What exactly is digital marketing, and what benefits does it bring to an offline business like a car dealership? The answer is rather industry-specific. But there is some common ground for every business when it comes to digital advertising.
And you can succeed if you are equipped with the right skills to engage meaningfully with your audience. Besides, having a deep understanding of how your marketing strategies perform can significantly benefit your organization.
The automotive industry continues to shift gears towards more dynamic and data-driven advertising strategies. In 2024, automotive businesses must stay ahead of the curve in leveraging digital tools to be able to reach their target audiences effectively.
This article provides all the insights into digital marketing that you might have been hesitant to ask about. Anything from upcoming trends, strategic approaches to using advertising platforms like Facebook to advertise your car dealership, to automation solutions that can boost your automotive digital advertising, such as:
What is automotive digital advertising?
Automotive digital advertising refers to the online marketing efforts that automotive businesses use to promote their products and services. This includes a wide range of activities including:
- Displaying ads on digital platforms
- Using social media
- Running email marketing campaigns
- And engaging potential customers through personalized content.
The aim here is to grab the attention of likely car buyers and service users and convert them from mere viewers to paying customers.
However, dealers should know how each advertising channel contributes value to their overall media strategy. Only then can they make sure that every tactic affects the bottom line.
Automotive digital marketing trends for 2024
Leaders in the automotive industry often use our trend analysis to spot important trends and get ahead of the competition. They basically use this information to create a plan that links their sales, fulfillment, and financial processes together more closely. This will help them work better and more efficiently.
Here are the top automotive digital advertising trends for 2024:
Increased use of Artificial Intelligence
AI continues to be a hot topic in any industry, including automotive digital advertising. Dealerships can benefit from technologies like chatbots and personalized recommendations based on user behavior.
This could bring a ton of advantages. For example, 64% of consumers prefer the 24/7 availability of a chatbot, while personalization can reduce your advertising costs by 10 to 20 percent.
More video content
Video marketing has dominated the stage for a while now, and continues to do so. Take Facebook’s video ads, for instance. This format lets you provide vivid vehicle previews and immersive virtual test drives that engage automotive customers more effectively than traditional photos or text-based content.
How do they exactly compare? Young users (18-24) watch Facebook video ads 75% of the time, compared to 65% for users over 65. At the same time, 71% of shoppers find these ads relevant.
Scott Chow from The Blog Starter says an added trend to video marketing is personalized videos. These videos could yield a 16 times higher click-to-open rate and 4.5 times greater unique click-through rate comparatively.
Offering better mobile experiences
More consumers than ever are browsing and researching purchases on mobile devices. That’s why using this customer tendency is essential for dealerships in the long term.
Automotive digital marketing that’s mobile-friendly also allows for analysis and customization that meet the specific needs of your customers. So, optimizing for mobile is a must-have in 2024.
Heightened focus on sustainability
There’s a buzz surrounding fuel-efficient cars and alternative fuels. This trend is driven by growing concerns about climate change and responsible resource usage.
Crafting ad content that showcases your brand’s commitment to building a greener future is an excellent strategy for appealing to environmentally conscious consumers.
Use automotive PPC advertising
In 2024, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising is going to be really important for car dealerships that want to be seen more online. This method means dealers only pay if someone clicks on their ad, making it a budget-friendly way to bring more people to their websites.
PPC on Facebook is a popular way to advertise. You create a visual ad campaign and pay for clicks or impressions. Even if you’re new to paid ads, Facebook makes it easy to create, target, budget, and analyze your campaigns.
Here are some interesting stats for Facebook ads in the automotive industry:
- The average CPC (cost-per-click)for automotive ads is $2.24, thanks to the competitive nature of automotive advertising on Facebook.
- The average CTR (click-through rate) for automotive repair, service, and parts ads is 1.38%. This is slightly lower than the average across all industries, meaning there’s a demand for engaging ad creatives.
- The average conversion rate for automotive ads is 5.35%. This says that a good portion of users who click on these ads take the desired actions, like filling out a form or making a purchase.
Use tools like WordTracker and Google’s keyword planner to pick the best search terms. This, in turn, keeps your costs proportionate with clicks, which would cost between $8 and $15.
New cars usually sell for a lot, getting this right can really pay off. Also, by using different platforms like search engines, social media, and YouTube, dealerships can make sure their ads reach the right people.
That’s why automotive PPC advertising makes their digital campaigns even more effective. Learn all you need to know about PPC automation here.
