DealerAuthority Digital Marketing Best Practices for Car Dealership Events

[JessicaRobertson]

Hey all,

Long-time listener, first-time caller. With dealerships bristling with upcoming sales events this Labor Day weekend, I wanted to share a resource that our team put together for one of our auto group clients that has since been flipped into a blog post, "7 Digital Marketing Best Practices for Car Dealership Events."

While the goal of this list was to map out all of the ways a dealership event should be promoted digitally, it also denotes how the digital aspect of an in-person event can be leveraged to boost your existing and future digital marketing efforts as well. Let's start from the top:

1. Give your team plenty of time, say 4-6 weeks to plan out your event

• More often than not, dealers will try to promote an event that’s been in the works for weeks or months only days before the event
• Do yourself a favor and try to map out all of the details, including the marketing, well in advance so you can milk this event for all it's worth

2. Take inventory of your event details and marketing assets

• The who, what, when, where, why, and how of it all
• also gather the logos, promo videos, social media handles of co-hosts, etc. Anything your marketing team will need to make their magic happen.

3. Build a dedicated landing page

• This should house the event details and serve as a specific destination on your site to send offsite traffic like social media posts links.
• Put that barren blog feed to use with relative news about your upcoming events - it holds more value than you know!

4. Create an event on Facebook

• Fill it with the details from your website's event page,
• Pin it to the top of your Facebook (Meta) Business Page and invite everyone you know

5. Promote across all of your social media channels

• Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, wherever you and your co-sponsors get social is where you should be promoting your event
• Be sure to include that link back to your website’s event page, especially if creating an ad!

6. Hype the event in real-time

• Go live with ya bad self on Facebook or Instagram and show some behind-the-scenes footage of the event, or even interview the sponsors and a few guests
• Speaking of real-time, if you're mustering up the energy to put all of this into motion, you had better be snapping photos and videos throughout the day so they can be used for future content.
  • Don't just rely on yourself; team up with a few coworkers to get multiple viewpoints!

7. Share after-event photos and video clips to showcase how well it went

• This is an excellent time to thank your co-hosts and sponsors!

While these are just the high points, the full article has an in-depth review of these best practices as well as a few bonus tips you won't want to miss (especially on #3 and #5! ).

Got any other digital marketing best practices to share for dealership events? Let 'em rip!

On that note, have a safe, and not too laborious Labor Day weekend! ✌️

 

[DrewAment]

re: 4. Create an event on Facebook

Do you recommend to just create an event, or a separate event "page"? I have seen a few 3rd party vendors use an separate event page for some "events" and I have always wondered the benefit.

 

[JessicaRobertson]

We don't recommend building separate event Pages for your dealership for a few reasons, although I do recall those BuyBack events being all the rage in 2019.

The primary reason why they would use a separate page is so that they could easily grant page access to anyone on their team administering the event, like the appointment setters.

The problem with this is now you have a separate page taking on your dealership's identity that no one within your organization has any control of. Couple that with the fact that after the event has expired, those pages typically end up living on long after that fact, confusing future and current customers and pissing them off when they reach out and say "I want to buy a car" and no one is there to help them. And we all know that Meta (Facebook) won't help you mitigate this in the long run.

Another common issue with those 3rd party vendor Page events was that oftentimes there was a complete disconnect between the organization running the "event" and the in-house team. Salespeople didn't know appointments were being set, customers were showing up during closed hours, and the actual BDC reps didn't know what was happening nor did the marketing managers. Total chaos to the tune of $8k or more.

Now I'm not saying this happened in ALL cases with EVERY buyback event vendor... but you're better off taking a fraction of that spend and applying it toward a solid Facebook ad strategy on your own page.