With the number of car dealerships around today, the level of competition has become increasingly steep. If you’re a car dealership, one of the best ways to stand out from your competition is through digital marketing. Digital marketing can often be the difference between a customer going to your dealership or the competitor dealership down the road. The problem is, many dealerships don’t have the first idea about how to properly set up a digital marketing strategy, leading to many common mistakes. In this blog, we’re going to go over the 7 most common digital marketing mistakes we see dealers make.  ‍

1. They Don’t Update Their Information

Dealerships need to be on top of their website and social media to ensure all of the information is up to date. The name, address, hours of operation and phone number are all critical information that appears in Google search results that you need to ensure is up to date. Furthermore, you need to ensure that your vehicle inventory is up to date. You don’t want a customer to browse your inventory and gain interest in a few vehicles only to find out they all sold in weeks prior. You also don’t want to miss a sales opportunity by taking too long to upload new inventory to your website.

2. They Don’t Give Their Strategy Enough Time

When you come up with a strategy for a sales promotion, you can’t expect to see immediate results. A good marketing strategy can often take time to gain traction and if you’re not patient about waiting to see results, what could have been a successful campaign instead gets cut short. We typically recommend trying out a marketing strategy/campaign for a minimum of 30 days. After 30 days you can do an assessment of what’s working and what’s not working and either make tweaks to the campaign or stop it altogether. 

3. They Don’t Contact Leads Quick Enough

Customers like to get information or replied to quickly. If your dealership is able to get in contact with leads within the first 5 minutes of contact you’re much more likely to convert that customer. This is why it’s important to ensure that you always have someone available to answer or reach out to leads. To do this, train your team on how to monitor leads regardless of the time of day. If people are reaching out to you after hours, make sure you have a chatbot that can answer any basic questions until a real team member can get in contact with them. 

4. Not Concerned About Their Online Reputation

One of the most common mistakes we see dealers make is they put little effort into garnering an online reputation. Gaining and maintaining an online presence means being active online every day. This means being active on social media and active on your website. If you need to dedicate one person to ensure that this happens daily, it's worth the time and effort.  

5. They Don’t Keep Track of Their Progress

While experimenting with different ideas and strategies is great, it means nothing if you’re not actually tracking the results. The more detailed you are in your report tracking, the better you’ll be at creating campaigns for different goals. Perhaps you want more awareness about your dealership in your community or you want to bring in more customers from more rural areas. The means to getting either of these outcomes is completely different. If you’ve tested and tracked multiple ideas/strategies, you’ll have a better idea of how to accomplish your desired goal. 

6. They Don’t Have a Mobile-Friendly Website

To ensure you’re reaching every possible customer, you need to have a website that performs well on mobile devices. People are increasingly using their phones to browse the internet over laptops and desktops and you need to take this into consideration when building your website. Things like pop-ups need to be closable via mobile, navigation needs to be intuitive and your overall UI design needs to format correctly to a phone screen. 

7. They Don’t Use Their CRM to Its Full Ability

Not using your CRM to its full potential is a massive waste of resources. A CRM can help you track inventory, appointments, customers and propel your digital marketing efforts. You can use your CRM for your digital marketing in the following ways: 

• Create email or SMS campaigns 
• Conduct market research to narrow down your target audience
• Keep track/organize your leads