According to Pew Research Center, 81% of adults in the United States use social media regularly. Therefore, social media needs to be an integral part of your marketing strategy. Automotive dealerships can benefit from the power of Organic Social Media strategies to drive brand awareness, engage with potential customers, and ultimately increase sales. Below are five proven social media marketing strategies specifically tailored for automotive dealerships.
Understand Your Target Audience
To craft an effective social media marketing strategy, it is crucial to understand your target audience. Utilize market research and customer data to identify the demographics, preferences, and online behavior of your potential customers. When targeting a younger audience, platforms like Instagram and TikTok may yield better results, whereas Facebook remains popular across all age groups. CBC’s research combined with data from GA4 can provide you with your customer’s social media preferences and media habits. This will help you tailor your content, tone, and messaging to resonate with your audience and lead to improved engagement and conversion rates.
Visual Appeal - Showcase Your Dealership and Inventory With Organic Social Media Strategies
Visual content plays a pivotal role for dealerships. Capturing high-quality images and videos showcasing your inventory is imperative. Quality images and videos can captivate users' attention and entice them to explore your offerings further. Social media posts with visuals, specifically video, receive higher engagement rates compared to text-only posts or stock imagery.
Investing in professional photography or video production is one of the best uses of your marketing funds. Not only can you highlight the unique features and aesthetics of your vehicles, you can also highlight your staff and happy customers, showing future buyers the benefits of buying with your dealership.
Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)
According to a survey conducted by Stackla, 79% of consumers say that User Generated Content highly impacts their purchasing decisions. UGC helps build trust, authenticity, and social proof, influencing potential customers' purchase decisions. Encourage your customers to share their experiences, testimonials, and photos on social media by tagging your dealership and using hashtags that reflect your dealership brand or tagline. You can also encourage your sales team to create content showing off the latest vehicles or a great deal people need to take advantage of. Make sure everyone shares the posts!
Personalized Communication - Respond and Engage
Social media provides an excellent platform for direct communication with customers. Respond promptly to comments, messages, and reviews to demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction. Personalized interactions not only enhance customer experience, but also contribute to building a positive brand image. After working with CBC’s reputation team, unhappy dealership customers have reversed their negative review on Social Media for a favorable one. Investing time in your customers is never time wasted.
Get Creative
Don’t be afraid to get creative when it comes to your content. Create a contest for your followers to participate in over Facebook, or pair a series of short videos featuring your inventory with that trending Owen Wilson audio (you know the one) for Instagram Reels. Short form video may rule social media right now, but it doesn’t mean you have to share a video every day. Consistency is key. That, and showcasing your dealership’s approachability, personality, and friendly personality. Showcasing your team having fun can go a long way to in building a great reputation among viewers and customers.
Conclusion
Utilizing these Organic Social media strategies has the potential to drive remarkable brand recognition for automotive dealerships. When you understand your target audience, creating content and utilizing UGC is easy and can help you establish a robust presence and boost your dealership's success.