AUTOMOTIVE DIGITAL MARKETING - THE COMPLETE GUIDE

Foreward

Most How-To-Guides Guides seem to copy and paste content from various sources. These different sources usually specialize in one of the different advertising tactics (e.g., search, social, display, e-mail, etc) and are a bit disjointed. We decided to write these Ultimate Automotive Digital Marketing guide differently. We start with a solid foundation in marketing and then add on specific tactics that can help support your overall marketing strategy. 

WHO WAS THIS WRITTEN FOR?

This guide is written for the Director of Marketing for an Automotive Group, CMO of a publicly traded automotive group, CMO of an automotive brand, or an Internet director. It’s important to connect all the individual tactics so that they support the overall marketing strategy for your dealership. 

Let’s start at the very beginning. Because that’s a good place to start.

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Contents

  1. Foundations

  2. Paid Search

  3. Organic Search

  4. Paid Social 

  5. Organic Social 

  6. Email 

  7. Video

  8. Display 

  9. Summary

Foundations

Automotive Digital Marketing Strategy

Automotive marketing strategy works on your customer’s mind and demonstrates the benefits of buying a vehicle from your dealership, getting their vehicle serviced in your service center, or buying parts from your parts department. It lays out a clear set of choices of what you’re going to do. And what you’re not going to do from an automotive marketing standpoint. Automotive marketing strategy is often confused with tactics. Marketing tactics are things that you’re going to do to support your overall automotive marketing strategy. There are probably more than a thousand different tactics that you could use. And there are tactics within tactics and tactics, and tactics that go across different channels and networks. Check out our Automotive Digital Marketing Foundations Guide. 

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Paid Search

There are 94,000 Google Searches in the world. And it continues to increase. Even by the time that we finish this sentence, that number will be higher. Check out this link to see where it is when you read this sentence. For context, 5-years ago, that number was 48,000. It’s important to make sure that Paid Search is a part of your overall automotive marketing strategy. Check out the Automotive Digital Marketing Paid Search Guide.

 

Paid and Organic Social (Social Media Management)

Before jumping in, it's important to understand the difference between Paid Social and Organic Social, or what some people call Social Media Management.

Paid Social Media
Paying to display advertisements (whatever the format – text, image, video, carousel etc.) or sponsored messages to social network users based on user profile e.g. demographic. A cost is incurred depending on the type of ad planned; for example many ads incur a cost per click (cpc) if the ad is clicked on. Or a CPM if that is the bidding strategy. Let's jump into to the deep end with the Automotive Digital Marketing Paid Social Guide. 

 


Organic Social Media
Using free tools provided by each social network to build a social community and interact with it, sharing posts and responding to customer comments. For example, using Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule and publish tweets on Twitter is organic. You may pay for a license to use Hootsuite or Buffer, but there is no charge from Twitter for publishing your tweets. Check out our Automotive Digital Marketing Guide for Organic Social

 

 

Email

In our Automotive Digital Marketing Email Marketing Guide, learn why email marketing is still worth doing for your dealership. Email marketing, done well, can be hugely impactful for your dealership. 74% of Baby Boomers think email is the most personal channel to communicate. 99% of email users check their inbox every single day, with some checking it up to 20 times a day. Let’s dig in. 

Video

Video Advertising typically sits at the top of the marketing funnel to help effectively drive awareness for your dealership. It can be used in the consideration stage if done wisely. But we’ll get to more of that coming up. Let’s dig in on how you can leverage Video advertising for your dealership in our Automotive Digital Marketing Guide for Video. 

 

 

Display

There are certain tactics that work best at the top of the funnel to drive awareness. Display is one of those things. Along in the middle consideration stage through retargeting efforts. Check out our Automotive Digital Marketing Guide for Display. 

Summary

We hope that you found the Automotive Digital Marketing Complete Guide to be helpful. 

Advertising is likely one of your biggest expenses at the dealership level and you have to figure out how best to allocate your monthly spend so that you can hit your advertising cost per vehicle. There’s an infinite number of choices out there and it’s your job to best allocate that advertising spend. Here are a few tactics or techniques that you can use.

Here’s a list of digital marketing tactics (or techniques) that is by no means exhaustive. Seems like there are new tactics entering the marketplace every day. But these are the individual tactics that should support your overall marketing strategy. If the tactic is linked then it will send you to our Guide for that linked tactic. Let us know if you would like to see a Guide written for one of the tactics that isn't linked. We'd be happy to write one for you.