Automotive Digital Marketing Strategies to Implement in 2022

1.    Revisit Your Website’s Content

A lot of auto dealerships fail to regularly update the content on their site.This is a mistake for multiple reasons. For starters, buyers are smart and expect to see the latest and greatest information. If there’s content promoting an old sale or an outdated model of vehicle, it hurts the credibility of the entire dealership. Beyond that, refreshing the content on the website provides the search engines with a reason to crawl the website and increases the site’s relevancy in the search engine rankings. Of course, the content needs to be relevant to the website. The golden rule of digital marketing is to have the goal of improving the user experience drive every decision. Valuable content will keep shoppers on the website longer and will cause them to come back again and again.

2.   Ensure Your Dealership is Everywhere Shoppers Search

It’s not enough to have a website where buyers can research their favorite vehicles.The modern shopper relies heavily on the search engines to help them find the proper dealership for their needs. This often means that aggregate sites will appear before local dealerships. This is dependent on the type of search the potential shopper conducts. To ensure no opportunity is missed, dealerships are wise to seek out sites like Edmunds.com and Cars.com and ensure that they have a definitive presence on these sites. Beyond aggregate sites, there are often local influencers in the automotive space. These influencers review different car models and bring in a lot of readers to their blogs. Building relationships with these influencers can be a great way to bring in more targeted leads.

3.   SEO Keyword Research

It’s always a good idea to conduct keyword research when a new wave of vehicles hits the market. The search volume of new vehicles in your local area will provide your dealership with a good idea of interest levels in newer models. Keyword research also helps a dealership understand when it makes sense to build out a whole new webpage optimized for a given keyword. A major mistake car dealerships make is trying to rank for the same keyword across multiple pages. This starts in the Meta information where dealerships will have duplicated keywords used to describe multiple pages. There is plenty of competition in the automotive space. The last thing a dealership needs to be doing is competing against themselves.

4.   Implement Paid Search

Paid ads on both Facebook and Google have a proven track record for automotive dealerships. Paid ads offer guaranteed reach. Marketers who take the time to tweak headlines, experiment with different calls-to-action and create beautiful imagery can experience fantastic results. Paid search marketing requires the marketer to react in real-time. Paying to appear for different terms will come from different costs. Campaign spend should be raised or lowered to coincide with ROI. This can only be done with a vigilant marketer at the helm.

5.   Leverage Chatbots

People expect instantaneous information in the digital age. No car dealership employee should be asked to work 24/7, but a chatbot can handle that responsibility. Advancements in chatbot technology have allowed for so much more than an automated hello. Chatbots can lead prospective leads down the sales funnel while capturing relevant information that can be passed to a real-life sales representative. Chatbots can be leveraged for both mobile and desktop users, which make them the most efficient way to connect to potential customers at any time of the day or night.