Social media platforms provide invaluable marketing opportunities for local businesses—including your used car dealership. However, all of these platforms come with their own sets of rules. Take Instagram. It can be a powerful platform for promoting your used cars, but only if you leverage it correctly.

Participate in the Instagram Community

One way to grow your dealership’s presence on Instagram is to participate—not merely posting your own images and videos, but interacting with other content, as well. Some steps you might take:

• Follow influencers—vehicle manufacturers, car magazines and blogs, and local businesses in your community.
• Like and comment on some of the content they share.
• Also be sure you respond to comments and questions your followers leave on your own Instagram posts.

The bottom line? You’ve got to spend engagement in order to gain engagement.

Be Consistent and On-Topic

Another key element of Instagram marketing is maintaining a consistent brand identity.

Simply put, you sell cars—so posting memes or celebrity gossip, just to appear trendy, isn’t going to help your brand. Stick to the things that make sense coming from a used car dealership—images of your inventory, vehicle maintenance tips, images and testimonials from your happy customers, etc.

Remember that everything you post is a reflection of your business and needs to align with your vision and your value proposition.

Promote Local Events

To engage buyers in your community, use Instagram to promote community events. These might include:

• Fundraising events from local non-profits you support.
• Special events or family days at your dealership.
• Major sales events.
• Local events or festivals that your dealership is sponsoring.

Create some local buzz by posting local content.

Include Local Hashtags

Speaking of keeping things local, make sure you spend some time researching hashtags that are relevant to your community—and use them to label your content whenever appropriate.

This might be something as simple as #OrangeCountyCars, or even just something like #HuntingtonBeach. These local hashtags can really help your content be discovered by nearby buyers—and those, of course, are exactly the people you want to reach.

Buy Some Ads

If you’re just getting started on Instagram, it’s usually best to develop an organic content strategy and build a small following before you take out any paid ads. Sooner or later, though, you’ll need to pay in order to target potential buyers and grow your content reach.