16 Automotive Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

These strategies will make sure your automotive marketing is always on and everywhere.

🚀 Automotive marketing success needs a road map! Download Your Easy-to-Use Growth Strategy Gjuide (+Template)

1. Optimize your website for local SEO

The first of our automotive marketing strategies is one of the most important. While most consumers do some online research when it’s time to replace their car, the majority still want to complete at least some of the transaction in person. In fact, 63% of surveyed consumers say a hybrid retail experience is ideal. And of course, most repairs need to be completed locally.

That means you need to make your automotive business discoverable to a local audience—the people who want to connect with nearby automotive sellers to complete their car buying or repair journey.

Getting your website local SEO-ready involves technical and on-page adjustments. Ensure your site is fast, secure, and mobile-friendly (especially because 70% of consumers undertake some car-buying research on a mobile device).

This repair shop is a good example. Notice how the main page mentions its location multiple times.

Source

Your on-page copy should make it easy for humans and search engine crawlers to understand where you’re located. Include your address, map with locations, directions to your dealership, and incorporate local keywords into header copy and meta descriptions (Think: “Chevrolet Dealer Serving El Paso, Texas”).

This handy local SEO checklist will help.

automotive marketing strategies- Local seo checklist.

2. Claim your Google Business Profile

A major off-site factor influencing your local SEO standing is your Google Business Profile. When you search for a local business online, you’ll notice that the Google Maps results appear at the top of the page, often immediately below paid ad results. If your business has claimed and optimized its Google Business Profile, you have a chance of appearing in this prime search spot. This automotive marketing strategy will help you do it.

You can optimize your Google Business Profile so it shows up in the local 3-pack.

Optimizing your Google Business Profile starts with claiming your listing. From there, you can add basic information about your business, like a description, your hours, and contact information. Take a few extra minutes to add even more detail, like business category and photos or videos. Doing so makes your profile more useful to searchers, and Google always strives to surface helpful results.

3. Set up your local listings

Google is a go-to for many searchers to find local businesses, but it’s not the only place people go online. Other local listings sites—like Yelp, Foursquare, and Bing Local—are popular destinations.

Yelp is a classic example of a general local listings site. Searchers can go there looking for any type of business, from a restaurant to a nail salon to a plumber. Getting your dealership listed on sites like Yelp can help you appear in automotive-related searches on the platform.

Appearing in Yelp listings can help legitimize your automotive business to buyers and search engines.

4. Encourage reviews and respond to them

This automotive marketing strategy will help take your local listings to the next level. It’s all about gathering a healthy number of reviews, which serve as a trust signal to search engine crawlers and prospective buyers. More than half of consumers weigh online reviews ahead of the opinions of family and friends, so gathering positive reviews about your business can make a big impact on public perception.

Good reviews and strong ratings build trust fast.

The first step is to encourage customers to leave reviews. While different platforms have rules about soliciting them (Google allows it, while Yelp doesn’t), there are ways to encourage customers to leave reviews. Start by making it easy for them to find you on review sites—for example, you might link to your Yelp or Google Business Profile in your email signature.

Next, include explicit asks to leave a review (on platforms that allow it) at key touchpoints. Build a post-sale email drip campaign that includes a request for feedback and invites recipients to leave a public review.

Once the reviews start rolling in, be sure to respond to them. Almost everyone who reads reviews also reads the business’s responses, so your audience for responses isn’t only the review writer—it’s also your prospective customers. Be kind, take all feedback graciously, and offer solutions to any concerns or questions writers pose.

Reviews are a big deal. Here are some guides to help you get more, use them everywhere, and respond like a pro:

5. Build an organic social media presence

Prospective buyers aren’t only going to your automotive site to learn about your business. More than 25% of consumers head to social media to do research and comparison shop.

Building an organic social media presence helps your business stand out when people head onto their platform of choice. Even if your business wasn’t in their initial list of contenders, if they discover you on social media as they’re doing further research, you may earn a spot on their shortlist.

