Your automotive marketing plan is critical and dealerships need to stay on top of the marketing trends in the automotive industry. In today’s environment, it is not all about price. With that in mind, dealerships need to have a content creation strategy that focuses on video marketing, customer video testimonials, relationship marketing, and social media influencer marketing. Tying this all together with a plan for automotive email marketing and automotive reputation management will set up your showroom for success.
The Millionaire Car Salesman Podcast Presents:
Learn How to Save your Coins and Ditch the Ad Agencies with Ally Piñon, Marketing Manager at Chastang Auto Group
This week on the Millionaire Car Salesman Podcast, host Sean V. Bradley, CSP dives into marketing strategies for automotive dealerships. The way people consume information, communicate, rsearch, shop, and purchase products have drastically changed over the past year and a half. As such, the way car dealerships market and advertise must also change.
Joining Sean today is Tianna Mick, also known as T Got Your Keys, and Ally Pinon, marketing manager at Chastang Ford. Ally and Tianna discuss the marketing, advertising, and branding strategies that helped them and their dealership soar to new levels.
About Ally Pinon
Ally Pinon is the marketing manager for Chastang Auto Group, located in Houston, Texas at their Chastang Ford dealership. Ally started her career in the radio business with Telemundo and Intercom as an account executive, where most of her clients were car dealerships. After 5 years, she transitioned her career to the automotive industry.
For the past 3 years, Ally has been a marketing manager. In this role she is involved in all things marketing and advertising. In addition to creating campaigns and scripts, Ally also creates new advertising avenues with messages geared towards specific target markets. All of this is done with one thing in mind, ROI.
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Automotive Marketing & Marketing Trends In The Automotive Industry
The Role Of A Marketing Manager At A Car Dealership
At Chastang Ford, Ally is the sole person in charge of all things marketing. Not only does Ally manage everything herself, she also executes each campaign as well. While each campaign is important, her most important task is analyzing the return on investment on all marketing efforts.
Some of the many different forms of marketing Ally oversees includes 3rd party lead sources, radio, the dealership website, SEO, pay per click & SEM, social media, OTT, charty, golf tournaments, and social media influencers, along with many other forms of marketing. Ally’s primary goal is to not only diversity, but also to maximize the ROI of the marketing efforts.
Automotive Marketing Strategy for Car Dealerships
Automotive Content Creation Strategy
The strategy for content creation is critical for a dealership’s marketing. Ally’s strategy to keep content fresh and ahead of the curve is by asking her friends. What do they want to see? Do they look at the price? Do you look at pictures? What Ally found out is that most people don’t look at price any more. They are looking for the experience. They want a WOW experience where they aren’t meeting with the stereotypical sales associate or that they are being tricked. With this in mind, Ally pivoted a lot of the marketing to be more brand and experience focused.
Automotive Reputation Management
Ally makes an effort to get customer testimonial videos, especially the ones that had the best possible experience. Not only does Ally share these testimonials with customers, she also shares the videos on multiple platforms. The videos, paired with excellent online reviews, helps sell the experience they provide.
Automotive Marketing Plan
To stay on top of all of her campaigns, Ally has a log and a planner to keep everything organized. This allows her to track net lifts when she makes changes to the marketing efforts. He log and planner also ensures the timing of each campaign is correct. She plans and schedules most of the marketing a month in advance. For social media posts, she schedules the posts weekly. This allows her to create, produce, and launch different videos for each social platform.
Automotive Email Marketing & Cross Promotion
Does not send email blasts often, when they do, they use their CRM. They found that people tend to feel bombarded with emails, but more importantly, you never know where they are in the purchasing process. Additionally, Ally does not cross-promote. Such campaign stays as their own campaign. This is because each campaign has their own separate audience.
Automotive Marketing & Automotive Advertising Agencies
Most dealerships do not have an in person marketing manager. As such, they have advertising agencies. Ally uses her vendors for many things. She provides them with an outline for them to write the content and then makes any changes needed from there. Other times, Ally creates the content herself.
The Problem With Automotive Advertising Agencies
Ally does have an ad agency, but she only uses them for Facebook. This is because ad agencies tend to be out of touch. They tend to be obsolete and are constantly trying to reinvent themselves. They don’t always understand the automotive industry and they are not able to pivot as quickly as dealerships need them to. The ones that do have automotive experience, they try to genericize the content so it can be reused for all of their other dealership clients. Additionally, they can be very expensive with little results.
Marketing Trends in The Automotive Industry: Influencer Marketing
Relationship Marketing For Car Dealerships
Relationship marketing is one of the most successful ways to market yourself. The top sales associates in the world, including Ali Reda and Cody Cody, sell over 120 cars per month. They get to this level by focusing heavily on relationship marketing. Additionally, they both focus on relationship selling as opposed to transactional selling.
Social Influences & Automotive Marketing For The Latino Market
Ally has started focusing on relationship marketing as well. In fact, she started marketing to the Latino community. In addition to posting some content in Spanish, Ally also utilizes influencers in the Latino community. Soon after this initiative started, Chastang Ford had to hire additional Spanish speaking staff as their messaging was well received.
How To Properly Utilize Influencer Marketing
The traditional bad credits or payment driven marketing is not the most effective way to spend your ad dollars. Influencer marketing, paired with the correct message, will help drive more customers to your dealership. Ally recommends allowing influencers to take a vehicle out on a demo and record how they are using it and how it solves their problems.
Influencer Marketing Paired With Hosted Events
Once you start to utilize influencer marketing, you can then bring it all together with an event with your influencers. They can either be in attendance or they can host it. You could have a customer appreciation event or a charity event. There are also many dealers that have their own podcast, in which case, interviewing your social media influencers would be a great idea as well.
More About the Millionaire Car Salesman Podcast's Hosts & Guests
Resources: Automotive Marketing & Marketing Trends in The Automotive Industry
Dealer Synergy & Bradley On Demand: The Automotive Industry’s #1 Training, Tracking, Testing, and Certification Platform and Consulting & Accountability Firm
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The Against All Odds Radio Show: Hosting guests that have started from the bottom and rose to the top. Also, join The Against All Odds Radio Show Guests & Listeners Facebook Group for the podcasted episodes.
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