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Digital Marketing For Car Dealers

By Marketing

Like every other business, auto dealerships have added the Internet to their marketing mix. After years of employing the same tactics — TV commercials, flyers in the paper, and signs in the store window — they’re trying to implement online marketing tactics that save time and money.

However, it’s not always an easy transition to make. There are so many ways to market your business online that it can be tough to juggle them all. It’s even harder to stand out among your competitors, who are using the same tactics, and could possibly take attention away from your business.

Digital marketing for car dealerships requires more than just being known — it requires keeping people loyal and engaged. By reading this article, you’ll learn why digital marketing is so important for car dealers. You’ll also learn what your dealership can do to launch a successful digital marketing strategy. If you’d like to speak with one of our marketing experts, you can reach us at 75 697 942.

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How is digital marketing for auto dealers different from traditional sales?

The main difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing for car dealers can be summed up in one word: interaction.

In a traditional marketing campaign, you might place ads on TV and radio and in the papers and then bring car buyers in for a one-on-one conversation. Now, that conversation has to happen before people even walk in the door.

Digital marketing makes this possible through a wide range of channels, including email, blogs, interactive forums, social media, and more. You used to be able to bring buyers to your dealership with one-way messages. Now, if you’re not actively engaging with them before their visit, they’ll pass on your dealership for another one.

Top 10 Effective Web Design Tips for Auto Service Centers

By Marketing

You might have the best auto service center on the planet, but unless you have a strong online presence to go with it, it can be nearly impossible to reach new customers. Today’s consumers use the Internet to find businesses that can help them with all of their needs, and auto service centers are no exception.

However, creating a great website that will attract people who need help with their cars and convince them that your center is right for the job requires more than just buying a domain and typing up a few sentences.

Tip #1: Make it easy for visitors to get around

You wouldn’t design an auto service center to confuse your customers, and your auto service center website shouldn’t be confusing, either. The easier it is for visitors to find the information they require and learn about your business, they more likely they’ll be to become customers.

As you consider how you want your prospects to navigate their way through the site, begin creating a logical menu. It should be intuitive and streamlined, which will prevent your customers from getting frustrated, having a bad user experience, and leaving.

Tip #2: Be careful with sliders and carousels

Sliders and carousels of images and other content can be nice to look at, but use them with caution. Not only can they difficult to adjust to mobile devices, but they can unnecessarily slow the loading time of your site.

Many business owners insist on homepage sliders with large numbers of images without considering the potential downside. Work with a web design firm to determine if sliders or carousels are appropriate for your website, and how you can create them in a way that won’t damage your site’s load time and user experience.

Tip #3: Pick a clean font

While it can be tempting to use a creative font for your headers or content, you have to think about readability. Most people who go online for information about auto service centers do so because they’re having car trouble that needs resolved—and they won’t have the patience to decipher odd sizing and decorative font choices.

If visitors can’t quickly tell what a headline says, or if they find it difficult to read paragraphs, they’ll go elsewhere for their information. A clean, readable font is your best bet. There are other ways to be innovative on your site, so leave the font typeface alone except for your logo or possibly call-out buttons and promo banners.

Tip #4: Choose a simple color scheme

There’s no need to use every color of the rainbow for your auto service center website design. In fact, the fewer the main colors you use, the better. If your logo is made up of 3-4 colors, this can be the perfect starting point.

Too many hues make a website look messy. The only exception to this rule is to pick a contrasting color for any of your call-to-action buttons, so they stand out. Thus, if your website is shades of red, a golden yellow call-to-action button will stand out.

Tip #5: Make contact information prominent

If your site doesn’t have a simple way for customers to contact or set up an appointment with you on the homepage, you’re missing an enormous opportunity. This is the easiest way to get site visitors to become customers, and the more prominent it is, the better.