Source

Social media is a great place to build trust, showcase your personality, and boost your profile. Platforms like TikTok are discoverability engines, so if you can learn how TikTok SEO works, you have the potential to create viral content that reaches a wider swath of your target audience.

Social media is also a great place to share educational content that answers everyday users’ big car questions, from how to assess their vehicle options to how to keep their existing car in tip-top shape. When you can establish your team as a go-to resource for friendly, helpful car content, you position your business to be the place a follower turns when they’re ready to make a purchase.

6. Explore social media ads

To make an even bigger splash on social media, consider running social media ads in conjunction with your organic content. While organic content is a great way to stay top-of-mind with existing followers and steadily grow your reach, adding social media advertising to your broader marketing strategy for automotive can help you get more leads quickly.

Social media platforms allow advertisers to target very specific audiences. You can direct your ad to the right people in the right geography and craft messaging that resonates with that specific segment of your target audience.

7. Engage relevant influencers

As an extension of your paid social media efforts, you may also try influencer marketing. On social media platforms, influencers have worked hard to cultivate a niche audience for their content. And many nano and micro-influencers (those with thousands, rather than millions, of followers) speak to specific groups that may be highly relevant for your business.

While this post isn’t sponsored, it shows how a TikToker who provides auto advice has carved out an audience that would be relevant to brands in the automotive space.

If you specialize in classic cars, find an influencer who loves nerding out about antique vehicles. If your target audience is young families looking for safe, reliable used vehicles, team up with a local couple that creates parenting-related content.

No matter who it is you’re trying to reach, influencer marketing is a great way to establish trust quickly and expand into a relevant niche that’s already highly engaged with your influencer-partner’s content.

8. Try PPC advertising

Because so many consumers begin their car search online, incorporating PPC advertising into your automotive marketing strategies is a must.

Think about your own buying behavior: search engines are often a first stop when researching a purchase decision. PPC advertising allows you to bid for ad placement at the top of search results, so your name appears first when people start looking for a car.

Ads like these show up above the top organic results.

PPC advertising complements your other marketing strategies well. For example, when you invest in local SEO, you may show up in organic results for relevant searches. And when you’ve paired that with a PPC advertising strategy, your name pops up multiple times on the page: you may show up in paid search, Maps results, and the organic blue links.

The more times your business’s name can land in front of consumers, the greater chance you have that they’ll look into your dealership as part of their online vehicle research.

👀 Want more search ad intel? Free resource >> PPC 101: The Complete Beginner’s Guide to PPC

9. Run automotive industry-specific ads

In addition to general search engine and social media advertising, some platforms have ad products specifically built to serve the automotive industry. They include:

Google vehicle ads: This ad format allows you to promote your entire vehicle inventory of non-commercial passenger vehicles. Include images and vehicle specs (like make, model, mileage, and price) so viewers know exactly what you have available.
Facebook Automotive Inventory Ads: Similar to Google’s product, Facebook allows you to advertise your entire vehicle inventory. It uses its Meta Pixel on your site and people’s engagement on Meta platforms to show specific vehicles to a relevant audience.

The sponsored vehicles on this page represent Google vehicle ads.

These industry-specific ad types can be even more beneficial for automotive brands than generic, traditional advertising. Because it shows your real-time inventory to relevant buyers, it drives more engagement and conversions—both online and in-person.

10. Invest in display advertising

Display advertising uses visual ads—like banners, videos, or images—placed across websites and apps to build awareness and attract potential customers as they browse online. It’s one of those automotive marketing strategies that really help you show up everywhere your next customers spends time online.

There are nearly endless opportunities to promote your automotive business through display ads. Does your local newspaper have a digital edition? What online publications does your audience read? These are a couple of examples.

Even better, display ad networks can now do all sorts of audience targeting for you. Meaning, you launch one ad, the network will dynamically test placements on dozens or hundreds of websites to find the ones that drive the best returns.

11. Create a remarketing strategy

The average cost of a new car in the US is over $50,000. As with any big-ticket purchase, people might not be ready to buy right away. That’s why remarketing can be an invaluable tool in an automotive brand’s overall advertising strategy.

