It is a brand new year before us and now is the best time to evaluate & plan your Digital Marketing Strategy for success in 2021.
There are many different digital marketing sources to take advantage of to promote and sell your vehicles. Each source offers its own unique way of finding customers and bringing them to your website.
PPC Search Marketing
Pay Per Click marketing refers to running text ads on Google Search. With PPC ads, you can display your dealership front and center to customers searching for keywords related to your business. PPC marketing is intent-based, meaning the customers are actively searching for cars to buy. PPC ads are essential to driving quality traffic to your website.
Remarketing
Most users will visit your website, browse and then leave without completing any further actions. With Remarketing, you can identify these users and tag them with an internet cookie. Once you have users added to your list of Remarketing users, you can serve ads to them while they browse other websites. Remarketing ads can include vehicles the user previously viewed or an incentive to entice the user back to your website.
Display
While PPC provides you with an opportunity to target clients actively searching to buy a car, you can also target users who aren’t. With Display advertising, you can create beautiful banner ads with promotions/specials, then serve those ads to new users as they browse the internet. You can select which audiences of users to target based on their user behavior and interests shown.
Gmail
Users will spend a significant amount of their time daily attending to their Gmail mailbox. You can take advantage of this by serving ads to users right inside of their Gmail mailbox. Your ads can include any branding messages and promotions.
Example of an expanded ad (after clicking):
Facebook Marketplace
A must-have free service for all dealerships. Facebook allows you to post your entire inventory in the Facebook Marketplace. Facebook has millions of users that browse the Marketplace shopping for cars. Best of all there is no fee to post your vehicles to Facebook Marketplace. You can even automate your feed to update every hour to ensure fresh listings.
Craigslist
Take advantage of one of the world’s largest classifieds listings websites. Millions of users browse and shop on Craigslist daily. At just $5 per post, you can post each of your used cars and have ads running for 30 days. There are also automated services that will post your vehicles for you automatically with no effort from you.
Facebook/Instagram Ads
Social Media advertising is a great way to reach users who spend most of their time online on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Target these users with banner ads that promote your dealership’s brand and any specials you would like to promote. The ads appear as native posts on Facebook and are mixed in with the other non-ad posts in users’ feeds.
Keys to Success
To ensure a successful sales year for 2021, we recommend adding each of these marketing sources to your digital marketing strategy for the year. Each of the sources targets users differently and will provide a different set of customers. The more sources you implement, the broader your net of reach will become in an effort to bring in the most customers to your dealership.