While we know paid marketing efforts increase sales, such as Search Engine Marketing, Facebook Lead Ads and Conquest Email Blasts (just to name a few), the organic side of marketing is often neglected – and usually more affordable! “Organic” is a term that describes the process of getting people to visit your website gradually, over time – rather than using paid marketing strategies, such as the ones listed above. We compiled some of the top performing examples of organic marketing tactics that your dealership can take advantage of.

1. Invest in Your Website with SEO

Most dealerships spend on average anywhere between $600 and $1,000 per month just for their website. That isn’t including any extra bells or whistles. If you notice in the higher priced packages your website company offers, it usually will include something along the lines of “Advanced SEO”. SEO is a great way to increase the quality of traffic to your website. This is done by adding relevant content to your website that customers would typically be searching for on a search engine. Certain keywords are highly ranked organically.

In order to achieve more traffic to your site, we recommend having landing pages set up for the popular models that are available at your dealership. You can take it another step further by having similar pages built out for the lease/purchase specials you’re offering. This way, the lease or purchase offer information is all on the same page as the specs of the vehicle. Having the vehicle’s full information broken out by trim level will make the car buying experience for your customer even easier. This also gives the customer a specific place to fill out a form fill, if interested.

The more visits to these pages from a search engine, the higher it will be ranked in the search results. Thus, will continue to drive your website traffic up.

2. Social Media Postings

The best part about social media is that it can be free. And not to mention, it is one of the most popularly used marketing tools out there. People of all ages are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter…you name it. And people are sometimes on social media for hours each day, which why it is imperative to take advantage of these apps. It is one of the easiest ways to help boost your dealership and drive traffic to your website.

We recommend posting 4-5 times per week. While the amount of times you post is important, the content is what is going to engage previous and potential customers. Even if someone may not be in the market for a new car, they still need to stay up to date on recommended maintenance or be interested in other car related topics. When posting on social media, we try to follow the 80/20 rule. This means 80% of your postings should be informative, entertaining posts and the remaining 20% can be ones that directly promote your business, like lease or service offers you’re currently advertising.

After a few weeks of posting consistently, you can get a feel of what your followers like to see and maybe don’t want to see and re-evaluate your content from there.

3. Promote Your Review Websites

 Online reviews are the digital version of “word of mouth. Just like with word of mouth, your dealership’s reviews can be the deciding factor on if someone visits your dealership. A lot of dealerships underestimate the impact reviews have. Like previously discussed in our blog, Reputation Management, potential shoppers are looking at the experience other consumers had at your dealership. Let’s say someone is searching your dealership on Google – your business page will show right next to that search. If your Google reviews are poor, so is your Google review rating. This goes for any review site a potential customer can stumble upon.

You can promote your review sites within your own website, on your database email creative, or you can even hand out “Let’s Get Social” cards in your showroom. You can even have your sales reps ask the customers they directly worked with to leave them a review. If you promote your review sites to happy customers, this will help your reputation rating go up. If you do unfortunately have some negative reviews, we recommend responding to them as soon as possible – so if they are seen, the customer is also seeing you care enough to respond to the situation.

Whether your dealership takes the SEO approach to help drive traffic to your site or decides to go the route of a branding campaign like social media postings and reputation management, they both will help keep customers engaged and all around will create more interactions. If you are interested in learning more about what SEO package is right for your dealership, Organic Social Media Postings or Reputation Management, please call us at 877-958-4524 or contact us today.