Car dealership marketing is essential to a successful business, but it’s also a major risk. Without proper planning and integration, a marketing strategy can cost the business its reputation, drive away customers, and even lead to extensive financial losses. Of course, good marketing can drive profits, boost brand recognition, and keep a steady stream of customers coming to your dealership.
The good thing about marketing is that it gets easier the more you do it. Every post and ad campaign offers performance data that your dealership can use to improve its performance. Here are six reasons why marketing can make or break your dealership, plus tips for success.
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1. Drive or Lower Website Traffic
Well-structured, carefully implemented marketing campaigns will incorporate buyer’s journeys, smart ads, and landing pages to generate leads for a business. They use content strategies to boost organic traffic through search engines and attract more customers.
Bad marketing lowers your website’s visibility and deters people from choosing your dealer. If your ads look unprofessional, don’t resonate with the audience, or make claims that your audience finds salesy, inauthentic, or even offensive, you’ll lose traffic and, in turn, business.
2. Enhance or Weaken Your Marketing Strategy
Marketing can help drive a business forward by aligning sales goals with marketing efforts and using a structured budget to invest in the most profitable channels. On the other hand, bad marketing will drive up costs while ultimately leading to less engagement, fewer leads, and a poorer brand reputation.
So, it’s important for marketing teams to work closely with the sales department and align the company’s ultimate sales goals with its marketing budget. Responsive marketing strategies will continuously review ad performance and ensure money is being spent wisely.
3. Improve Brand Image or Weaken It
Car dealership marketing needs strong key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure how well content and ads are performing. Without them, you’re operating in the dark, hoping that the money, time, and resources you’ve poured into marketing will pay off.
But if you don’t track engagement and audience perception, you run the risk of having your dealership look less appealing than your competitors. This is why its crucial to work with a marketing team who understand that brand image and reputation management are closely intertwined with every marketing effort.
4. Increase or Decrease Leads
Marketing aims to increase the number of people interested in a business. Sometimes, it can close sales directly, but with high-investment purchases like cars, you’ll need marketing to serve as the catalyst that drives leads to your sales team.
Unfortunately, some businesses don’t understand that you can’t push sales or throw deals at people and expect them to convert right away. You need good marketing that offers value throughout the buying process to give customers a chance to build trust.
Then, you extend an olive branch by enticing them to reach out to your dealership for a test drive, free consultation, etc. What really matters here is that a company is not attempting to trick or manipulate people into becoming a lead, and they aren’t trying to rush people into making a purchase they aren’t ready for.
5. Build or Disconnect Your Audience
Poor campaign structure will hinder a dealership’s ability to identify and engage with its target audience. Bad keywords, lack of research, poor research methods, and generic advertising techniques are just a few of the most common mistakes dealers make when trying to market without foresight or planning.
6. Expand or Narrow Your Dealership’s Reach
Dealerships may operate in a local region, but that doesn’t mean they’re limited when it comes to marketing. The right strategy will focus on enhancing local visibility by targeting prospects in areas closest to the dealer. Bad strategies will use generic marketing that doesn’t get the dealership to appear in “near me” results or help it build credibility as a top seller in its area.
Good marketing and bad marketing operate on the same principles; the difference in success lies in the execution. Companies that know how to build a good brand presence, take a customer-first approach, and continually use marketing data to improve their advertising will see improvements, while those that try get-rich-quick marketing tactics will find their costs go up while their business fails to grow.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Luckily, it’s possible to quickly learn from marketing fails and implement those lessons into future successful campaigns.