Big ticket items require more convincing and efforts to generate sales and this is true for a used car business too. Any person searching for used cars on Google will definitely get plenty of options to choose from. In order to grow your used car dealership amidst the growth in competition, it is extremely necessary to be good at advertising your used car business. Considering this, go through this comprehensive list of used car marketing ideas to stay in the game:
1) Refine These Features on Your Website
A website should be the first on your priority list for digital marketing of your used car dealership since it acts as your virtual showroom and is accessible to a far larger segment of potential customers. As more individuals are beginning their search for products and services online, having a website with good features becomes mandatory. Most importantly, if you have a website along with the option for customers to select a car and book test drives online, your business will see growth in conversion. Following are some tips that will enhance the performance of your website for converting visitors into clients:
a) Create a website that has content properly organized into sections with ease of navigation and with the option to see your current car portfolio directly from the website itself.
b) Your business contact information should be shown clearly in the top section of your website.
c) Make sure that you display testimonials as well as frequently asked questions to build trust as well as to enhance the user experience.
d) You must ensure auto-adjusting resolution is enabled for your website so that it can efficiently display on different kinds of devices (mobile, tablets).
e) Site shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to load fully as slow loading time equates to visitor loss.
f) Enlist significant accomplishments that your business has accomplished, such as being honored, or being recognized in the media.
2) Send Press Releases to Get Several Benefits
Press Release plays a multidimensional marketing part for any business. However, most businesses are often unaware of their potential. Most businesses often consider press releases as mere tools to make announcements, but they are not limited to this. Premium press release syndication networks have the ability to publish your business content across some of the most renowned news portals. They are also a great tool to earn backlinks from big sites which in turn aids in the better positioning of your website across various search engines. They also generate traffic/visitors and assist in creating a brand name for your business.
3) Get Found Easily for Used Cars Online
When you invest your money and time into developing an attractive website, you must also make sure that potential customers can easily find it online. You need to adopt certain strategies to enhance your site’s visibility in search engines for local keywords related to “used cars”. These strategies are called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Although there are a number of free and paid courses available online that teach the entire niche of SEO, you can hire any expert agency to manage the SEO of your used car website so that you can just focus on your core business while outsourcing the peripheral tasks to capable businesses.
4) Start Creating Relevant Content
The more blog posts you put up on your used cars website for various topics related to your business (like best used car dealers in [City Name]), the more will your website be shown on search engines for different keywords. This process will in turn help to grow the number of visitors to your site which is a direct contributing factor in growing sales for your used car business. Your business can utilize content marketing for captivating leads, creating case studies related to business, or offering information to someone researching topics related to your business.
5) Enable Your Business to be Seen on Local Listings of Google
“Google My Business” (GMB) listings prominently display information about businesses and services when local searches are done on Google. The best part is that these results show up on the first page of Google thereby generating more visibility and leads/sales. To create your GMB profile, you can head over to the GMB page creation section followed by listing all necessary details associated with your business like the name of the business, working hours, phone number, address, etc. More positive reviews and citations are two essential elements that determine how frequently your details will be shown. There are agencies that handle the ranking of GMB pages too.
6) Set Budget for Paid Marketing
Paid advertising on platforms such as Google, Facebook, Bing, and so on will expedite the process of lead generation for your business. Google is the best option for paid advertising online while Facebook and Bing also being significant. If things like ad creation, bid setting, keyword setting, and targeting are new to you, you must definitely go through various online advertising ebooks and portals to better understand them first. A much better way is to have a professional marketing firm manage the PPC advertising for your business.
7) Explore Social Media to Build New Connections
It takes time and work to build a following on social media, but the time and effort you put in are going to pay off in the form of a continuous supply of free leads for your used car business. In order to see results from your social media marketing strategy, be consistent with providing quality information along with making your network. In the initial few months, maintain a consistent publishing schedule with a main focus on producing high-quality, useful material with very minimal emphasis on direct marketing. When you have established a sizeable following, you can easily step up your used car advertising efforts with good returns. Joining various relevant local groups on Facebook is necessary if you want to get the word out about your used car portfolio.
