Must-Try Automotive Digital Marketing Trends for 2021
Digital marketing for the automotive industry is constantly changing and becoming more complex. In order to remain relevant and deliver conversions — leads, subscribers, and sales — it’s essential to be in the know about the latest trends.
To help you stay ahead of the curve, we’ve created a list of some must-try trends to keep in mind for your 2021 strategy:
Automotive social media marketing trends
People are drawn to digital storytelling, and leveraging social media is a great way to grow brand awareness and connect with your audience (especially a millennial audience). Through social media ads, you have the opportunity to promote your products and services while increasing your engagement and online presence.
Social media ads allow you to drive sales by creating a funnel that directly promotes prospective users to convert to your brand. By running paid advertising on social platforms, you are able to reach a highly targeted audience that may not have found you otherwise.
To reach the most people in the most relevant places, you need to be very strategic with your social media marketing by creating ads that are highly targeted for each platform. You can create ads to target a specific audience based on demographics, location, interests, or behaviors. You can also create a custom lookalike audience based on the demographic profiles of your current customer base.
Automotive influencer marketing trends
Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that leverages industry influencers — people who typically have a large social following and are considered experts within their field. For most small and medium-sized automotive repair businesses, it’s most feasible to work with a micro-influencer.
Micro-influencers typically have between 2,000–50,000 followers on a particular social media channel. They are known to be experts with a genuine interest in their specific topic or niche area. By aligning with influencers for product or service endorsements and brand mentions, you tap into the trust that those influencers have established with their followers and build social proof.
In addition to the obvious category of car/motorcycle enthusiasts, consider other micro-influencers who might have a following of people who would be interested in your services. For example, travel bloggers or outdoor adventure enthusiasts could make posts about using your repair shop for maintenance (e.g. tire rotation, oil change) before embarking on long car trips.
Automotive PPC advertising trends
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an online advertising model where advertisers pay for their ad placement only when their ad is clicked. As you are essentially “buying” visits to your site, PPC ads are often a great option for gaining quality website visitors. This is one digital marketing trend you won’t see phasing out any time soon.
Search engine advertising is one of the most common channels for PPC ads, which you’ve probably encountered when doing a Google search (they appear before the organic search results).
More and more businesses are turning to this form of marketing, which means organic search results are getting pushed further down the page. That can reduce the visibility of organic results, so running PPC ads should be an essential piece of your digital marketing strategy.
Mobile geotargeting
Geotargeting (also called geofencing) uses mobile location information to deliver relevant location-based content to users, driving sales by targeting consumers that are within a specific radius of your storefront or certain target areas. Mobile users inside that area will receive your marketing messages and be directed to your store or online experience.
By using customer location information, you can deliver a more relevant mobile experience to your customers. You can also run a demographic analysis to find your ideal audience, learn about your current customer base, and better understand the buying behaviors in a particular area. This can help you pinpoint which geographic areas will give you the best ROI for your ads.
Working with an automotive digital marketing agency
Because digital marketing is evolving so quickly, it can be hard to stay on top of the latest trends on your own. Besides, you have a business to run — you can’t spend all your time focusing solely on your marketing strategy.
Working with an automotive digital marketing agency can be incredibly helpful in this regard. The right agency will identify the best marketing avenues for your business to pursue and help set you up for success. And when the trends shift again, they’ll be ready to reassess and adjust your strategy to keep those customers coming in.
Conclusion
These are just a handful of digital marketing trends that are reshaping the online landscape. By incorporating a healthy mix of new digital strategies into your marketing plan, the outcome of your financial bottom line could be game-changing.
You don’t have to be an expert at all of these strategies to be successful. It can be overwhelming and difficult to know where to begin, but we’re here for you! At UpSwell, we offer expertise from our industry-specific marketing specialists and a free initial assessment.
Contact us today to find out how we can pursue growth and financial success for your business.