If I owned an automotive dealership this is exactly how I would create my digital marketing plan that would dominate my local area. The goal of the marketing campaign is to…
Deliver the right offer at the right timeConstantly be in front of the potential customerand create a connection by telling the story of our company
If you can do all three of these things, you will dominate your industry.
The Right Website
Your website is the center of this equation, and needs three extremely important elements. Develop a website that quickly and effectively tells our story, and creates a connection with the viewer to create investment. The website also needs to read as a long form sales letter to inform the customer and capture leads with the correct call to action elements. Make it extremely easy to find the phone number, address, and either send a message contact form or book an appointment online.
The third important part of your website is having a Facebook Pixel installed for re-targeting traffic. Re-Targeting your web traffic is the most cost effective and important type of ad you can have.
Sending Traffic to Our Site
The next factor in our equation is traffic. We can get traffic from organic SEO results, Google Places, Google AdWords, and Facebook ads. Facebook ads are wonderful for two reasons. They are the least expensive and have amazing targeting options.
In order to achieve a high first page rank on Google we need to focus on several things. In a local SEO situtaion for an automotive dealer, competition is not a big problem in terms of ranking. With the right "On page" SEO practices and a few high quality backlinks we can rank well.
Here is a chart of SEO ranking factors.

A local SEO Strategy would focus efforts on the following:
On Page SEO
The proper Title and Meta Descriptions, and avoiding duplicates
The correct use of H1 and H2 headings
Properly optimizing images with "Alt Tags" and file names
Improving loading times for both desktop and mobile versions of website
User experience, Analytics
Improving user experience to increase dwell time
Create engaging content to reduce bounce rate
Link Building
Finding opportunities to build backlinks from credible high authority sites, the biggest ranking factor in Google’s algorithm deals with backlinks and the domain authority these links are from.
Social Signals
Develop social profiles, linking back to business site
Developing proper social signals to website
Social media not only is an opportunity to connect with your audience consistently, but also helps organic search results by sending social signals to Google.
Google Maps Local
In addition to organic page rank we also want to rank well in Google Places, top three if possible. In order to improve our rank for Google Places we need to focus on optimizing our GMB listing, reviews, and directory citations.
Here is a chart of Local map ranking factors, provided by MOZ.

We can improve our Google Places listing with the following actions:
Optimizing our "Google My Business" listing
Creating more citations than our competition. We can analyze the competition to find out how many citations they have and create more.
Encourage customers to leave a Google review
Google AdWords
Most local industries can utilize Google AdWords and generate leads for $10 or less per click. With the cost and level of search volume for local industries, you can run AdWords around the clock without much cost. In addition, this gives you the ability to grab another spot on the first page of Google. When we combine all three, we can be listed on the first page up to three times if we can get a top of page AdWords listing, top three map rank, and first page organic SEO rank.
Facebook Ads
A huge part of generating leads will also come down to running Facebook Ads. The first type of Facebook Ad I would use is a lead ad. The most important part of marketing is your offer. You have to make someone an offer so compelling they can’t refuse it. Personally I would promote the best offer the factory has at the moment, but also throw in a few bonuses for choosing our dealership.
Why is the Digital Marketing world going crazy over Facebook ads?
Short answer – they work. Why do they work? The information that Facebook captures gives us an amazing ability to target potential clients with exactly the interest that are inline with our product.
For example – Facebook allows us to target people that are shopping for a vehicle according to the manufacturer. In addition, we can use our existing email list to find potential clients within 10 miles of the dealer that share the same interest of our current clients within a 1% variance.
Lead ad or landing page?
In our offer to a cold audience we can either use a lead ad right inside of Facebook, or link to a landing page on our website. The lead ad is easier and faster for the customer, but we lose the opportunity to communicate all of the benefits of the offer if we don’t send them to an opt in page. It can be a major mistake to send cold traffic to an inventory page. When someone gets sent to your inventory page they get overwhelmed with your amazingly large stock of cars, get distracted by a text message, and disappear without you generating a lead. Luckily we can track them with a Facebook pixel.
Pixel Your Leads
In order to stay in front of our warm leads, we are going to re-target our web traffic everyday. Yes, everyday people that have visited our website within the last two weeks are going to see our ads on Facebook. The best part? It’s extremely affordable.
This gives you the ability to stay omnipresent and stay in the mind of the consumer to develop a position of authority in your industry.
Email marketing
Once we capture an email address from a lead magnet or opt in page, we can start an email sequence. The point of the email sequence is not to sell in all of our emails but to offer value and provide great information to the potential client. This is another opportunity to position ourselves as an authority figure.
Putting it all together
This is an example of an overall funnel
We send our traffic to landing pages that are designed to capture leads. We contact our leads and put them in an email process. If we don’t get contact information we re target with Facebook ads. If we don’t get an appointment we continue to re target and email offers. If the initial offer wasn’t right we re-target with other offers until we can get the potential client in the dealer or set an appointment. We can also use these tools for follow up, or for service reminders after a vehicle purchase is made.

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Feel free to email with any questions!
Chris Phillips