The most basic way of doing this is putting your contact information in an obvious location, and making sure that your phone number is clickable on mobile devices. This will make it so that people who find your site on mobile devices are only a click away from calling you and scheduling. You might even take this a step farther and provide an online scheduling option. Although this will require a skilled developer, it can save your employees time and make things even more convenient for customers.

Tip #6: Make your site mobile-friendly

It’s essential that your website is accessible on a wide variety of devices, including smartphones and tablets. The reasons for this are two-fold: First, people are using mobile devices to search for auto service centers. (You may be reading this article on a mobile device right now!) Second, Google now considers mobile-friendliness when assigning ranking to websites.  Most web developers are aware of this, and can use responsive design to ensure that your site works on all devices.

Tip #7: Stay away from stock photos

The images on your auto service center website should look good, as well as be fast-loading. It’s up to you to decide how much you want to spend on professional photography. However, you must take into consideration the quality of all of the images.

We recommend that you stay away from stock photos, because the images on your site should give visitors an indicator of what they can expect when they come to your business in person. If they look staged (or are clearly not true to your business), this can be off-putting to potential customers. For that reason, it’s best to use photos of your auto service center, your center’s team, and other real examples of your work.

Tip #8: Create useful content

Google takes the quality of content into consideration, just as web visitors will do. And although it’s more of an SEO concern than a design element, your content should be useful and easy to scan.

Leave plenty of room for text and images when designing your site, and you should be just fine when it comes to writing and optimizing copy. For more information on why this is important, check out this resource about SEO for auto service centers or take a look at the SEO services we offer.

Tip #9: Remove duplicate content

We mentioned in the last tip that content is important, and it’s worth pointing out that in order to be useful to your site, it needs to be unique for every page. In fact, if you’ve ever copy and pasted content onto multiple pages, you could actually be damaging your site’s chances of being found.

Even if you haven’t purposely duplicated content, it’s still possible to use design elements (like a blog homepage that displays full posts) that create it. Be sure to rewrite any content that’s duplicated, and discuss how to avoid it in the future with your designer.

Tip #10: Check on your inbound and outbound links

Links are essential for a healthy website, both the internal ones that link your pages together and the ones that link your site to others. However, if your links are broken or link to low-quality sites, they can present quite a few problems.

To the humans visiting your site, a broken link is an annoyance. To search engine crawlers, it’s confusing and could cause your site to lose page rank for particular keywords. Regularly check all your inbound and outbound links (i.e., links to outside sites and sources) to ensure that they work correctly and are only to high-quality, reputable sites.

Why Auto Part Retailers Need Digital Marketing

By Marketing

In a high-investment industry, trust and credibility play a very important role in turning your visitors into customers. This is why auto parts retailers really need a digital marketing agency. Digital Marketing Services helps to turn your visitors into customers. Better Marketing Ideas for automotive spare parts leads to increased sales and revenue. Through our online marketing strategy for auto parts stores specifically tailored for the industry in general, and your needs in particular, we can create an engaging platform for your business on the web.

The importance of digital marketing to auto part retailers

The auto part industry is alive and well, and it’s your job to ensure that you’re at the top of the pack. Your digital marketing strategy has to be spot on to ensure that you rank higher than your competition in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is especially true for Google.

  • Digital marketing targets your customers so that you advertise to users who need your services.
  • Digital marketing increases brand awareness, rankings in search engines, and more all at the same time.

Simply put, Internet marketing is essential to your auto part retailer if you want to grow.

4 digital marketing strategies for auto part retailers

There are a handful of ways that you can market your auto parts retailer online that can help you gain traffic to your website and to your physical storefront.

1. SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, should be the first step in any Internet marketing campaign.It allows you to improve your site’s position in Google by making your website easier to read for users and search engines.

You should start any SEO campaign with keyword research, which allows you to find what users want to know about your industry.For example, one of your most valuable keywords could be “brake pads for Jeeps” or “exhaust pipes for Toyotas.”

