Have you employed hyper-local dealership marketing? If not, it’s time to make sure you’re focused on bringing in customers within 20 miles of your location.
As a brick-and-mortar business, it’s important that you focus on your local customer base. Although some shoppers will drive hundreds of miles for the right vehicle, that doesn’t apply to everyone. Most of your customers are close by, which means you need to focus on a 20-mile radius marketing to appeal to these nearby customers. You can do this by focusing on dealership SEO that’s focused on your local customers and community-based auto sales, giving you the edge you need.
Here are some tips to help you focus on hyper-local dealership marketing.
Own and optimize your Google Business Profile
The first step toward focusing on local marketing, before you create geo-targeted car ads, is ensuring you capture your Google Business Profile. This means ensuring you show up on the right side of search results with your business information, including your name, address, phone number, hours, and reviews. To do this, you must:
- Ensure your business name, address, and phone number are consistent on every page
- Include photos of your dealership, staff, and vehicles
- Post updates including promotions, events, and new arrivals
- Collect and respond to customer reviews
Keep your profile active; it helps ensure Google takes your business seriously.
Use Geofencing
Car dealer neighborhood targeting is also called geofencing, and it’s a great way to create hyper-local dealership marketing. The way it works is to run mobile display and video ads to users when they enter a selected area, called a geofence. The user must complete a specific call to action, but they can receive your ads when they enter these areas, making it easy for you to target local areas.
Create local content that converts
Avoid generic blogs that have little or nothing to do with your dealership. Instead, focus on proximity-based dealership marketing by posting blogs that have to do with your local city. This means creating content that is less general and much more specific to your area. Some great ideas to do this could simply be adding your city to blogs and explaining within the blog why each vehicle would be good to drive in your city. This tells Google, and readers of your blog, that your dealership isn’t only a dealership, it’s the place to go for people in your city.
Promote and track in-market inventory
You would do this with local inventory ads and “available nearby” messaging. This could be the best automotive local advertising that you can create and use as a way to promote your vehicles. You can add the “available within X miles” message to your paid promotional ads and social media marketing campaigns to help drive more visits in your local area. The idea is to get drivers from within 20 miles to visit your dealership and enjoy what you have to offer.
Reviews are the lifeblood of marketing
Most shoppers start their search online for nearly everything these days. Your hyper-local dealership marketing campaign needs to focus on your online reviews. This is the new word of mouth, just in digital form. One of the most important local dealership strategies is to collect reviews. You want more reviews to become a trusted dealership, and you want those reviews to offer high scores. Getting more reviews includes:
- Asking every happy customer to leave a review before they drive away
- Sending a follow-up email with a direct Google review link
- Training your team to make it part of the sales process
Sponsor and host local events
Car dealerships are a great place for community events, and that gives you an additional opportunity for local geographic car marketing, which helps you promote your location and help the community. You can host a Cars & Coffee event, charity drives, or local business pop-ups to allow them to show off what they have to offer the community. Promote your events on local Facebook groups and set up notifications via ZIP-targeted email/SMS communications.
Build locations pages on your website
Whether you serve one city or several, you need to have hyper-local dealership marketing as part of your strategy. This means creating pages that speak to your location, which means including the city in the title. You can do this by adding your type of dealership and the city name as part of your blog postings, such as “Honda Dealership Near Fort Worth” would be a great way to promote a Honda dealership in the Fort Worth, TX area. Each of these pages should include:
- City-specific keywords
- Directions to your dealership
- Customer reviews from that area
- Photos of happy local customers
Using these strategies helps Google understand the relevance of your site to local people searching in each of those areas for the vehicles you sell.
How will you employ hyper-local dealership marketing to improve your local reach and focus on customers who are within 20 miles of your dealership? These tips are perfect for helping you communicate with customers in your local city, county, and region.