8) Use Influencers to Influence Locals
Locals from your town/city who are active on social media and who have built a big enough follower base (in a few thousand) are the right prospects who can be good business promotion partners. Contact such influencers that are related to your niche and explore the possibility of getting your used car dealership promoted by them. Select those influencers who quote fair promotion costs and have a sizeable audience from your own town/city. You will get more followers and sales for your used car business with the right influencer marketing approach.
9) Encourage More People to Refer Your Business
Customers must be encouraged to tell their friends, relatives, and family about your business. Though a simple way out is to ask your customers to do so but in order to get some real momentum into referral marketing, add some good incentives in the form of gift cards or discounts. The better the incentives are, the better will be the results achieved from referral marketing.
10) Free Merchandise Distribution for Business Promotion
A creative way to promote your used car dealership is by utilizing low-cost items with your business name printed on them. As custom printed products have a utility value, they create a much better and bigger impact than distributing brochures, pamphlets, etc. Some of the customized items that your business can use for this purpose are t-shirts, mugs, pens, pencils, wrist bands, plastic bottles, calendars, etc. These customized items can also be given away as rewards for all such people who help in marketing your used car business on their social media accounts.
11) Convince and Close Deals Better with Email Marketing
When it comes to communicating with existing customers and gaining new ones, email marketing stands out as one of the most effective methods. Many individuals visit a company’s website but for some reason do not avail the products/services offered by the business. Once you start working towards collecting the email addresses of your site visitors, you will get additional chances to convert these visitors into customers. If you offer something of value in return for contact information (like ebooks, coupons, discounts), it will assist you in collecting email addresses faster.
12) Find Good Directories and Get Your Business Listed
As a business owner, you must always be ready to utilize all such digital assets that can help you gain more exposure to your business. For doing this, you can start typing keywords relevant to your business on Google (like used car business in [name of your city])in order to find such directories and sites that allow free listing of other businesses on their platform. Once you have found such sites, you can proceed with marking your business presence on them due to which your business listing will be open to more exposure. The most common example of such directories is Yelp and you can discover more of such sites.
13) Start Producing Videos
If you create and submit videos to YouTube that showcase used cars offered by your business, such videos will drive additional views and leads from searches that happen on the YouTube platform. Because YouTube gets billions of search queries each and every month, maintaining an active channel on this site creates immense potential for brand awareness. Videos from Youtube that target easy competition keywords usually get displayed on Google search results too thereby bringing additional leads and growth for businesses.
14) Test Traditional Offline Marketing Methods
No matter how much is the growth in expenditure toward online marketing, offline marketing still holds its significance. It remains the most widely used marketing form across the world. Though many marketers and businesses complain that offline marketing is too expensive than online marketing, they are still useful in getting more visibility to businesses around the world. Be it ads on newspapers or billboards across the streets, from distributing pamphlets to brochures, these methods still grow brand recognition and help in making more sales.
15) Get Seen Across Roads With Branding on Vehicles
Cover your vehicle with the advertisement of your used car dealership business. You can also ask other private vehicle owners to put the advertisement of your used car business on their vehicles in exchange for monetary incentives. Every time when these vehicles will move across different routes and roads, your used car business will be noticed by all people driving by.
16) Build Relevant Partnerships for More Leads and Sales
Every entity out there in the market that provides some or the other car-related services can be your good partner for sending more referrals to your car dealership. Some good examples of these partners can be car washing services, auto parts dealers, auto insurance agents, car mechanics, and garages. To add a better incentive angle for getting more referrals, you can also offer commissions to this group of people if they refer your used car dealership to other people. From a reverse perspective, you can also send them leads whenever possible as it will help to maintain a good relationship for mutual growth.
