How Does Inbound Marketing Help Car Dealers?

Let’s start talking about the car sales process two or three decades ago. We will refresh your memory if you’re from that era. When someone wants to find out about a car dealership in the past, they would have relied upon a friend who had bought their car from a dealership, or they had randomly seen a billboard of one.

In this scenario, the buyer was left pretty confused before visiting the dealership, and the only way to find out about the inventory was to visit the place themselves. They also found out about the car prices, features, and financing possibilities there. If they wanted to see more options, they needed to visit in-person several dealers and collect more brochures to evaluate and make a decision. However, things have changed drastically nowadays!

Gone are the days when dealers had to follow intrusive and repetitive advertising methods. Now, digital automotive advertising, social media marketing, and CRM for car dealers have taken their place.

Keep reading this blog to know how inbound marketing can work for car dealerships and how it can help them attract potential customers.

How Does Inbound Marketing Work For Car Dealerships?

Traditional advertising methods have not become completely obsolete, as these methods are somewhat helping the car dealership industry. The modern-day audiences are a bit intolerant of businesses that only look for them to sell. If you have put yourself in a consumer’s shoes today, you know that everything we have just told you is true. If you are a car dealer or a marketer, understanding how inbound marketing benefits car dealers is necessary.

Car dealerships have official websites, social media profiles, blogs, and more. It is enough for modern-day car lovers to simply “Google” dealerships in the area where they live. Hundreds of options will appear. Once you have found a dealership that you think is reliable, you can check everything about your favorite car on the dealer’s website. Afterward, Google Maps will take you there in seconds to make a fair deal.

Remember that inbound marketing is not about forcing your customers to buy the car. Instead, this marketing method aims to help your customers (potential car buyers) receive authentic product information. Inbound marketing highlights the importance of content creation to attract customers and move them through your sales funnel. Essentially, this method helps you constitute customer relationships through relevant social media posts, email campaigns, mobile-friendly ads, and more.

Before applying this marketing method, knowing your audience, their needs, and preferences is good. You must also recognize what to do at each stage of inbound marketing, including attract, convert, close, and delight. Inbound marketing is the non-intrusive advertising methodology for the car dealership sector.

You do not necessarily need to apply inbound marketing on your own. You can find the most reliable automotive advertising agency to benefit from inbound marketing. However, understanding this marketing strategy is necessary for you so that you can track if the agency is working for you well. 

Inbound Marketing – Attract More Potential Customers

Attracting potential customers is necessary for all business industries to generate sales and revenues. The same applies to the car dealership industry. The way is very simple: have an official website, a strong presence on social networks, and so on.

Websites need optimization from time to time and must be directed to the buyer personas that you want in your dealership. Otherwise, all the effort will be in vain.

We thus advise you to attract potential customers through influential inbound marketing.  

Social Media Network

Social networks are essential to building a community around the cars you sell. The most effective approach to use them is by uploading and spreading quality content. The content is not necessarily promotions about vehicles. Instead, focus on content marketing by creating and distributing valuable, pertinent, consistent content to attract and retain customers.

If you have a blog section on your website, social networks will be your best allies in promoting that content. This way, you will be able to attract more customers soon.

Before visiting a business website, most people prefer to see their Facebook profile. So, keep an eye on your FB content. It is the platform where you can directly talk to your audience and convince them by providing all authentic information about cars.

You can focus on social media marketing campaigns like Facebook Ads to attract more customers and, therefore, the leads you want.

Website 

Having a presence through an official website is ideal. However, It is necessary to optimize that website as much as possible so that the efforts do not stop there. And this is the area where automotive SEO (search engine optimization) plays a pivotal role in optimizing your website on popular search engines.

Updating your official car dealership website with keywords from your niche and optimizing its loading time will make a difference. This way, you can help potential car buyers receive all the information they need. You must also make sure that your website is user and mobile-friendly.

Website optimization is an area where it would be good to contact an automotive SEO professional for advice.

Marketing Mix 

A marketing mix would be appropriate to know exactly what type of media to launch your car marketing campaign. And by the rest of the media, we mean local directories, billboards, newspapers, radio, and television. Although they are traditional marketing approaches, they are still relevant in the automotive industry.

You can apply the marketing mix to market and promote your dealership. You can integrate both traditional and digital media strategies, which would help you to a greater stretch.

Final Words

Buying a car is not an everyday decision that a person makes overnight. People invest their savings in vehicles that could give them good or bad experiences. So, it is the dealer’s responsibility to guide buyers by providing them with all relevant information. Adopting inbound marketing is necessary to make everything easier for car buyers. 

If you are looking for a professional automotive advertising agency, come to DealersGear. We are the most reliable provider of CRM, automotive digital advertising, and social media marketing services for car dealerships. Leave your digital marketing task in our experts’ hands and focus on your customers and sales!