It’s no secret that most sales pitches begin online. As an automotive dealer, you don’t want to miss out on potential customers. This is why you need to build an effective automotive dealer brand for your business.
If you’re looking for a stronger digital presence, want to create an online following without frustration, or want to build up your client list and close more deals, then you need an automotive dealer brand.
3 Steps to Build a Profitable Automotive Dealer Brand
Use these tactics to take your brand from obscurity to popularity.
Step 1: Define Your Automotive Dealer Brand
Defining your automotive dealer brand is about refining your message. You want it to be clear. You also want to showcase how you’re uniquely positioned to serve your audience.
When someone asks you what you do, you need to have a quick and focused answer. Most people don’t have the time or attention span to listen to you go on about your services for hours and hours in a casual setting. Giving them too much information will only confuse them.
A confused audience cannot connect with your brand and your business. People don’t like to feel confused. It stresses them out. If you stress out your potential customers from the start, they will likely find a business with more streamlined branding to work with.
The most influential brands are the ones who:
- Explain who they are to their market
- Set themselves apart from the competition
- Attract the right clients
- Convey trustworthiness
- Live the value and quality of their mission
- Maintain professionalism
- Make it obvious what clients can expect when working with their company
Create an Elevator Pitch
An effective pitch will allow you to distill the essence of your automotive dealer brand down to the purest form. It must let people know:
- Precisely who you are
- Exactly what you offer,
- What sets you apart from your competition
The first step is understanding exactly what you want from your digital brand. This will make the entire process of digital branding so much more straightforward.
Your pitch is what will define you online, so write down a few sentences that say who you are. Your pitch should include:
- Your name
- Your company
- The products you offer
- Who your target customers are
- What makes you unique
- A call to action
By doing this, you make it simple for your target audience to know they’re in the right place when they read your name. Brand recognition is key.
When creating your pitch, it is more important, to be honest, and clear than clever or funny. Often, brands will try very hard to be funny or trendy in order to reach certain demographics. This can feel forced, not read well, and even turn people off. Be honest, clear, and be yourself.
Make a Slogan
It’s essential to have a brand slogan in the digital space. While people often research companies online before they do business with them, there are so many companies and so many choices to be made that most people don’t have time to do in-depth research about every business and brand.
This is why you must establish your automotive dealer brand slogan to stand out. Display it online to gain the attention of potential customers in a snap.
This is important because, in a world where people are surfing the Internet and bouncing off pages, you don’t have very long to make a good first impression online.
When you create your brand slogan, you want to be unique. Your slogan is a few words that people will associate with you. These will define your brand. Your slogan might be similar to Toyota’s ‘What will you do with all the money you save?’ or Mitsubishi’s ‘Wake up and drive.’
Your slogan may not be this catchy, but it should stand apart from any other business you’re competing against. It should also be authentic to your brand presence and values.
Find the Intersection
If you were to make a ven diagram with customers and products, that sweet spot in the middle is where you have the opportunity to make the most significant impact on your following with your automotive dealer brand.
Find the place where your service will intersect with your target audience. Make sure to talk about it. You want to make your audience aware of what they are missing and how you can see to that need. Fill in the overlapping circles with your automotive dealer business.
Step 2: Build Your Automotive Dealer Brand
Before they go to an actual brick and mortar store, people almost always look up businesses online. This means that in most cases, your target audience will interact with your digital brand before they come to you in person.
This is especially true in the automotive industry. People will usually come to your dealership knowing exactly what they want to look at already. This is because they’ve looked you up online first.
So how do you make your automotive dealer brand sparkle in digital searches?
Build Your Home Base
You want to make sure that your audience gets the right information right from the start. This is why you must focus on building your home base. For most of us, our home base is our website.
Your home base is a critical component of your digital brand. No matter how tech-savvy you think you are, you must have a visually appealing and responsive home base.
Regardless of how good your products and services are, if people cannot use your website because of design or other errors, they will likely get a bad first impression of your brand and move on.
Some Helpful Tools
If the purpose of your home base is just to showcase your brand or to allow people to get to know who you are, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, or about.me are viable options. If you require a little bit more functionality, building a self-hosted WordPress website is a great place to start.
