Are your marketing efforts reaping rewards? Have you seen a strong ROI from your marketing dollars? If you’re not satisfied with your dealership’s consumer outreach, now’s the time to change it—and we can show you how. In this post, we’ll offer five steps you can take to revise, fine-tune, and ultimately transform your marketing approach.

Improving Your Dealership Marketing Strategy

Get your whole team involved.

If you’re going to go back to the drawing board, and dream up a whole new dealer marketing strategy, a good place to start is with simply assembling the right people. Get sales reps involved, and also customer service associates. They may be able to identify some gaps in your marketing approach that you haven’t even considered, based on their customer interactions. Always aim for a plurality of perspectives.

Research the competition.

How do other local dealerships market themselves? Where do they seem to be spending their ad dollars? What works and doesn’t work about their marketing approach? Spend some time reviewing your competitors’ blogs, social media presence, website content, and more, gleaning inspiration for your own marketing efforts.

Consult with your analytics.

There’s a saying in the marketing world—that marketing without data is like flying blind. Hopefully, you have some numbers you can look at—Facebook insights, Google Analytics—to get some sense of how your digital marketing dollars have been allocated historically, and what results you have to show for it. This can be a helpful way of determining which parts of your existing strategy work and which don’t.

Set the right priorities.

Your budget is doubtless going to be limited, so make sure that you focus on the marketing efforts that are most essential—and most beneficial—for dealership success. The areas of focus that Get My Auto recommends include:

• A good dealership website, made to convert
• Facebook, both organic and paid
• Craigslist ads

In addition, there can sometimes be value to Instagram and email marketing, but only after you’ve made a strong investment in those top three.

Construct buyer personas.

Finally, remember that your marketing outreach always needs to be targeted toward your buyers—which means knowing who those buyers are. That’s why it’s wise to invest in buyer personas, compiling some basic demographic data to sketch out who those buyers are and what they are looking for in their next used vehicle.