most significant challenges automotive marketers face is gaining the trust of their leading customers. When they gain the trust of their leads then only their business will burgeon. Therefore, the job of the marketer is to bring leads to the store so that the sales team has the people to sell their products.
But in this competitive industrial world, the customer has to make a large financial decision to buy the product, which will eventually affect their everyday lifestyle. Where automotive marketers do not have it made in the shade.
So, here is the question, having such problems, how can automotive marketers deal with these challenges?
The marketers adopt new strategies and by being smarter about their online advertising. Nearly 97% of people who look out to purchase, repair, or even customize a car, start their journey first by looking and researching online.
9 Superlative Automotive Marketing Strategies
As intimidating as it is to advertise in the automotive industry, there are some exclusive ways to achieve nurtured success.
Under are highlighted 9 automotive marketing strategies that you can use to drive more sales and engage customers to build your business. Without any further ado, let’s read out these strategies:
1. Develop trust with customer reviews
Let me here share my experience in benefit terms of customer reviews.
I was looking to lease out my first car. I went for affordable, reliable, and decent-looking Hyundai car, but I was so terrified and perplexed at making this decision. I spent months researching, calling local dealerships, whether buying a used car or leasing was the better idea to go for or not. Finally, I realized where to look, I started reading customer reviews on Yelp and Google. By reading the reviews I finally got my explanations and answers to what I was looking for days.
The main persona of this is that; Reviews are probably the most productive and efficient automotive marketing strategy we have. As an automotive marketer, you need to make sure that not only you do have GOOD reviews, but also, you must focus on the fact that these glowing and engaging reviews must be everywhere they can possibly be. For instance, Google, Yelp, social networking platforms, your own website, just make sure you are covering all your bases of where reviews could be.
In addition to this, you can also take things a little further by creating customer success stories and videos with your most loyal and active customers. You can take leverage of these in various places such as your website, paid social advertisements, or your newsletter.
When we talk about automotive marketing and getting customers’ trust, there is no better way than to let your customers speak for you and leave the spark behind!
2. Rank at The Top of Google SERP
As I have mentioned above, when I first started searching for my new car where did I turn to? Google, (without any second thoughts)!
I am not only the one saying this!
According to a study, it has found that 70% of customers when research about cars turns to search engines first.
Since Google counted as the first choice of everybody to search, you need to be at the very top in SERPs! Especially considering the fact how frequently do people scroll to the bottom of the SERP (search engine result page). That time comes, never, people do not go to the bottom often.
The first few listings get more clicks and engagement as compared to the bottom ones. Ensuring you are in the top positions is significant to your automotive marketing strategies. To do this your Google Ads strategy requires to be remarkably productive.
So here, the question comes, how can you get to the top of the page without completely breaking the rules? There are certain algorithms and strategies that Google tends to favor and take that into consideration. By this, Google will help you get in higher positions without spending more cents.
Here are the tips to follow and then get started!
1. First, make sure your Google Ads account is structured accurately with familiar ad groups (You can aim at around 15-20 keywords per ad group).
2. You should keep keywords absolutely relevant to your ad text, and include 2-3 ads per ad group or keyword list.
3. You can use ad extensions! Google loves ad extensions, and this will help you get more ad real estate and increase the chances of lead interactions.
4. In addition, you can add negative keywords to block out irrelevant searches.
Note: Keep a close eye on your search query report.
5. Divide your budget accordingly between campaigns. Contemplate questions like: What are your highest sellers? What is your target audience most likely to search for? Always bid higher on the items to capitalize on what is trending among your beloved customers’.
It is also necessary to focus on other search networks, such as Bing.
While Bing might seem like a neglected search engine network, but they do account for a section of the search market that typically attracts older folks. This is for the people who are more financially established and able to invest in expensive and luxurious cars.
3. Bid on Competitor Keywords
While we are discussing search engine marketing, it is necessary to not only be bidding on the knowable keywords such as “new Hyundai i20.” You must also set up an automotive marketing campaign to grab your competition.
It is a feisty and competitive world in automotive marketing, so when your brand shows up every time your competition does with compelling ad copy is the prime key. Here, I am not recommending saying anything negative or abusive using your competitor’s name in your ad copy (which Google could also put you in time out for).
You can bid on your top competitors’ brand names, and create highly compelling advertisements to get leads to visit your website over your competitor’s website.
For example this ad showing in the below image:
4. Proactively Manage Your Negative Keyword List
Do you know that your business ads can show up for searches that are not applicable to your brand? And if anyone clicks on those ads, do you still have to pay?
Whenever you are bidding on broad or phrase match keywords the chances to show up for inappropriate searches is present.
When you just bid on the exact match might seem like a nice solution. This will somehow limit your potential reach, which makes the procedure of recognizing negative keywords demanding to your automotive marketing strategy. When you start searching for your search query report it might feel like a time-consuming activity. But it is an absolute requirement, especially in the automotive market.
Make sure your ads are not appearing in irrelevant search terms. If they are appearing, then your business instantly loses its credibility and drives away the engagement. This is the reason why being cautious about setting up negative keywords to avoid irrelevant search queries. This way you do not have to face any sort of complications and it will eventually save you a lot of bucks.
Here let’s take an example if you want to bid on the keyword say “affordable cars” and instead of that your ad appears on say “toy cars,” and then a busy or not so focused user clicks on that advertisement. It will not only cost you a fortune but will set a bad impression on that user for ruining his or her time.