The sweet-spot keywords have high search volumes and low competition. That means a lot of people are searching for the keywords, but other auto part retailers aren’t writing about them.

After you find your keywords, you should create content that explains those keywords.

Content creation is important to your strategy for many reasons. It’s a great way to rank in SERPs, it’s perfect to share via social media and email marketing.

2. PPC

PPC, or pay-per-click advertising is a paid method to market your auto parts retailer. These ads work on a bidding system, where you choose your keywords and how much you’re willing to spend for an ad. Best of all, you don’t pay when the ad is viewed — you only pay when the ad is clicked. When someone clicks, the ads take users to landing pages where users will learn about the parts or services that they want. From there, they can buy an item, fill out a form, or schedule an appointment at your store.

3. Email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with interested customers. It also consistently reminds interested users of your presence and willingness to help them with their car part needs. To engage your recipients, you can use graphics, videos, coupons, and a call to action that encourages someone to take the next step to becoming a paying customer.

4. Social media marketing

Social media is one of the best ways to spread the word about your auto parts store. Social media platforms have billions of users combined, making them one of the best places to build brand awareness for your auto parts retailer.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the three platforms that work especially well for auto part sellers. Facebook is a great platform to connect to current and potential customers. Your followers can also rate your services, which helps build trust and authority among new followers.

Twitter works well because it forces you to be concise with your posts. This makes it ideal for sharing links, videos, and infographics.

Instagram is a photo-based app you can use to post photos of your auto parts. You can post a link to your website in your bio and add links to your products underneath their photos.

Does your auto parts retailer need help starting the perfect digital marketing campaign?

Contact us today to talk to a specialist and get a free quote!

Digital Advertising for Museums

By Marketing, SEO

Your museum’s digital presence is critical to its success. It’s an opportunity to connect with more leads that traditional marketing tactics cannot reach. You must invest in your Digital marketing plan if you want to help your museum flourish.

Make no mistake: unpaid, organic marketing strategies are crucial as well. Your website is important, especially when optimised for relevant search phrases. A social media presence and an email marketing campaign that engages visitors and communicates the nature of the location are also essential.

Digital museum advertising does not replace these efforts, nor does it replace the traditional, in-person marketing that smaller museums and attractions have mastered. Instead, paid advertising are an important contributor to the overall marketing mix, providing a more reliable, structured way to reach your target audience, from capturing their interest to eventually enticing them to come.

Step 1: Understand the Value of Digital Advertising for Museums

Let’s face it: museum marketing budgets tend to be very limited. That’s why the first step has to be a comprehensive understanding of why you should invest in paid ads to begin with. Consider these five reasons to invest in paid digital ads:

  1. Expand your reach. Even spending a few hundred dollars on a Facebook campaign can get your message in front of thousands of potential audience members you wouldn’t otherwise reach. You no longer have geographic or demographic limits, or have to rely on your audience finding you.
  2. Reach targeted audiences. Reach matters little if you can’t focus on your target audience. Fortunately, you can leverage digital ads to reach audiences with a specific interest in what you offer. Facebook alone offers hundreds of segmentation options, from age and gender all the way to recent travel and purchasing information. Meanwhile, Google allows you to focus on exact keywords and phrases that relate to your museum.
  3. Cost-effective outreach. Compared to more traditional means like radio and billboards, digital ads across platforms tend to be extremely cost-effective. As mentioned above, you can stand up an ad or campaign for as little as $100 and still reach a good segment of your audience.
  4. Opportunities across the funnel. We’ll dive into this piece more throughout this guide, but it’s important to understand as a general benefit of digital ads. You can create campaigns that accomplish anything from just spreading the word to actually getting visitors through the door on opening night.
  5. The value of a Google grant. In its effort to support non-profit organizations, Google (responsible for more than a third of all digital ad revenue) offers significant financial support to entities like museums. The search engine giant offers grants that match up to $10,000 in ad spend every month for 501(c)3 organizations.

