Achieving Objectives Series: Ways to Improve Dealership Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is always a challenge in the car dealer environment, what with franchised dealers representing the larger manufacturer identities. However, whilst a lot of your brand penetration should come from manufacturers' overarching marketing strategies, there is plenty that you can do to ensure that your dealership sticks in people's minds. What is the aim? To make sure that they think of you at the exact right moment. 

Thankfully Bluesky Interactive have a specialist Digital Marketing team in-house - making us experts in what works (and what doesn't) in the brand awareness arena. Read on for some of the different ways you can increase brand awareness in the motor trade, or speak to one of the team today to see if our Digital Marketing experts can help you instead.

PPC Search Campaigns

The highest performing PPC campaigns (that is, adverts run on Google that show when people search for certain terms) are when people are actively searching for cars - but Search PPC has a role to play in a branding strategy too.

We'd recommend that you target people who are actively searching, but for broader, more generic categories. These could include local car buying terms, or competitor make/models. 

Top tip - branding PPC like this is best as part of a well-rounded paid search strategy, let us know if you need a proposal!

PPC Display Campaigns

Display campaigns don't traditionally have a high click-through rate or conversion rate, but where they really deliver is in terms of how many people see the adverts. This can run into the hundreds of thousands with a comparatively small budget!

Google Display campaigns allow car dealers to run animated or image adverts across Google's extensive website network.

By targeting these ads at certain websites, local areas and certain audience criteria, you can ensure high relevance and gain a lot of exposure for your dealership.

Video Campaigns

We'd be surprised if you haven't come across a video advert when looking at videos on YouTube, or even on TV. These quick and impactful adverts are an excellent way to put your brand in front of relevant audiences, sharing key offers, benefits and reasons to think of and choose your dealership.

YouTube is the easiest video advertising starting point, but you can also consider networks like Sky's AdSmart, or even other television channels' online offerings. 

Top tip - work hard on producing a quality video here, as you need people to pay attention. and notice your advert!

Facebook & Instagram Ads

Adverts on Facebook or Instagram can reach customers who aren't actively searching for cars. These are then exposed to your brand artwork, logo and offers, ensuring strong local reach.

As a bonus, Facebook and Instagram campaigns have very strong targeting options, meaning that they tend to have a higher conversion rate than Google display campaigns.

Top tip - did you know that Facebook and Instagram ads can be one via one single campaign set up? This means you just need one social budget, but cam have twice the impact!

If you want to have a strong presence in your local area, it will be important that you have a general presence on Google across a range of relevant terms. There is a lot you can do non-organically (such as the ideas we've shared above), but a holistic strategy should include at least an element of SEO activity.

Focus in on the content of your website, and its speed, to ensure that your website has the highest chance of showing locally for relevant terms. Ideally, you'll want to have an SEO agency like Bluesky Interactive running monthly SEO strategies to deliver consistent improvements, especially considering how often Google's algorithms change - but there is plenty you can do in-house that will offer improvements over your search engine "baseline". Why not speak to us today about an SEO quote?

Top tip - don't forget to optimise your dealership's Google My Business location pages. These are increasingly important for car dealerships, and having the right information, strong reviews and lots of images is an essential part of your organic presence. 

Our in-house team know car dealer marketing back -to-front - so why not request a campaign proposal today? Simply click the "Talk to us" link below and we'll be happy to pull you something together: