Marketing for the Automotive Industry

The automotive industry is changing faster than ever before and as a result, dealerships need to adapt and create an innovative digital marketing strategy. And you can’t have that effectively unless it’s backed by a really rich and constantly updated resource of video, picture and editorial content on the products you offer.

Social media is a huge platform for people to get connected, entertained and educated. Millions of people (4.5 billion people worldwide), including potential car buyers, use social media sites daily.

With the increased use of these platforms, there is a reasonable chance that you could meet your next customer on social media, so it is so important to create a social media presence.

Digital marketing needs to be a critical part of your plan because it is having a huge impact on the purchase decisions of potential buyers.

Car shoppers will search and compare prices online before visiting an automotive business or dealership. Having a social media presence will give you a much higher chance of being seen online during this step and increase the chance of them visiting your business or dealership.

Video content and why you should have it

Video content is a great way to showcase your dealership and the vehicles you have available. 81% of car buyers research cars through online videos before making a purchase decision (Google).

Website visitors would rather watch an informative video than read pages of text. Wyzowl found that if both video and text are available on the same page, 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service.

That is why using detailed, professional videos will help buyers narrow down their search and make quick purchasing decisions.

If you can engage with your website visitors better, then it will rank higher in searched and increase your SEO. Video will also increase your dwell time as the average user spends 88% more time on websites that include videos

Car and Driving have a huge library of video reviews and video content that can help you with this.

We independently review every vehicle on the market and produce both in-depth and short summary videos and we are the only supplier with a full review video library covering all commercial pick-ups and vans. We update them every time a vehicle has a new model or is facelifted and produce an additional written used car review. Our library is twice as big as that of the nearest competitor and it continues to grow by approximately 150 vehicles every year.

Using this service allows you to have a video and written review plus images for every vehicle instantly, without the need to film anything in-house, thus saving time and money.

YouTube and Social Media

It is important to use video content across all social media platforms as posts with video have 48% more views and generate 1200% more shares than text and image content combined.

Don’t forget to create a YouTube channel because YouTube is the second largest search engine and car dealerships and automotive content are among the most popular categories on YouTube.

There are many ways you can utilise our video content on social media. We offer a personalised branding service which allows a client logo to be watermarked onto the videos for social media. Please visit the OSV YouTube Channel.

Short and Silent Videos

Short videos are becoming hugely popular on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. TikTok alone has billions of users and #automotive has over 590 million views.

Automotive consumers are watching more and more video content on mobile devices in many different locations and scenarios, which often means watching them silently.

We have some fantastic stock footage that can be used as it is or edited into a short film for social media. These can have text added, some music or voice over. Visit our store here.