Your customers are online. They can bank online, shop online, and connect with friends online. They expect to be able to find automotive parts, accessories and cars online, too.

The online buyer journey for the automotive industry isn’t so different than the offline one. Customers still do a lot of research before purchasing or leasing a car, shopping for auto repairs, and buying parts or accessories. They’ll read up on specs and suss out the pricing benchmarks. Finally, they’ll try to figure out the best place to buy what they need.

But things start to look a whole lot different when you consider how they’re finding automotive brands. It’s not as simple as asking around, visiting their nearest auto parts store, or looking up a Blue Book value.

Today’s automotive shoppers do even more research, and they do it all online. If your website doesn’t show up, they won’t even factor you in as a possibility. It’s as simple as that.

How is the automotive industry responding to these trends? By investing in effective digital marketing. Digital advertising spend alone is increasing at a rate of 13% year/year.

Digital marketing is no longer optional for automotive brands. If you want to reach shoppers, you have to be online—and you have to be marketing to them in all the right places.

The good news is digital marketing is extremely effective for automotive brands. Automotive shoppers are 9% more likely to be swayed by digital marketing than the average consumer.

automotive digital marketing strategy

Our Best Automotive Digital Marketing Tips

Ready to kick digital marketing into high gear for your automotive brand? Here are our 5 best tips to get you started.

Watch your ROI like a hawk

Most automotive companies have a low GPM compared to other products. That means it’s essential for you to keep track of your marketing spend, and how it relates to GPM, to ensure your channels are still profitable. Set up detailed reporting for each of your channels and keep an eye out for opportunities to optimize your spend.

Take into account seasonality.

Some automotive parts sell better during winter months versus summer ones. Floor mats and hitches come to mind. Plan your marketing campaigns ahead of schedule and make sure you’re pushing the right products at the right time to maximize sales. Then, spin up the email campaigns and paid search ads to support those promotions.

Understand your customer

The automotive industry is niche and speaks to a very specific type of audience. Make sure your content strategy, messaging, and ad copy reflect the customer and what they are trying to achieve by purchasing your product. If you serve multiple types of customers, that’s great. Create targeted email campaigns to serve individual segments, and target all of them by bidding for more keywords in paid search.

Use email marketing to get more sales out of your current customers

It’s more cost-effective to keep returning customers than to acquire new ones. That’s where email marketing comes in. Develop a rock-solid email drip campaign that welcomes new customers and them targeted promotions. If you sell online, don’t forget an abandoned cart series, too. Insert items from their cart with a promo code they can’t refuse.

Optimize your website for conversions and user experience

One of the easiest ways to boost your conversion rate is to make your checkout experience as user-friendly as possible. Find ways to make it easier for customers to buy more, too. Offer them an additional discount for subscribing to your newsletter—and then target them with one of your email drip campaigns. Add an exit popup when people try to leave, and upsell related items or accesories on your product pages.

Top Digital Marketing Channels for Automotive Brands

Digital marketing is a vast and varied landscape, but we’ve found the following three channels to be the most effective for automotive brands.

Paid Search

Research shows that PPC visitors are 50% more likely to buy than organic visitors.
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Email Marketing

of all Automotive Dealerships send out their email newsletters on a monthly basis
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Shopping

Google Shopping represents over 75% of all retail search ad spend
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The Automotive Industry’s Top Digital Marketing Challenge

automotive digital marketing

Every industry has its own unique challenges. For automotive brands, it’s the high ticket price on most of your items, and the long journey customers take to get comfortable letting that money go from their wallets.

According to Google, the average auto consumer’s buying journey includes 900+ digital touchpoints over a 3-month period, from YouTube videos and Google reviews, to dealer and manufacturer websites. 71% of those interactions occur on mobile devices.

The customer journey for an automotive purchase is longer, both because of the high cost of the item, as well as the customer’s need to research the right part for the make and model of their vehicle.

In order for your brand to stay top of mind with these customers—throughout the entire course of that journey—you need a multichannel approach, starting with Google. You need to invest in both paid search and Google Shopping to ensure you capture audiences at both the top and bottom of the funnel.

This isn’t conjecture. We’ve actually seen that when companies don’t make this multichannel investment, their business suffers.

For instance, if you choose to decrease your Shopping spend and spend more on Paid Search, it can negatively affect your Branded campaigns. That’s because you haven’t built up the consumer awareness from back when they were at the top of the funnel. They’ve never seen your company’s name before, so why should they choose you now—when they can go with a brand they recognize from Google Shopping when they first started searching?

 

 

Best Automotive Digital Marketing Tips: A Recap

  • Watch Your ROI Like A Hawk
  • Take Into Account Seasonality
  • Understand Your Customer
  • Use Email Marketing To Get More Sales Out Of Your Current Customers
  • Optimize Your Website For Conversions And User Experience

About Your Marketing People

You know how automobiles work. At Your Marketing People, we know how marketing works—and we know how it works for automotive brands in particular. From paid search to google shopping, to email to SEO, we help automotive brands stand out to shoppers.

Consider what we did for TDot Performance, the largest seller of automotive parts in Canada. Through an omnichannel approach that took into account all of their digital marketing channels, GPM, and revenue goals, we delivered:

Increase in Organic Traffic
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Increase in Revenue for Paid Search
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Increase in Revenue for Holiday Email Campaigns
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To discover how we can do the same for your business, contact us.

We’ll create a custom digital marketing strategy that performs like a Formula One car.