Step 1: Create Awareness
Creating awareness for your dealership is the first of five steps in our Lead Generator model. This is also likely to be the first step no matter what type of dealership you own; online or not, the rule always applies that customers cannot buy from you if they don’t know about you. So, if they cannot buy from you if they don’t know about you, the goal here is to create awareness. This will get the ball rolling for the entire sales funnel, hopefully ending with a sale or, better yet, a lifelong customer.
Getting consumer’s attention can be tricky, so this first step is all about creating advertising that is especially effective and attracts your target audience. Everyone has problems that need to be solved – your goal with advertising should be to present yourself to those people who require your solutions. Customers have busy lives, so we need to remind them that are here to solve their ‘problem’. As a dealership, it is your job to fulfill the customer’s wants and needs. All of this is encompassed in this first step, creating awareness. So, here comes the issue – the digital marketing space is massive. When it comes to brick and mortar stores it is much more common for a potential customer to find you by chance. For example, if you own a shop in a mall then it is likely that you will often get foot traffic from people who might have never heard of you before. The same is true for any physical shop or location – you will almost certainly be discovered by people who might have never heard of you before. The same is not true for your online marketing efforts.
The digital space is incredibly overcrowded and competitive.
Something to consider is this – if you are a classic retail store and do business in person, then you are likely competing with those shops in your immediate surroundings. Maybe you are in competition with similar stores to yours that happens to be within a 10-kilometer radius.
When it comes to marketing online, you are amongst billions of dollars in competition. According to emarketer.com, digital ad spending in 2019 is estimated to be over $333 billion. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, this should – digital will now account for roughly half of the total global ad market. Here’s the good news: compared to traditional forms of advertising such as TV and billboards, digital marketing is inexpensive. Digital traffic is incredibly cheap when you consider the price against the cost of mass media such as TV, radio, and print. This is excellent for online marketing efforts because it allows businesses to make an impact in the crowded digital advertising space.
The first step in the 5 Step Lead Generator is creating awareness, and we at Catalyst Automotive believe that businesses should take advantage of the minimal online advertising costs to point as many sources of traffic as possible to your website/landing page.
There are thousands of online platforms that your potential customers may be using, and in order to capture as many leads as possible, it’s important to take advantage of all of them. The goal here is leads, so we want to create awareness to as many people as possible, as efficiently as we can. As is evident, there is a vast amount of platforms today that can be used for your online advertising. It is also sometimes difficult to keep up to date with which platforms are most effective for your marketing. The digital space is constantly evolving at a rapid pace, and even the most knowledgeable are sometimes not able to place their finger on which platform is the optimal location to focus advertising efforts at the time. As mentioned earlier, the competitive nature of digital media requires a dealership to diversify its online advertising in order to reach people.
This is why we advise taking advantage of the minimal costs of online advertising to spread your marketing over a multitude of platforms in order to create brand awareness. In an era of information overload, you need multi-touch points for your campaign. Here are some platforms we recommend as traffic sources:
- Facebook Paid Ads
- Facebook Re-marketing
- Google Adwords
- Google Display
- Google Re-marketing
- Youtube
- SMS/MMS
All of these efforts will drive as much traffic (people) as possible to your website or landing page, with the final goal of capturing leads. These leads are your key to increasing sales, which means growing and maintaining the success of your business. Powerful brand awareness does not happen with a few single Facebook ads – it is the result of a number of simultaneous marketing efforts. Increasing brand awareness is the first step in Catalyst Automotive 5 Step Lead Generator.
Book Your Free 30 Minute Strategy Session
If you would like to see how we can help you sell more cars this month with our car dealership advertising and car dealership marketing ideas, book your free 30 minute consultation today – https://www.catalystautomotive.com.au/contact/
