Everyone needs a car to get around. Why shouldn’t they buy it from you? But with over 16,000 franchised light-duty car dealerships in the United States, the competition can get rough. If you want to stand out from the pack and get more customers to your lot, here are five promotional ideas to market your car dealership.
Start with eye-catching graphics
The basis of any modern marketing campaign is graphics. Customers need something interesting to catch their attention before they invest any time learning about the brand or the promotion.
Since you’re busy selling vehicles, you probably don’t have time to design eye-catching graphics from scratch. Luckily, there are thousands of free car flyer templates available on websites like PosterMyWall.
Simply choose the template that best fits your dealership’s brand, customize the information with the easy drag-and-drop editor, and you’re ready to use the graphics in your next marketing campaign.
Send your designs to the printer to hang flyers around town or post them in your office. You can also save your graphics as a PNG or JPEG and upload them to your website and social media channels for even more visibility. Great graphics attract attention, and that’s how you promote a car dealership!
Manage a social media campaign
You always want your marketing efforts to reach as many people as possible, so you have to go where customers spend their time. In 2024, that place is social media. With over 5 billion active users worldwide, there’s a good chance that most of the people in your local area log into at least one social media platform monthly.
But with that many users comes a lot of competition. If you want your dealership marketing to stay top of mind, you have to post high-quality content regularly. Taking a break in the world of social media means your brand gets forgotten. Post to each channel at least daily, and make sure your content is good enough to compete with all the other millions of posts out there. In other words, it needs to be good!
It’s also a good idea to run a few social media ads. With an ad, you pay the platform a small fee, and it promotes your post to an audience of your choice. It’s a great way to extend your marketing reach well beyond your followers. Plus, you can choose how much you want to pay, so you won’t blow your marketing budget.
Offer special pricing and discounts
Everyone loves a discount. And if you can get a discount on a car you need to get around (or just want for your collection…), who’s going to resist!? Discounts and special pricing are great ways to show customers that you’re better than those other 16,000 dealers across the country.
Since you don’t want to hurt your margins too much, discounts and special pricing don’t always have to come in the form of a percentage off the purchase price of a new car. There are more creative ways to separate yourself from the competition, like offering a few free oil changes with the purchase of a new car, installing an upgrade at no additional cost, or even a couple free car washes. The better the deal, the more incentivized people will be to visit your dealership.
Harness the power of email marketing
You might think that email marketing is obsolete in the world of social media, but nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, email has one of the highest returns on investment (ROI) of any type of marketing, with an average return of $36 for every $1 spent!
What makes email so powerful is that you can message your customers directly. You don’t have to wait for them to stumble on your car flyers or social media posts organically.
Email is especially effective for car dealerships because your customers are always going to need vehicle maintenance. As long as you keep sending regular emails to keep your brand top of mind, your customers will always think of you when they need work done on their vehicle — or even better, when they’re ready for an upgrade.
Focus on your website SEO
When people want to buy a product, like a new car, where’s the first place they go? According to research, almost half of all consumers use Google to research and discover new products before they go to a store. That means your dealership needs to show up at the top of the search results if you want someone to visit your business over a competitor. And the best way to do that is with SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a way to make your website more accessible to search engines, so they can easily find information and show it to anyone searching for specific queries. The easier it is for search engines to find information, the more likely they’ll put your website at the top of the search results.
There are many ways to boost your SEO, but here are some of the most effective:
- Use proper header tags on landing pages
- Ensure fast loading times
- Include internal and external links
- Include plenty of high-quality content, especially text
An easy way to add more high-quality content to your website is to start a blog. Answer your customers’ most common questions in each blog post and watch your rankings on the search engine results soar!
Take your dealership to the next level
There’s a lot of competition out there for car dealerships. If you want to stand out from the pack, start with incredible graphics that you can use in other marketing campaigns, get social on social media, offer special pricing and discounts, send plenty of emails, and focus on your website SEO.
When all your marketing strategies work together, you’ll have people lining up around the street just to purchase a car from you!