WordPress makes it easy to create a webpage that has some pretty sophisticated functionality. You can utilize things like:
- Shopping carts
- Blogs
- Message boards
You can do all that without knowing how to program a single piece of code. Platforms like WordPress make this possible.
When creating your webpage, make sure that your name and logo are accessible and look good. Your logo is what people will recognize you by. Also, it will set the tone for your home base. Logos even can elicit an emotional reaction. Think carefully about the logo and name you create when working on your home base.
Build Your Email List
If you want to succeed in digital branding, get serious about building your email list. Your email list is one of the most valuable assets for your brand. This is because it allows you to get in contact with your followers and customers.
There are a few ways for small businesses to grow their email lists. The first is to offer an incentive. This is how you woo your target audience. You need to effectively help them to realize that you have something valuable to offer.
Adding an opt-in form on your website is also a great way to get your target audience’s attention. This can be used to encourage them to sign up for your email list. You can include these on the side of your website, the bottom, or as a scrolling pop up. It all depends on your target audience.
Build Your Social Media Accounts
When choosing where to buy a car, many car shoppers have listed social media accounts as being more important than an automotive dealer brand’s actual website.
When your brand is relatable to your target audience, it will separate you from the competition. If you are not a big fan of social media, this might seem like an overwhelming task, but it is actually quite simple. Interact with those on the web with the same professionalism you would use in real life.
When first starting out on social media, it is important to remember to only focus on one site. If you are just starting out, handling half a dozen or more social media accounts at once can be quite overwhelming. But, which should you start with?
Facebook is usually the most popular channel to start with. This is because it has over a billion users. However, take your time to think things through. It is important to be strategic when posting on Facebook. For example, you can choose to use free or paid content options.
SEE ALSO: How to Prepare for the Facebook Newsfeed Update
Instagram, on the other hand, is the fastest growing social media network. This is a great place for an automotive dealer brand to showcase their products to younger generations. On this site, users display pictures and videos. However, using Instagram will require a working knowledge of hashtags.
Twitter is also a favorite way of many brands to communicate with their target audiences. However, take note that Twitter might take up more of your time than other social media sites. This is because its users expect more frequent posts.
Step 3: Manage Your Automotive Dealer Brand
Managing a digital brand requires daily consistent work. Depending on your interest in and comfort with social media and web content, it might be in your best interest to find digital branding services that can help to manage this work for you.
SEE ALSO: Monitor Your Digital Brand
Guest Blogging
Most bloggers spin their wheels trying to increase traffic on their blogs. There are many tactics out there. However, many overlook the power of writing guest posts. Having your writing and branding displayed somewhere else on the internet, in a place with a bigger, more diverse, or different audience than your own can do wonders for the visibility of your automotive dealer brand.
When picking a place to guest blog, you’ll want to check a few things before you reach out to them. Take a look at the guidelines of the blogger to see if they accept guest posts. You also want to make sure their online presence aligns with your brand image and ideals.
If everything lines up then you can contact them and share why you’d be an excellent fit for their blog.
Repurpose Your Content
You don’t have just to keep endlessly pumping out brand new pieces of content for your clients. Almost no business owner has the time to create new web content constantly.
If there are several ways to say one thing, why do we continue to struggle when creating content?
-Juntae Delane
You may feel the pressure to create more and more content to stay relevant for your clients. This can be an overwhelming feeling. In fact, it can even get in the way of your creativity.
Instead of creating more and more new pieces, you can take apart pieces of old content that were popular and turn them into new pieces.
If you have several different problems that tend to come up that are similar to solve, you can repurpose the same content to address the various issues. In this case, everyone wins. Your followers still get their questions answered, while some of the pressure of content creation is off of your shoulders.
SEE ALSO: It’s Time to Take the Brand Out of Branded Content
Final Thoughts
If you follow these three steps, you’ll be well on your way to developing a thriving automotive dealer brand. These steps help to make brand-building and content creation easy, so you have more time to focus on other aspects of your branding and marketing.
You need to define your automotive brand, build your brand, and monitor your brand for maximum success in the digital world.
Are there any automotive dealer brands you follow on social media? Comment below…