5. Establish your campaign budget based on car-buying trends
Is Christmas the best day to buy a new car? What about Diwali festivities weekend? There are many unofficial “car-buying holidays.” According to a study, you can purchase a vehicle for about 7.5% to 8% below the marketing price if you plan out when to buy it.
With these, you can assume that your targeted audiences have done their fair share of research, and they are aware of these automotive deal times.
You should also focus on the timings such as when things are busy, steady, and slow and then according to these things adjust your online advertising budget. Ensure that your windows are not too narrow. This at times requires planning ahead of time, but Google and other ad platforms make it quite easy to adjust your budget on an ongoing basis. Just make sure you are actually planning all this!
Here is another way to take leverage of ad scheduling. When do customers frequently visit the store? Weekdays? Weekdays post-work shenanigans? Weekends? Determine the data to understand this and set an ad schedule so that your ads are running at a higher budget. This will remind your customers to come and visit us.
6. Target the right audience for your automotive campaigns
First and foremost you need to understand these questions, like; What type of automotive businesses are you marketing? Who is your ideal customer?
Always, there needs to be a different automotive marketing approach for marketers of luxurious cars like Porsche and BMWs versus marketers of used and second-hand cars or more affordable brands like Hyundai and Toyota. Every customer has drastically different opinions, choices, concerns, questions, needs, and wants when it comes to investing in a new car. Where the Mercedes and Audi customers will be more concerned about the look, interior, heated seats, and leather interior, on the other hand, your Hyundai buyer most likely to care about the car’s longevity and gas mileage.
Although there might be some other preferences also!
When the automotive marketing audiences are distinctive then the strategies should also be different. In layman’s terms, different automotive marketing audiences need to be cut down into distinctive categories and they should be targeted separately.
If we consider the main element, the audience chooses the critical route to get the right message to the right person thus increasing the chances of conversion.
If it is of prior importance, you can also segment your audience and run separate campaigns to ensure that you are sending the right message to the targeted audiences to drive maximum engagement. Also, with help of tools such as Facebook’s targeting options, this will be done easily as it does not sound.
Always focus that the time you have spent in defining your audiences should be of worth. Then only you can send the messages to the right audiences at the correct time.
7. Attract shoppers to come to visit your store with unique offers
Why should one buy the car from your store? Why the automotive dealership down the street is more engaging? Should this store be at an affordable price? Why a prospect will choose your business over the competitor one?
Questions like these play an important role in achieving the desired goals. By managing all the things while keeping in mind why customers will buy from me? Is the only question matters in getting engagement.
A vital part of your automotive marketing strategy should always be convincing and your prospects must choose you over your competitors.
If there are no such reasons or things to gain trust like, having an affordable range or the best reviews. Then you can offer some unique incentives and discounts to your customers. For example, you can offer a discount of 10% to the new car buyers or free oil changes and car service for the first two years. Incentives are also great for announcing a sense of urgency like for a limited time offer. These offers and incentives will attract the customers into buying from you over your competitors.
Check out this image, that this brand has offered to their prospects:
8. You must prioritize, all call features
Google Ads features like call-only campaigns, call extensions, mobile bid adjustments, and call tracking are some of the features that an automotive marketer should be prioritizing. Phone calls are essential in the automotive industry as it is beneficial to turn phone leads into sales.
Here are the main points highlighted when it comes to increasing your call volume:
1. Call-only campaigns:
With the help of call-only campaigns, you pay and bid to get a call rather than visiting your website. It is necessary that you understand that the strategy needs to be different for these call campaigns as compared to a regular search campaign.
2. Call extensions:
There is a slight difference between call extensions and call only campaigns. There is an option to visit your website is available, but with the help of this, you can add an extension to allow for phone calls, as well. In fact, you can also schedule to show your contact number during business hours, not afterward. This way you can make people call at the time of availability of the executive person which is pretty neat and engaging.
3. Mobile bid adjustments:
We are lucky to have Google in our paths where businesses operate in these times! Google allows you to manage your mobile bids, by this, you can make sure to bid higher on mobile traffic to bring in more leads.
4. Call tracking:
It is critical to track your calls in order to contemplate where your ROI is coming from. But here you can track all your calls in the bare minimum time.
Here, optimizing your automotive marketing campaigns for phone calls might look like a complex procedure to do. But, as we say that hard work always pays off! So, it will be worth the effort after you start investing in the right strategies here and phones start ringing off the hook.
9. Remarket
Remarketing is a demanding concept of automotive marketing. Since we are comparing lots of things and also, the sales process is the main component of buying the car procedure. It is also consequential to not lose any sort of new leads in the marketing stage of things. Giving your audiences the perpetual reminder through intriguing remarketing advertisements is one of the adequate ways to make sure no leads fall out of your pockets.
With the help of remarketing, you can decrease your abandonment rate. And you can get more deals by showing compelling and enticing display ads to users who have recently visited your website. In this way, you can remind them that you are still there and further lead them through the whole procedure. Make sure they see that enticing deal by which they eagerly wanted to come into your store. This will also lead where you can get them connected with your qualified sales team.
Also, you can configure remarketing campaigns through Google Ads and social media platforms, including Facebook (recently changed to Meta).
Wrapping Up
I hope that with these brilliant automotive strategies, your campaigns should take off and achieve greater heights. With these strategies, you will be planning a great plan and delivering new leads to your sales team in no time!
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