Automotive marketing is over a century old and yet, it’s more relevant than ever. On the customer’s side, buying a new car is a very significant event. This means that dealerships must carefully cater to every need and concern of the buyer to ensure they will drive off with a car from their lot.
How does automotive advertising help you convince your prospects that the cars you’re offering are what they want? We’ve asked our advertising experts to help you better understand the inner workings of automotive marketing.
Table of Contents
What Is Automotive Advertising?
Automotive advertising covers a wide palette of promotional strategies used by dealerships, automotive manufacturers, and other related businesses to market their services and products to prospects. These multi-faceted strategies target everything from traditional advertising to digital marketing approaches, promotions, sponsorships, local dealership marketing, and direct marketing.
Effective auto advertising builds brand awareness, generates leads, increases interest in particular models, and drives sales. It often uses the car’s performance, safety features, reliability, and other benefits to persuade prospects to purchase.
While automobile advertising relies on an omnipresent (online and offline) marketing strategy, technological advancements have also brought about considerable consumer behavior changes. For instance, 59% of car buyers spend their time online researching their next purchase, even if they finish their purchase offline.
Best Practices for Success in Automotive Advertising
Why invest in automotive digital marketing and advertising? According to Hyundai, around 95% of all purchases start online in some form or another, meaning that almost all prospects will grab their smartphones or laptops to start looking for their next car.
As such, here’s a list of best practices to help you get the most out of your brand and the vehicles you’re offering to your customers.
- Highly targeted and personalized advertising
- Interactive and immersive experiences
- Vehicle features emphasis
- Authentic storytelling
Highly Targeted and Personalized Advertising
The automotive market is highly competitive. Michael Krieger, President at Prime Marketing Experts, says that the average buyer only visits an auto dealership three to four times during their lifetime. David Ispiryian, CEO of Effeect, agrees with this statement, pointing out the highly competitive nature of the market.
"Dealerships and manufacturers should focus on brand differentiation and multi-faceted marketing to stand out from the stiff competition. Also, buying a car is a significant investment and dealerships must plan, nurturing leads over a longer period with targeted ads and content until they are ready to buy."
To ensure that prospects don’t lose interest or don’t turn to other brands, dealerships should prioritize personalized and targeted advertising.
Understand Your Customer
No two drivers are the same and each prospect will have their unique preferences, needs, and expectations when it comes to making a purchase. Those interested in high-performance vehicles will probably look into SUV ads, and a first-time driver will look for something reliable and easy to live with.
Having the necessary data at your fingertips lets you gain more insight into personal preferences and can help you forge targeted ad campaigns that resonate with your customers.
Use AI and Data Analytics
Artificial intelligence and data analytics can play a crucial role in personalizing marketing content and ads for prospects. Apart from pulling and organizing precious data from different sources, AI and data analytics can also help with refining every area of your campaigns.
Both Krieger and Ispiryan agree that these two technologies can help you create target audiences, and gather and highlight data about their preferences, online research habits, and more. Analytics can provide marketing experts with valuable insights into what kind of content their prospects like to consume online and enable them to cater their content marketing strategies to fit the requirements of these leads.
Krieger adds that analytics can help with identifying strengths and weak spots during a campaign, allowing for fast tweaks and even more profound refinements to stay relevant.
Craft Compelling Content
The insights you’ve gathered are also invaluable for creating highly tailored ads, messages, and other pieces of creative content for each of your audience segments. For example, take a look at how Ford advertises their legendary Bronco model’s 2021 comeback, versus the track-focused, GTD Mustang, a high-performance variant of the brand’s trendsetting pony car.
Both cars are Ford, and both are intended for the public, yet the way these commercials are crafted is worlds apart.
Optimize Ad and Content Delivery
Personalized and segmented ads won’t live up to their full potential unless you optimize every aspect of your paid campaigns. In addition to ensuring that you get the optimal return on investment, it’s also worth considering when and how your prospects will engage with your ads.
What time of the day are they active and most likely to check out your organic content like social posts? If you are hosting live polls and Q&As, make sure to maximize your reach by streaming at a time when the audience you’re currently targeting is most likely to be online.
Interactive and Immersive Experiences
Car brand loyalty is real. People can form incredibly strong bonds with brands, purchasing the same make every time they’re looking for a new vehicle. Dealerships and manufacturers should strive to provide immersive and interactive experiences to strengthen existing and newly formed bonds.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways that can help you achieve this.
- Online configurators and mobile apps
- AR/VR
- Virtual events and live streaming
- Video content and interactive video
- Social media integration and gamification
- Merchandising
Online Configurators and Mobile Apps
Online car configurators and similar apps allow your prospects to configure a car that will meet their preferences. From paint colors through interior materials to available engine displacement and wheelsets, your customers can get a sense of ownership that will make them more invested in the vehicle they want to purchase.
AR/VR
Augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) can provide immersive 3D experiences, enabling customers to “get inside” the car and take a closer look at its features. They can even perform virtual test drives without the need to leave the comfort of their home.
