While growth is expected to be steady until 2022, this year auto sales are anticipated to drop below 17 million units for the first time since 2014. This represents a 1.1% drop from sales in 2018.
The current landscape presents an ongoing challenge for car or truck dealerships. So what can digital advertising do for your car dealerships?
Dealers continue to face the same problems of ensuring they offer the best customer experience on their premises while doing all they can to drive customers through the door into dealerships through cost-effective advertising. Sales targets need to be hit, and vehicles sold as fast as possible.
So, how can digital advertising assist?
Digital display offers a quick route to market to engage with potential customers online and drive quality engagements right through to the in-store experience.
Car dealers can showcase their vehicles, deals and offers to consumers that are in the market to buy and provide them with an incentive to visit their dealership. They can even target customers visiting their competitors and serve them with their deals, knowing that they have the intent to buy.
Here’s how it can really benefit your business.
Search retargeting ensures you can engage with potential buyers
When people begin their search for a new vehicle, they’ll do their research online. They’ll likely have questions about specific models or be actively searching for reviews about certain cars. You can then simply retarget them with tailored ads based on their search history. This means that your ads will be relevant and will point them in the direction of your dealership for the eventual sale.
Feed Ads can enhance efficiency and drive user engagement
For many car dealerships, the ever-changing nature of their inventories can be viewed as a significant barrier to entry for digital advertising. Creating multiple ads for different vehicles and models can be costly and there’s no guarantee they’ll be up to date when deals change, meaning your paying to display incorrect information.
Feed ads offer a cost-effective and efficient solution. They take dynamic content from your inventory source and feed it into your display ads. You only need to create the ad once, as it will update automatically to reflect changes to your stock. When anything changes, so does the content of your ads ensuring stock and content remains live and current at all times.
Digital advertising can double the productivity of dealerships that are using Autotrader
If you’re already listing your vehicles on Autotrader.com, you can double productivity by tapping into a key feature of the Fluid Ads Creative Intelligence Platform.
In much the same way as feed ads, the platform automatically scrapes the data from the listings on Autotrader, collating key information to be included in your ads. This includes inventory, prices, logos, photos, contact details and more.
Crucially the ads will update in real-time, with any changes to the details on Autotrader instantly reflected in the ad.
The ads target customers that are in market to buy, based on their keyword searches, in a radius of 50km around the dealership. And with 150,000 ad views/impressions and 1000 website visits, per month it should result in 35 customers arriving in store. Based on industry-standard conversion rates, this can be expected to drive an extra 17 sales every month.
Geo-targeting can get your message out there on a local level
For car dealers with multiple dealerships in various locations, geo-targeting ensures you can serve customers in different areas with ads that are specific to that location.
It gives you the opportunity to target customers that are known to occupy a specific geographic area. This means that any ad spend will only go towards targeting people in that area, reaching as many as people as possible. This is no longer a scattergun approach, this is highly targeted and relevant audiences for you to engage your product or services with.
It’s a great way to promote any brand awareness campaigns on a local level.
Geo-fencing can create a competitive advantage
If you know potential customers are visiting your competitors’ premises, digital advertising can help you gain a competitive edge.
Through geo-fencing you can draw a digital fence around one of your competitor’s dealerships serving ads to anyone that enters that location. You can also do this in real-time to ensure their next stop is to your dealership. Once they’ve entered the fence, you can serve them with mobile ads re-marketing to them wherever they go. If you hit them with better deals at the right time, you’ll pull them in store and get those all-important sales.
The Fluid Ads Creative Intelligence Platform offers a range of features to revolutionise digital advertising for car dealerships. To understand more and arrange a trial, get in touch with us today.