These points make digital advertising for museums a no-brainer solution for any museum or attraction looking to gain a consistent audience and revenue stream. Feel free to use them as a business case to your supporters or supervisors to ensure that you have the budget necessary for the below opportunities.

Step 2: Build Your Audience and Targeting Opportunities

The general benefits of digital advertising for museums are clear, but it’s important to understand one caveat: you will only succeed if you know exactly who to target. Defining your audience and understanding how to target them should thus be your first step in building successful digital marketing campaigns for your museum.

It starts with defining your target audience to make sure that you find the people who look most like your potential and ideal visitors. Once that step is complete, take a close look at some of the targeting and segmentation opportunities that digital platforms offer to get your message in front of the right people. These are your options.

Existing Lists of Your Members

Almost every digital platform, from Google to Facebook, now allows for targeting based on email accounts. Upload a list and the network will match its contact info with that of its users, with a typical match rate between 50 and 60%. You can then show ads specifically to the matched users.

Lookalike Audiences

This step involves uploading your audience lists but allowing the platform to make a judgment call. For instance, Facebook Ads Manager will take an uploaded list and look for shared demographic and interest-based characteristics. You can then target ads to other users on the platform who share those same characteristics.

Demographic and Behavioral Targeting

In addition to basic demographic targeting, you can focus on more advanced behavioral options as well. That might include the followers of pages for other museums or interests in topics your museum focuses on.

Geographic and Time-Specific Factors

Ready to get even more advanced? By leveraging networks like Facebook or through advanced keyword targeting, you can reach users based on not just where they are, but where and when they’re traveling. Among other things, that enables you to get your ads in front of tourists while they visit your city.

The Nuances of Intent

Targeting users based on intent has been somewhat of a holy grail for digital marketers. If you know what your audience will do, you no longer have to guess what they might do. Knowing intent is becoming increasingly possible with access to search and content history, allowing you to build more specific audiences and messaging.

Step 3: Generate Awareness Through Eye-Catching, Current Campaigns

Effective museum marketing means embracing smartphone culture and building avenues for user-generated content. Done right, you can use paid ads to support these efforts to generate more awareness among members of your target audience who may have never heard about you.

A few crucial tips can help you get to that point:

  • Focus on creativity. Museum visitors tend to embrace creativity, so don’t be afraid to play around with the messaging and visuals to tell your audience more than ‘visit us.’ Good ads get results; great ads create word of mouth and encourage your audience to share them among their own followers.
  • Get that attention. Generating awareness is impossible without catching the eye of your audience. Turn images into artwork, play with the coloring, or just switch up the angles. It never hurts to get some inspiration from what other museums are doing, digitally and otherwise.
  • Build some videos. Video content tends to be highly effective, paid or unpaid. If you create the right videos, you can push them out through paid ads on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Meanwhile, over-the-top (OTT) video allows you to place digital commercials in front of highly targeted audiences on streaming services like Hulu for a fraction of the cost of traditional TV.
  • Showcase the experience. What is it like to visit your museum exhibit or attraction? What does your typical visit involve? Use your ads to showcase this experience. That might include a hyperlapse video showcasing the exhibit, a behind-the-scenes tour after dark, or other creative ways to get the attention of your unsuspecting audience.

Generating awareness means capturing attention. If you can do that, you’ve taken the first step in making sure that your audience enters your funnel and that you’ve established future contact down the road.

Step 4: Increase Consideration Among Interested Audiences

Generating awareness, of course, is only part of the battle. If that awareness never turns into tangible interest, you won’t see the ROI you need to help your museum succeed.

In this step, you go beyond that initial awareness. Here you specifically target the audience that already knows about you, through seeing your ads or following you on your social media accounts. That means refining your targeting, messaging, and ad types accordingly.

Leverage Retargeting Opportunities

Let’s start with the basics of retargeting, which describes a targeting mechanism available on all digital platforms that allows you to focus on potential visitors who have already shown an interest in your museum. By placing a so-called retargeting pixel, you can show your ads specifically to recent web visitors or app downloaders.