Virtual Events and Live Streaming
From behind-the-scenes footage to Q&A sessions, you can create significant buzz around your brand or specific models. Product launches and new inventory arrivals can be great occasions for live streaming, and you may opt for virtual events to offer exclusive access to specific services or offers.
Video Content and Interactive Video
Video is a powerful marketing tool in automotive advertising too. According to Hyundai's study, nearly 70% of respondents mentioned that video has helped them make a purchase. As such, you can always focus on showcasing new cars or talk about new arrivals.
You can also consider interactive videos, where viewers can click on particular areas of the car to learn more about its features.
Social Media Integration and Gamification
Social media should be an essential component of your overarching advertising and marketing strategies. Social platforms are great for showcasing your models’ performance, features, and looks. Social also enables you to create a thriving community with brand advocates, who can help you with additional powerful marketing approaches, such as word-of-mouth marketing.
Offering interactive and rewarding promotions can also gamify the purchasing and marketing experience for your buyers. Ispyrian mentions Tesla’s Referral Program and word-of-mouth marketing as a prime example of automobile advertising done right.
Merchandising
Automotive apparel can be an effective way to boost brand identity, visibility, trust, and brand advocacy, especially among enthusiasts, who, on average, spend an astonishing $7 billion on modifications a year. In addition to branded T-shirts and other memorabilia, there’s enough room for branded aftermarket and OEM merchandise too.
Vehicle Features Emphasis
Again, no two drivers are the same and will be looking for different features in vehicles. This is where researching your audiences can come in handy, as you will be able to highlight specific vehicle features in your campaigns that will resonate with specific groups within your target market.
Safety Features
Automotive technology is constantly evolving, and driver surveys have concluded that customers are looking for more advanced driving assistance and other autonomous safety features.
Your dealership should take advantage of all the safety features your brand(s) implement in the cars and highlight those. Automatic braking, adaptive cruise control, and lane departure warnings are only a few of the advanced features you can showcase to make a model more enticing to potential customers.
Sustainability
People are increasingly interested in buying more environmentally friendly vehicles, even if it means paying more and advertisers can leverage this interest in green cars and electric vehicles. On that note, Krieger mentions that while electric cars pose a new set of challenges, they also open new marketing possibilities and customer base.
To showcase sustainability, you can highlight features such as fuel efficiency, hybrid or fully electric drivetrains, and eco-friendly materials. Also, you can portray your brand as a socially responsible company and list your environmentally-conscious brand values.
Performance
Some people aren’t that interested in eco-friendliness or safety features. They focus more on performance and racing pedigree than anything else. “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday,” says the American marketing gospel that showed that success in NASCAR racing can translate into increased sales across showrooms and dealerships.
Focusing on performance features such as acceleration, horsepower, torque, steering, braking power, and other features will also make a compelling case for people who are looking for a car to tear up the road.
Authentic Storytelling
Making a case for safety or performance features is one thing. But people also crave deeper and more meaningful relationships between the brands they drive. Think about the exclusivity of owning a Ferrari, or the Ultimate Driving Machine slogan BMW uses to market their cars.
Authentic storytelling can help everything we’ve covered above and incorporate it in a meaningful way that creates the complete engagement package for target markets. This can help build lasting loyalty and create emotional relationships between a brand and a driver that goes beyond owning a car.
Sharing customer experiences and real-life stories from other car owners can help potential buyers get a better understanding of vehicle reliability and running costs, and showcase dealership transparency, especially if you encourage owners to talk about the possible downsides of owning a particular vehicle.
You can also use social media to highlight brand values and vision, deliver relatable stories, and build a strong presence that will resonate with every potential customer who seeks more from the brand than just owning a car.
Shift Your Automotive Advertising Into Gear
Staying ahead of the curve in the highly competitive automotive industry means understanding your target audience and catering to their needs. Remember, while most car purchases happen offline, most of them start online. So, embrace the bond between man and machine and leverage all the advanced technologies modern vehicles use to make driving safer while capitalizing on the rich history of the brands you offer.
Remember, these brands often revolutionized much more than just driving. They transformed country-wide infrastructures and manufacturing processes, and became the symbol of freedom, especially for Americans in the 50s and 60s.
Automotive Advertising FAQs
Can SEO help with automotive marketing?
Search engine optimization (SEO) along with other organic approaches like social media management can help you become organically visible to people online who are interested in buying a car from the brand you represent. Both SEO and social media marketing are heavily reliant on content marketing, which enables you to increase visibility while offering value to your customers and allows storytelling, which forms deeper relationships between brands and prospects.
Are new technologies helping automotive advertising and marketing?
Technological advancements such as VR and AR enable more immersive buyer experiences, while artificial intelligence and data analytics can help marketers segment buyers and create more personalized messaging for them.
What matters the most in automotive marketing when it comes to connecting with audiences?
It depends. For some, advanced safety features, ride comfort, and cargo room are the most important features in a vehicle. Others may be looking for luxury, sleek lines, and high-end infotainment, with top-notch interior design. A third group might be looking for sustainability, while others will always prioritize performance.
