While 95% of car sales are still made at a dealership, most buyers’ journeys nowadays begin online. Most automotive marketers know that online advertising is the key to generating leads and getting more people into their dealerships.
That said, this automotive marketing strategy does have its costs and challenges.
One of the biggest problems automotive marketers face today has to do with gaining their audience’s trust. It is the job of marketers, content marketers included, to bring people into the door, so sales professionals have someone to sell to. This is true not just in the automotive industry but pretty much any industry under the sun.
However, the automotive industry is different from most in one key factor — a car is a big financial commitment.
When buying a vehicle, consumers are expected to make a significant financial decision that will affect their day-to-day life. It is fair to say that automotive marketers have their work cut out for them.
So how can you deal with these challenges as an automotive content marketer? You need to be smarter about your content promotion tactics.
Best content promotion tactics for automotive businesses
You might have heard that to be successful in the content marketing game; you need to produce a lot of content. This is true to a certain extent, but writing a metric ton of low-quality blogs and optimizing them for your targeted keywords will only get you so far.
Sure, writing your competitors under the table is not a bad strategy, but all the noise eventually leads to diminishing returns. Even if you’re able to control all your content, focusing solely on quantity can quickly backfire.
Content marketers who choose to work smart while allowing their competitors to work hard. This means spending more time promoting a piece of content than it took to produce it. The goal of this guide is to provide a few creative ways to promote your content.
Let’s get started!
Embrace high-quality video content
According to Cisco, videos are expected to account for more than 82% of consumer internet traffic in 2022.
More and more companies are beginning to understand the importance of video marketing. That said, many businesses still aren’t quite sure about how to incorporate quality video production into their marketing strategy.
This means that the landscape is relatively underdeveloped, and there is a massive opportunity for anyone willing to produce great content. And you don’t have to be Steven Spielberg to create a good video, either. Lumen5 and similar video makers mean you can make high-quality videos without a degree in film.
You can use these tools to create introductory promos for your blogs, for example — all you’ll need is a few of the most compelling snippets of copy from the blog’s introduction, and perhaps a couple of fun gifs, and voila, you’ve got yourself a promotional video!
Depending on the nature of your content, a summary might be a better option than a promo.
Perhaps your team doesn’t include expert visual designers, but you pride yourself on your salespeople’s bright and shiny personalities. In that case, feel free to turn the camera around and showcase some of your most charismatic team members.
Longer, more informative videos can also be great for content promotion. A piece of video content that brings real value in its own right is more likely to generate shares than any teaser; plus, it is more likely to drive traffic to your Facebook page or YouTube channel.
Ultimately, any good digital branding agency out there will agree a video like this will position your brand as an industry thought leader.
There’s one thing to keep in mind, though — a social video that comprehensively covers the topic of the blog you’re trying to promote will discourage people from actually clicking through, so consider your bottom line.
If all you’re interested in is generating blog traffic and on-page conversions, you should probably incorporate short and fun promos into your strategy — Instagram stories and even TikTok videos can be excellent channels.
Don’t just copy and paste blog headlines into your social media posts
If there’s one thing that we would like you to remember from this entire guide, it is this — focus on quality rather than quantity.
Writing a thousand blogs and sharing each with the same headline on every social media platform will get you some visitors, but it is not a sustainable, not to mention creative, way to run your content promotion.
If you want to do things right, look at the social accounts that spark your interest. Chances are they rarely copy and paste throwaway headlines that you won’t look at twice. Putting more effort into the teaser copy can put you miles ahead of the competition.
This doesn’t mean you have to set up a brainstorming session each time you want to share a blog post on Facebook — a standard headline here and there won’t ruin all your efforts. However, you should at least try to look for a few snippets of text within the blog to use for social copy.
Pro tip: quotes from influencers work well, and so do statistics. Also, your blog author likely wrote a few intriguing lines in the introduction — use these.
Whatever you choose to go with, treat your social posts like ads — pretend that you have to pay for each. This will make you take better care of them, and they will, in turn, take better care of you.
Reach new audiences through influencers
When companies pay influencers to market their products or services, they’re looking for outreach and credibility. They’re buying exposure to an audience they would have had to spend weeks targeting and nurturing.
This DemandGen report states that 87% of buyers are more inclined to trust industry influencers. That is a significant number, but to take full advantage of it, you’ll need to do more than create a compelling Instagram post.
Taking the time to reach out to an influencer for a quote before writing your blog, or even just quoting them in one of your posts, puts you in a position to receive exposure on their platform. They might choose to retweet your post simply because they were flattered by the mention.
Who knows, they might even enjoy the content and decide to link to you in one of their future posts.
Whatever the case, by cooperating with influencers, you give your content the chance to thrive by exposing it to an entirely new environment.
You probably already know all the big players in your market. If not, a tool like Followerwonk can help you gauge people’s social influence. Once you’ve identified your targets, it’s time to send some emails or reach out through social platforms.
If you want to get their quotes for your blog post, reach out before starting to write. If you’ve already mentioned them in a post, reach out to tell them. We recommend giving both strategies a shot, as both can be equally effective, depending on the influencer you’re trying to connect with.
Final thoughts
If the theme of this post hasn’t quite shone through, allow me to reiterate — content promotion is all about quality rather than quantity. And if you want quality, you’ll need to think like a human and market to humans.
Start by narrowing the scope of your work and be more deliberate about who you’re trying to reach with your content. Before you look at the next keyword you should target, make sure to give your last piece of content enough room to thrive.
