Building your Automotive Marketing Plan
Creating automotive marketing strategies seems daunting due to many factors. You may not have the time to sit down and create a full marketing campaign. If you do not have a great understanding of what goes into creating a successful campaign, you may feel discouraged in getting started.
Here we will break down all the most important aspects needed to create a cohesive marketing campaign.
Developing Your Target Audience
The first step in developing a marketing campaign for your automotive business is creating your ideal target audience. Your desired customer base can change depending on the types of vehicles you service, the area you are in, and more. You need to define that audience by looking at the geographical and psychological aspects of the population in your area.
Geographics
There are two factors at play when creating your target audience. The first one is geographics. The specific location of your audience is important because most of your client base will live locally. Your shop’s location can determine what seasonal services or products you offer.
For example, if the shop is in South Florida, you will not offer snow tires to your clients. Instead, you would want to push A/C services to help combat the Florida heat.
Psychographics
This speaks directly to the thought processes of your target audience. Psychographics includes things like purchase intent. So, if you notice that consumers in your area are looking for shops that work on exotic cars, then focusing your marketing efforts on services for exotic vehicles will help your business stand out.
How to Figure out The Psychographics of Your Target Audience
There are many ways to determine what your consumers look for in an auto repair shop. You could participate in face-to-face marketing to determine what values and beliefs your customers have. Hosting local events should spring to mind because it shows consumers what you value apart from making a living as a business owner.
Another way to do that is by participating in community engagement on social media. Consumers will follow your business's social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
Leveraging those platforms to figure out what your audience values mean engaging with your audience using your business’ social media pages by posting content that may be relevant to them. Whether they respond positively or negatively, you may find your answer as to what they value.
The Goals of Your Automotive Marketing Campaigns
We often forget the importance of goals in business. Sometimes, it is easy to neglect the action of creating goals if your business is successful at that moment. What do you strive to accomplish with your business? Regardless of the motives behind owning an automotive repair shop, an effective marketing campaign must have a goal.
Digital Advertising Using SMART Goal Setting
Devising a plan to meet those goals requires the implementation of SMART goal setting. SMART is an acronym that incorporates the most important aspects of the campaign.
The “S” refers to the specificity of the goal. If your goal is too broad, the other aspects of your marketing campaign will not matter.
The “M” refers to whether the goal is measurable or not. Failure to measure the goal of your campaign will result in not knowing how effective the campaign is. You will be able to adjust the campaign if you are able to measure them.
The “A” refers to the achievability of the goal. Unrealistic goals do not work for marketing campaigns, and the campaign will fail if the goal does not meet reasonable expectations.
The “R” refers to whether your ad is relevant or not. Consumers will continue scrolling if the ad is not relevant to them or their intent to purchase.
The “T” refers to the timeframe in which the goal can be achieved. This is relevant to you because the timing of your goal will determine how much money you will need to invest for your goal to be achievable.
Overall, the point of SMART goal setting is to establish a realistic, cost-effective campaign that will be easy to manage and measure. Use this to keep your thought process in check.
Using Advertising Ideas to Fuel Your Marketing Efforts
With the lack of an attention span in today’s society, the importance of uniqueness and authenticity cannot be argued. Consumers will ignore most of the content they see daily, which is why your automotive marketing plan must include engaging content that speaks to the authenticity of your business.
Here are a few ways to create engaging content:
Be Authentic
Your brand identity can be on full display on social media. The content you share with your followers should be based on things that they want to see, which is why giving consumers a taste of what it is like in your shop will go a long way.
Sharing information about your employees, local events, and maintenance and repairs are all things that consumers love to see.
Providing Solutions to Your Target Audience
Advertising on platforms like Facebook, Google, and Yelp requires finding a solution to your audience’s problems. What do your consumers need most?
If it is an oil change, then advertise that service with a discount, as well as a call to action. The call to action will work to encourage them to engage with the ads that you post on those platforms, so be creative with it.
Add Social Media Marketing to Your Marketing Plan
People want to see fun, exciting, or educational content on social media. You have a better chance of being seen if you are authentic and post interesting content.
One way to be authentic is to provide tips or tricks about their vehicles. Most do not care how their vehicle works so long as it gets them to their destination safely. Giving them a glimpse of what your automotive technicians deal with on a regular basis will help them to decide if they should bring their vehicle in for maintenance or repair services.
Another way to stand out is to highlight customers for their reviews on those platforms. Encouraging feedback and making your customers feel important may help attract more customers to your place of business.
Automotive Marketing Websites Used to Boost Visibility on Search Engine Results Pages
Search engine optimization (or SEO) allows websites to be more visible to people online. It may be difficult to understand because there are so many moving parts.
When designing a website, the overall functionality of it is determined by three things: the content, the ease of use, and the responsiveness of the website. We will dive a little deeper into how SEO works and what things affect it.
The content on a website is crucial. Images used, the logo, and the text all function to make your website more engaging with the consumers. It is not enough to slap things together in hopes to drive traffic.
There must be interesting, educational content on your website if you are to keep consumers on your website for extended periods of time.
Added to that are the keywords used on the site. Your goal is to use relevant keywords that Google’s website crawlers can detect. This will help rank your website higher on SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
The general layout of a website makes a difference. If it is difficult to navigate, Google may lower your ranking. Consumers must find information because, if they must spend time looking for it, they may leave your site to look at alternatives.
The same thing applies to linking as well. If you have broken internal or external links, that will push consumers off your site. Broken links also hurt SEO, so proper website maintenance is required.
Lastly, consumers are looking for responsive sites. With most consumers using mobile devices to search and view websites, a well-designed website will need to function on more than just a desktop or laptop. A website that is not mobile-friendly will not only be ranked lower on SERP but it also will not be viewed by consumers.
The point of a website is to drive traffic to it so that your customers can learn more about your business, and then they can decide if they should visit your shop or not. If your website does not meet their expectations, you should expect low traffic or a lack of time that customers spend on your website.
Optimizing Your Business’ Automotive Marketing Plan
Optimize Digital Marketing has been around since 2012. In that time, we have dedicated our business to helping automotive repair shops create digital marketing plans that assist in making our customer’s businesses successful.
We offer everything you need for your business to be effective online. Our team can create a website that is optimized for SEO, and create social media marketing and advertising strategies that engage with your audience. If your business needs that extra boost, call us and we can walk you through how we will create your automotive marketing plan.