Best digital marketing strategies for car dealerships

Driving leads and sales in your car dealership marketing strategies is often the end goal. But getting there can prove tricky, especially when you’re not equipped with the right solutions for digital marketing success.

Car buying journeys are constantly evolving, and digital touchpoints play a crucial role in conversion. Prospective buyers might make their purchase at your dealership, but they’re conducting extensive research, comparing vehicles, reading reviews, and evaluating dealerships online before making contact.

For your dealership to thrive amidst this shift in consumer behaviour, you need sophisticated digital strategies that incorporate software, like Mediahawk, to deliver actionable insights, optimise your campaigns, and build trust for high-value automotive purchases.

Why digital marketing matters for car dealerships

The automotive sector is becoming increasingly competitive, and effective digital marketing strategies are the only way to stay ahead and bring in the leads that matter.

When a customer buys a car at your dealership, this decision is not a one-time event. Instead, it’s the end result of a complex journey through various channels, both digital and traditional, where each touchpoint influences another action, eventually leading to a conversion. If you want this end result every time, then you need to pay attention to the campaigns and channels that drive it.

Traditional marketing strategies and attribution models can no longer capture the full picture of buyer journeys. Sophisticated solutions like call tracking provide the best way to measure the impact of your digital efforts across multiple touchpoints and ensure you deliver the right message, at the right time, in the right place, to drive prospects to a purchase.

So, how is this done?

How to turn online interest into real dealership visits

Here are some of the best digital marketing strategies that use call tracking software to convert your online prospects to buyers:

1. Understand your audience and their car buying journey

Knowing how to increase car dealership sales is really knowing how to give your prospects what they want. And how do you find this out? By tracking their journeys and creating effective buyer personas with granular insights from call tracking data, extending far beyond basic demographics.

Our User Journey feature shows the exact touchpoints your prospects are visiting with your dealership. Track interactions across different channels, both online and offline, including website visit, paid ads, social media posts, and phone calls. With the entire buyer journey in plain view, you’ll know exactly where your valuable buyers are coming from.

Also, you can extract insights from your Sales Matching data that reveal the link between your most valuable purchases and the key campaigns that generate them. This shows you what sources your buyers use to reach you, and you can increase investment in these areas to further boost revenue.

Speech Analytics will reveal the questions your buyers are searching to reach your dealership. This will give you an indication of the brands, vehicle types, pain points, and dealership services that your valuable prospects are after. You can then tailor your campaigns to directly influence conversions with the right content and messaging to nail their preferences on the head.

2. Turn real conversations into high-converting PPC campaigns

Do you have the right solutions in place to optimise your pay-per-click (PPC) targeting? Call tracking software takes away the guesswork and provides data-driven insights to cut costs and increase conversions from your PPC ads.

Speech Analytics will automatically transcribe and analyse prospect phone call conversations and surfaces the language and questions that real customers use. This data can be fed into Google Analytics to create custom audiences. These audiences can then be used to send positive signals into Google Ads to improve your PPC targeting.

So, instead of relying on traditional broad keyword targeting, you can tailor your paid campaigns to precisely focus on real customer intent data. This lets you create high-intent keyword lists that your competitors probably aren’t bidding on, so you can get ahead with your PPC leads.

Speech Analytics will automatically transcribe and analyse prospect phone call conversations and surfaces the language and questions that real customers use. This data can be fed into Google Analytics to create custom audiences. These audiences can then be used to send positive signals into Google Ads to improve your PPC targeting.

3. Gain sharper, more reliable ROI data for dynamic budget allocation

Sales Matching reveals granular insights that link your campaigns to car purchases, so you can be more reactive and dynamic with how you allocate resources for the highest return on investment (ROI).

Automotive marketing can shift at any moment, whether it’s seasonal patterns or sudden changes in engagement across channels – often influenced by factors like registration plate changes, model year releases, and fleet purchasing cycles.

With Sales Matching real-time insights, you can immediately identify trends and changes in prospect behaviours that impact revenue, and adjust spend across channels accordingly.

Dealer Group, Dick Lovett, saw an increase in visibility across their channels using Sales Matching, giving them a closer eye on what’s driving purchases at all times, With a clearer understanding of how their budget is being spent, they can accurately and dynamically adjust their campaigns in line with data from channels like PPC and Autotrader.

4. Know what content resonates across key stages in the car buying journey

Buying a car, for most prospects, involves a complex decision-making process that includes vehicle selection, financing options, trade-in valuations, and dealership choice. Our User Journey feature reveals key insights needed to align your content correctly at each stage of the buyer journey, so you can effectively nudge them along the funnel,

The software reveals the touchpoints a customer visits before, during, and after they call, so you know the true impact of each campaign along their journey. You might find that prospects are more likely to call if they engage with informational blog content early on in the journey, followed by product-focused ads later on. Or, they might prefer to be re-targeted with social media campaigns that address a specific pain point or need.

Use the data on campaign performance to create carefully-crafted content at the right time in the journey, since you’ll now know what content lands best and why. This makes all the difference in transforming content creation from being assumption-based to evidence-based, which is key to driving purchases.

5. Generate more leads with cross-channel presence outside of your own website

Multi-platform presence is essential for your car dealership marketing, and how you optimise different channels will make or break your lead generation.

Parameter Connect gives you a sophisticated overview of your cross-channel marketing using Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters and multichannel campaign tagging. This way, you can gather insights on how different activities and channels are influencing complex customer journeys and know how to adjust your campaigns accordingly.

For instance, you can track how social media campaigns, third-party automotive sites, your Google Business Profile (GBP) and review platforms are generating leads and sales. A prospect might discover your dealership through an Auto Trader listing, research your reputation on social media, read reviews on Google, and finally convert via a direct website visit.

Without having comprehensive attribution methods, you’ll lose sight of the value of early-stage touchpoints. Call tracking helps you avoid this and shows you where to increase and reduce investments across all channels to make the differences that matter to your ROI.

6. Pinpoint the best timings and messaging for successful email marketing

Increasing conversions with your email marketing depends on well-timed emails triggered by customer interaction data.

User Journey data pinpoints the right time in the buyer journey to send certain emails, as you’ll have clear data on which email timings and specific messaging led to the most conversions. Design your email campaigns with data-backed evidence on what prospects interact with best, when they need it, and why it’s effective.

Sales Matching also provides the crucial link between campaigns and actual revenue generation, and you can tailor the software to show which types of emails and email timings lead to the biggest car purchases.

This level of personalisation significantly improves email engagement, and in turn, drives more leads and sales with successful retargeting.

7. Use call features to help boost conversions

Phone conversations often convert at higher rates than form submissions, making call optimisation crucial for your dealership’s success. Advanced call handling features are therefore essential to ensure your prospects are receiving the care they need to convert.

With Interactive Voice Response (IVR), you can route callers more efficiently to the right departments based on their needs – whether they need sales, service, or warranty support. With a faster and more accurate system, callers will have a more streamlined experience that reduces frustration and nurtures a purchase.

You can also be more adaptable during live calls with mid-call diversions, allowing you to more easily transfer live calls between your call handlers, should the prospect need additional expertise or service from another department.

Transform your car dealership marketing

If you want success in your car dealership’s digital marketing strategies, you must adopt solutions with comprehensive measurement and analysis capabilities that extend far beyond traditional analytics.

With software like Mediahawk, you’ll have full visibility across both online and offline touchpoints, clearer direction for optimising PPC and email campaigns, better content that aligns with each stage of the buyer journey, and more streamlined experiences when your prospects call.