Remarketing ads are ads shown to people who have already visited your website or interacted with your business, helping you stay top of mind and bring them back to convert. And most advertising platforms offer some way to do it.

Continuing to advertise to those who already know your brand is a great way to stay top-of-mind as they consider their car-buying options. When your name stays in their field of vision throughout their search, you have a better chance of becoming one of their short-listed dealerships.

12. Share video content

Research finds that video marketing has a huge role to play in consumers’ online research: 75% of car buyers report being influenced by video content while exploring their options.

Automotive brands that create their own organic video content and optimize it for easy discoverability give themselves a leg up over the competition. In the world of video today, there are really two avenues: short-form and long-form video.

Source

A platform like TikTok is well-suited to short content, like a highlight reel to unveil new inventory, while a longer-form YouTube video gives you the space to go more in-depth, sharing content like a thorough walk-through of features on the latest make and model of a popular car or a guide to avoiding rust.

No matter how and where you share your content, you can optimize it by incorporating captions, adding structured data to your watch pages, and including descriptions and hashtags on sites like YouTube and TikTok. These additional steps help your videos appear in relevant search results.

13. Use YouTube advertising

While you build out your organic video content library, you can also explore paid advertising strategies on YouTube. Since YouTube is part of Google, it’s pretty easy to get started with YouTube advertising if you’re already running PPC ads on the search engine.

YouTube ads can show up before, during, or after a video and in the search feed.

And because seeing is believing with a product like a vehicle, paid video advertising can be a hugely cost-effective tactic in the automotive space. That’s why manufacturers and dealerships love to run television ads—few can resist the allure of a gleaming new car gliding down the highway or along a city street. YouTube does that and more, with the benefits of audience targeting and viewer data that TV ads can only dream of.

14. Try seasonal marketing tactics

Many in the automotive industry already engage in seasonal marketing tactics. Some advertise promotions with holidays (President’s Day and Fourth of July sales are big among dealerships), while others create their own seasonal holidays (Toyotathon is the car manufacturer’s annual year-end sales event).

Source

Seasonal marketing has the power to be effective for dealerships for several reasons:

Creating seasonal promotions can be the nudge some buyers need to finally make a purchase decision.
Seasonal messaging allows you to say something fun, engaging, and unique. This helps your brand break through the noise and capture your audience’s attention.
If you align your seasonal marketing with your inventory, you can create an even more effective campaign. For example, you may use the back-to-school season as a time to advertise your family-friendly inventory.

15. Run a contest or giveaway

When you’re building your presence online, you’re always looking for ways to widen your circle of connections. Running a giveaway or contest can help you connect with an even broader network of potential buyers.

Whether you build out a giveaway that appears as a pop-up on your site or design your promotion to run on social media, creating an enticing offer helps you collect contact information or boost your follower count among people who are interested in your business.

While they might not be ready to buy right away, once they’re in your orbit, you can continue to nurture them until they are.

16. Explore lead management tools

When a prospect decides to buy, they want you to be ready for them. An HBR study found that businesses are seven times more likely to close a sale if they respond to a customer inquiry within the first hour as compared to those who wait until hour two.

An AI-powered lead management tool can help you qualify leads, respond faster, and track lead sources.

AI-powered lead management tools like Dash by LocaliQ will help you track and respond to leads faster and more thoughtfully.

Rev up your automotive digital marketing strategy

The digital marketing landscape offers automotive brands lots of open road to spread the word about their business. Whether that’s with organic tactics or paid advertising campaigns, building out automotive marketing strategies that encompass a healthy mix of approaches helps you get discovered by relevant prospects, stay top-of-mind with those you’ve already met, and be poised to close the deal when they’re ready to buy.

When you’re ready to shift success into overdrive, contact us. We’ll show you how our digital marketing solutions can help you grow your business on every digital channel.

Meet The Author

Amanda Rodhe

Amanda Rodhe is a freelance content marketing writer. She’s passionate about the power of the written word and loves helping brands craft compelling stories that stick. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or learn more at www.amandarodhe.com.

16 Automotive Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Contents