17) Catch More Attention with Car Parades
On certain days, you can take the convoy of your cars one after the other with your business flags/logo attached to them. This will draw public attention and more people will notice your business name along with the inventory of vehicles held by your used car business. Since it will be exciting to watch the convoy of cars, following a certain pattern, crossing the road, it can also become the talk of your town for the next few days. Such car parades can also be done on special occasions like any big match or for celebrating a big event in your town/nation.
18) Offer Inexpensive Services for Free or Heavily Discounted Prices
Depending on your budget, you can offer very low-cost services related to cars for free or at heavily discounted prices. Some of these services can include checking tires, car washing, fixing minor problems, etc. Due to this, many new potential customers can land on your business and this can give a great opportunity to cross-sell your used cars.
19) Contribute Articles to Local Newspapers
Many local newspapers welcome contributions by guest authors and experts and you can utilize such opportunities to advertise your car dealership business along with sharing helpful content for such newspapers. You can come up with articles on common problems related to cars and can get such articles published in popular local newspapers in your region. By doing this, people who will read such articles will also become familiar with your business name and this process, if carried out for some period of time, can also help to create a good brand image for your car dealership business which is essential to get more sales.
20) Advertise Using Records of Car Purchase Dates
Utilize the past purchase records of your business to send “car anniversary” greeting cards to your previous customers. Apart from reminding and wishing their car anniversary, such cards can also help to get more referrals from these customers along with strengthening client-customer relations.
21) Add Associated Services to Generate More Revenue
Brainstorm all the associated services that you can provide along with your car dealership and select those services that can be comfortably used as an add-on service for boosting the revenue gained per client. For example, you can lend out some space to a car wash business on your premises and can take some commissions from every car wash along with automatically promoting your used car business. You can use any such combination of services as per your convenience.
22) Hold Photo Submission Contests to Promote Your Business
To get significant attention from car owners in your region, you can announce a “photo submission contest” where car owners can submit photos of their cars and a lucky few will be selected for rewards. Such contests can, therefore, allow more people to get familiar with your business which can also give you new leads and sales. To ensure greater participation in such contests, the projected rewards must be good enough to attract public attention. You can also hold such contests in joint participation with other businesses so that you don’t have to shell out more money.
23) Sponsor Events to Be Recognized Even More
Sponsor or cosponsor all such events and gatherings that are likely to drive more public from your region. To keep track of all upcoming events in your region, you can make use of event listing websites. Even by reading local newspapers, you can know about upcoming events and can plan accordingly to mark the presence of your business in such venues.
24) Make More Sales By Free Test Drives
Offer free test drives of your cars in order to get more people to visit your car dealership. A good marketing strategy to increase the efficacy of this method is by inviting famous video bloggers (vloggers) and influencers from your city to test drive your cars followed by sharing the videos and photos of such test drives on their websites and social media profiles. This method will make sure that thousands of followers of these vloggers and influencers will notice your car dealership business.
25) Open Your Doors to Affiliates for Faster Growth
To utilize collective efforts for the growth of your used car business, you can join any big affiliate network as an advertiser for implementing this process. By doing this, you can find thousands of affiliates who will be ready to promote your car dealership in order to get commissions from your business. These affiliates will adopt different advertising methods for sending leads to your business in order to make commissions for themselves.
26) Uphold Positive Reviews Online
Gone are the days when most people used to buy products and services based on advertisements alone. With more people having access to the internet, searching for reviews of a business or service before trying them out is increasingly becoming a norm. This factor of reviews has become so crucial that it can no longer be ignored or sidelined by any business that is serious about its growth. So make it a habit of asking your customers to leave reviews online and to speed up the rate of reviews, you can also give your customers some sort of incentives to do so.
After going through these used car dealership marketing strategies, you can certainly try out at least a few of them first to start seeing your revenues rising. Leave your comments below to further discuss any tips or doubts that you may have.
