We’ve all been there, you’re struggling to create an affordable marketing strategy for your dealership that is going to promote growth. While it may have once been relatively impossible to promote your content without money, today’s technology has made it possible. In today’s blog, we will discuss the many ways you can promote your content when you’re broke.
1. Find Out Your Search Position
When promoting your content, you’ll soon find out it is best to do so through Google and Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. The most important thing to keep in mind is that your position in Google Search is absolutely crucial. With over 31% of clicks going towards the number one result, it’s no wonder that everyone is trying to be first. Additionally, you should know that if you are not listed within the first top ten results, you will likely not be seen by searchers. Roughly 75% of users never scroll past the second page of results. Additionally, the better site structure you have, the better your chances are of ranking higher in search engines.
2. Fix Your Site Structure
When you have a good site structure, you almost always have a great user experience. The more appealing your site is to your users, the more appealing it will be to search engines. This does not necessarily mean that the site just looks good visually, but that it also works well from a technical standpoint. Although photos of your vehicle inventory may look sleek and you have a good looking trade-in form, this will mean very little if your overall website is not optimized for users. One important technical aspect to keep in mind is the navigability of your site. You want to make sure it is easy to find everything on your dealer site and it will not take more than 15 seconds for a user to find the page or information they are looking for. If you are structuring your site properly, you can immensely reduce your bounce rate while also improving your dwell time and click-through rate, which will, in turn, improve your rankings on search engine results pages. Additionally, have a good dealership website architecture will help Google’s site crawlers. The goal of these crawlers is to index your site content so that it can return it in search results. This means that the better your site structure is, the easier it is for crawlers to access your site, the higher your rankings will be.
3. Focus on Niche Themes for Your Blog
First and foremost, if you do not already have a blog for your dealership, you need to make one right now. If you have already started creating blogs for your dealership’s website, you’re off to a great start. The most important part of creating your blog content is that you should focus on only a few key themes. Luckily, being in the car industry, you have a few different options to choose from. Whether you want to focus on giving unknown tips and tricks for vehicles, the upcoming car trends, or you just want to talk about which vehicles you think are best for different types of people, you have so many topics to choose from. The way Google used to rank websites is that they would rank the highest ones that seemed to have a lot of authority for pretty much everything. Although they still kind of do this, Google now more prefers niche websites that cover a specific topic. After you’ve chosen a specific area of the industry you want to focus on, make sure you stick with it. If you’re still stuck on what to write about, we’ve got you covered. After you have created your content, go over it, and think about how you can expand on those topics. If you have created a blog post, see if you can turn that into a video and vice versa. If you have a blog covering the best features of a new vehicle in your inventory, consider creating an in-depth video giving a bit of a tour of the car, maybe even what a test drive would look like. Don’t just duplicate your topic but elaborate on it more thoroughly.
4. Link To Others and They Will Link to You
Linking is a great way to promote your content and help others as well. When creating articles, you should include links to other peoples’ sites in the content. After you’ve done this, tell the owner of that website that you have linked their site to your article. When you do this, you are improving your relationships with other website owners and can encourage them to also create links to your site. Backlinks like these will drastically increase your rankings because it shows others trust your site and trust the information you are putting forth. Beyond this, you should regularly be checking up on your links. Go to Ubersuggest and type in your URL. After this, you’ll want to head to the backlinks report and you will be able to see all of your new links and your lost links. This website is helpful because it shows you where you are gaining and losing links so you can reach out to those who you have linked to and see if you can convince them to link back to you.
5. Work With Outside Communities
As we know, social media is the king of the internet now. Because of this, you want to make sure you’re getting your dealership or staff within your dealership involved in Facebook Groups, SubReddits, Quora, Instagram, Twitter, etc. The more places you are being active and communicating with potential future customers, the more likely you’re dealership will be to grow. We’ve seen this happen many times with situations like AirBnB leveraging Craiglist listings in order to generate local prospects and Spotify users sharing their favorite music on Facebook. Using social media is one the easiest and the cheapest ways to promote your content so get started with it!
Overall, you just want to make sure you have a consistent and strong content marketing strategy. If you want to create good content, you need to make sure you have a specific purpose for it and you need to define this specific purpose early on. Create goals for your dealership, whether that be generating more organic or referral traffic, convincing customers to physically come into the dealership, or just getting more exposure on your social media pages. Whatever it is, set the goal, create a strategy, and stick to it. Promoting your content should be fun and with these tips, it will be.
If you’re looking to update your dealership or are still just a bit confused on this whole “promoting” thing, send us a message or give us a ring at 515-232-2024, and we would be happy to help.