Creating a robust content plan for effective dealership marketing

As a full-service automotive marketing agency who have worked with top motor brands for over three decades, we know that having a robust content plan is a fundamental part to organising both paid and organic social content when attracting new customers to purchase their next car with you.

To help improve your dealership marketing, we’d like to share some of our top tips on creating a highly effective content plan when communicating with your customers in the automotive industry.

This may appear basic but validating your target audience often gets overlooked when building a content plan in the automotive industry.

Knowing who your customers are, where they are located and what drives them to buy their next car is fundamental.

Also understanding their automotive interests, age and profile demographics, budget, location and whether they in the market for a new or used car right now, helps you to build tailored personas which is important to your content plan.

Once you are knowledgeable with this data, you can then start creating your plan and begin the digital consumer journey with them early.

Using our own data, we know that 95% of car sales are within 15 miles of dealership locations, so we advise that dealerships aim to dominate their local marketplace to get maximum return from their budgets which minimises wastage.

Creating a defined content strategy and plan really helps to raise brand awareness of your dealership, increase lead generation, and drive in-market traffic. A content strategy which has defined SMART objectives aimed at your target audience is important.

Objectives may include total number of email enquiries, web form submissions, appointments secured or actual sales (car purchases) from targeted audiences, as well as engagement metrics such as number of clicks, shares, impressions etc across social media platforms.

Having a mixture of different kinds of content often generates best results. So, whether your content is around your dealership insights, automotive trends, new reg plates, car showroom events, new cars in stock or switching to an electric vehicle, your content must be engaging, informative, insightful, and interesting so that your customers can relate and feel connected to your brand.

Content should always be written in the language and tone that relates to your target audience.

Publishing organic posts first across social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram helps to entice your customers early and to see what kind of posts and content generates best results.

If certain posts generate greater awareness, more clicks, and conversions, then you have a greater understanding of what your customers likes, so that you can create more of them.

Organic posts such as dealership news stories, images of vehicles and thought leadership pieces can help build and strengthen your brand and reputation. This content can be used for paid campaigns and similar content can be created moving forward. Having a combination of paid for space and organic content is often the most effective solution when raising the profile of your dealership and car brands to your customers.

Once you know what kind of content generates maximum results through sharing and testing different kinds of content, set your social media advertising budget to build brand awareness.

Creating carefully crafted Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube ads (or blended approach) to suit your social media budget and set the daily budget that you are comfortable with. From our experience, we find setting a smaller daily budget initially works best to access results, which can then be increased for next time.

Using software such as Hootsuite can help you to plan content throughout the month in advance, in line with your strategy and content schedule.

This may include using a blended approach to retain interest such as paid, organic posts, dealership updates, videos, or competitions.

Being organised with social media campaigns and content is also key as it’s all about the timing! Coincide latest car and finance deals with calendar events for extra impact.

It’s important that all content shared looks the part and grabs interest. Having eye-catching customer led designs – whether this is infographics, banners, adverts, videos, web forms etc – all encourage a greater call to action and car purchase. 

We recommend that you build custom reports for analysing what social media campaigns are working to drive new customers to your dealership website(s) and from which source/platform. Track and measure the total reach, impressions, click through rates, conversions and CPC rates to fine tune for future campaigns.

If you’re looking to create a robust content plan as part of your social media campaigns for the remainder of the year and into 2022, then we can help you. Our team help automotive clients to build content and digital strategies that attracts, engages, and converts across all channels for maximum results.  

To speak to a member of our team, please call the office on 0114 244 6060 or simply fill in the form by clicking on our 'talk to us' button below.