Automotive digital marketing has replaced traditional marketing efforts with more impactful methods of enticing shoppers to consider a new vehicle.

Every year, new trends appear, but some stay and continue to be some of the best practices for advertising teams. The highly competitive nature of the automotive industry makes it important for dealerships to focus on marketing that matters to their customers. Dealers selling trucks aren’t targeting the same audience as those selling small cars.

Here are some great ways to improve your automotive digital marketing, putting your dealership in front of your customer base.

Your website has to be useful on mobile devices

It’s 2024, and we’ve talked about mobile optimization and responsiveness for years. At this point, if your website isn’t as useful on mobile devices as on laptops and desktops, you’re way behind. In fact most marketing teams will tell you it’s important to adopt a mobile-first strategy to ensure your customers can use and navigate your website on their smartphones or tablets. This means everything from page appearance to page load speeds must be right and work on mobile devices.

Chatbots have become more dynamic

The development of artificial intelligence incorporated into chatbots and other customer service functions helps free up time for sales teams to focus on leads. Dealerships must utilize automotive digital marketing that includes chatbots to engage with consumers after business hours. When shoppers have free time to browse and search for vehicles, they also want their questions answered, which these AI-powered chatbots can accomplish. Dealership teams could see new leads from these overnight chats between customers and the chatbots.

Voice search is mobilized

With most consumers utilizing their mobile devices to search for products and services, voice search has become more important than ever. Shoppers can simply talk into their smartphones and expect to find answers to their questions. This mobilization of voice search means your website must be optimized for these inquiries. Instead of focusing on keywords for search, it’s important to focus on the frequently asked questions that could be part of a voice search. If your website is optimized for this search type, you’ll find more consumers can visit your site and find the vehicles you sell.

Marketing must be personalized

Your automotive digital marketing efforts must make consumers feel like the advertising is meant only for them. This means utilizing AI to create segmented lists of consumers based on their needs. The more your advertising can be personalized to sub-sets of your customer base, the greater the impact you can have on potential customers. Personalization could lead to offering specialized off-road vehicles to those who spend time in the outdoors, family SUVs and minivans to families with children, and sports cars to those looking for fun on the road.

How local is your SEO?

Car dealerships are physical locations that can only serve specific areas. It doesn’t do your dealership much good to discuss the automotive markets of other countries when your customer base is local. Instead, your blog page should be filled with local events, topics, and conversations. Of course, you need to include posts regarding your vehicle lineup, but using local hangouts, businesses, and historical events can help boost your local SEO and allow your customers to find you without using cheap, generic terms like “near me” in your keywords.

Social media is more important than ever

The classic and standard platforms of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (now X) are all great places to continue to advertise your products and services. Your automotive digital marketing team should help you figure out other social platforms that could be great for your marketing efforts. Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest are all popular choices. YouTube has developed into a social media site that also acts as a search engine, making it an excellent place for video advertising.

Augmented reality could be the future of your dealership

Your sales team likely pivoted and became extremely flexible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the practices that took place during this time are still important today. Some customers search for dealers offering virtual test drives using augmented reality. This technology is becoming popular and is still one of the least-used tech strategies in the industry. Will your dealership bring AR to your customers, ensuring those who want to enjoy a virtual showroom, vehicle customization, and a virtual test drive from home can do so?

Will you put these automotive digital marketing strategies to work for your car dealership? Some should already be used by your team, while others could put your location ahead of your competition.