Automotive digital marketing strategies you need in 2024
Digital marketing can make the hard process of selling cars easier. However, dealerships need to understand how automotive digital marketing works.
Additionally, they need the right tools and strategies for online marketing to be successful. Let’s go through the top strategies that can create a robust foundation for your marketing.
1. Using Facebook ads for automotive
Facebook remains a powerful tool for automotive advertising. It offers dedicated solutions that allow dealerships to target users based on demographic, geographic, and psychographic data.
Meta says, “Many auto brands have successfully grown their businesses using lead ads on Facebook and Instagram. We’ve developed a set of features that can better serve the needs of automotive brands.”
When it comes to automotive digital advertising, lead ads can also be customized to showcase new models, promote special deals, and highlight unique dealership services.
Besides lead ads, Facebook’s automotive ads are a more tailored option. They use intent signals across devices to automatically showcase relevant vehicles from your inventory with distinctive creatives to users.
For a deeper dive into crafting effective Facebook automotive campaigns, check out this guide on advertising your car dealership on Facebook.
2. Creating data-driven audience targeting
Targeting the right audience means lower ad costs and better conversions. You can achieve this by using data-driven insights to create precise customer profiles.
Meta itself offers loads of targeting options, custom audience building, lookalike audiences, interest or demographic targeting, and so on. Depending on your campaign, these targeting tools work differently.
Nevertheless, you’ll still need to furnish Facebook with enough data so it can help you target the audience you are interested in more accurately.
LeadsBridge integrations help automotive businesses connect their CRM to Facebook, and thus, create a constant and automated data transfer between the two.
3. Use AI, AR, and other technologies
Interactive experiences have been a huge success in automotive digital advertising. They basically allow consumers to connect with cars in new, engaging ways.
You can create interactions through mobile apps and online configurators to let potential buyers personalize their vehicle choices.
Also, incorporating Virtual and Augmented Reality allows shoppers to explore cars and take virtual test drives from their homes. Top advertising platforms like Facebook have even caught up with this trend and offer exceptional AR solutions:
You can further boost your strategy with live streaming of product launches and interactive video content that details car features.
Also, don’t forget to automate your communication and schedule lead management to improve your customer satisfaction with integrations like:
4. Accurate conversion tracking
Tracking the impact of online ads on both online and offline sales is important. You need to measure how effectively your online advertising leads to sign-ups, appointment bookings, showroom visits, and, finally, vehicle purchases.
These insights can be the deciding factors in creating strategies for your future campaigns, improving the performance of existing ones, and boosting your ROI.
While cookie-based tracking is more restricted than ever before, using tools like Conversions API for CRM is a great way to track user behavior. Once you set up your Meta Pixel, Conversions API for CRM can help target automotive ads to users who have visited your website or app.
Using automated integrations, you can tell Meta whom to target based on their intent, behavior, and actions. Using this data, automotive ads can effectively target potential customers likely to convert by showing personalized ads to those who have viewed specific cars or entered payment details.
5. Creating highly targeted campaigns using automation
Automation is key to maximizing efficiency and effectiveness in digital advertising. LeadsBridge offers specialized integrations for the automotive industry that connect your advertising campaigns directly to your CRM and other sales tools.
This seamless integration makes sure that every lead is captured and nurtured without manual intervention. More importantly, it speeds up the sales cycle and improves your customers’ experiences.
LeadsBridge also helps make your marketing campaigns more accurate by connecting your CRM or other databases directly to Facebook. This connection allows you to use detailed customer data to create precise custom audiences and then target them with ads that really resonate with them.
When it comes to creating highly targeted campaigns, there is also a Facebook conversion leads performance goal that lets you specify how Meta should prioritize your campaign to reach users most likely to become paying customers.
Linking this feature to your database (like CRM or marketing tools) through automated integrations can significantly improve your targeting precision.
Note that using Facebook conversion leads performance goal first requires implementing the Conversions API for CRM integration to collect performance feedback and refine targeting. Learn how to do this here.
Takeaways
Adding these strategies to the emerging trends allows you to have the tools needed to stay competitive and achieve greater marketing success in 2024 and beyond.
Whether you’re looking to refine your automotive digital advertising strategy or integrate advanced CRM solutions, LeadsBridge can help you set your automotive business on the path to having more sales and customer loyalty.
Ready to drive your automotive digital advertising into the fast lane? Discover LeadsBridge’s integrations and automated solutions tailored to the unique needs of the automotive industry.