The implications for the consideration stage are significant. While your awareness-driven ads might prompt your audience to visit your website, retargeting draws them in deeper.

You know they’re interested now. It’s time to get specific.

Focus Your Messaging on Event Detail

Retargeting gets your message in front of the right audience. But of course, the message has to be right too. If you’re reaching interested audiences, it’s on you to satisfy their interest.

You can accomplish that by focusing on a variety of message types:

  • Details about upcoming exhibit openings and other special events.
  • Highlights from the individual exhibits that leave your audience wanting to learn more.
  • Specific opening times and dates that allow would-be visitors to make their plans.
  • Facebook event ads that push your audience to take action directly on the platform.

With this captive audience, specificity is almost always better. Give them information up front so they can see how it fits into their plans.

Step 5: Close the Deal With Decision-Based Ads

We’ve reached the bottom of the funnel, the crucial point at which your audience makes a go-or-no-go decision: should they visit your museum or enjoy your attraction, or not?

Awareness and consideration-based ads fill your funnel to get to this point. But that doesn’t mean your digital campaigns have to be complete. In fact, you can still influence this final step with the right types of ads and messaging.

The Convincing Power of Special Offers

The ads in this funnel stage have one goal: to give that final nudge. Special offers can play a major role in getting to that specific point.

It might be an early-bird special for the first few days of a new exhibit or opportunity. Another option is a membership offer that allows for extra perks such as return visits. We’re psychologically predisposed to respond positively to special offers, and decision-stage ads allow for an effective way to get these offers in front of your audience.

Leveraging the FOMO Element

One specific type of offer that’s worth highlighting in closing the deal and driving the decision: FOMO. Short for ‘fear of missing out,’ it’s a proven marketing principle that becomes invaluable at the decision stage.

Time-based special offers, like the early opening special mentioned above, are one way to leverage FOMO. You don’t have to stop there, though. User-generated content, especially from users your audience considers influencers, can have the same general psychological effect: if others are going, should I really stay home?

In digital museum advertising, FOMO should be used judiciously. It only remains credible if you don’t constantly change discount deadlines or push every new exhibit as the latest and greatest. But used selectively in ads, it can become a powerful tool to drive that visit decision.

Step 6: Measure Your ROI to Maximize Digital Ad Potential

Building ads throughout the funnel allows you to create a more strategic marketing effort that should, in theory, drive more visits. That doesn’t mean you have to hope for it. Instead, the final step in building your comprehensive digital ad campaign is to measure the ROI of your efforts.

Whenever possible, connect your ads to that next funnel step you want and need your audience to take as the core KPI:

  • Awareness-based ads are successful when they drive consideration, measured through web visits and ad engagement.
  • Consideration-based ads succeed when they show a clear path to the decision, like visits to a pricing page or calls for booking.
  • Decision-based ads should lead directly to actual revenue through ticket purchases and advanced booking.

A comprehensive campaign designed for the entire funnel should have revenue as its ultimate goal to drive true ROI. That requires analytics tools such as geo-conversion lift, measuring not just online conversions (an undoubtedly crucial part of the equation) but also actual foot traffic to your location.

Building this type of campaign is not easy. It requires careful thought and planning, as well as the right tools. At the same time, the effort will be well worth the investment when your attraction sees a significant increase in revenue and foot traffic as a direct result of your full-funnel digital ad campaign.

You don’t have to do it alone. With our help, you can build comprehensive campaigns designed to help your museum or attraction gain awareness and revenue to sustain and make a regional name for itself. Drop us a line to start the conversation.

5 Ways to Market Your Bakery Online

By Marketing, WebsitesNo Comments

Consumers today have hundreds of options for virtually every need in their lives, including food. You know your baked goods are palate pleasers, but how can you convince people who have never been to your bakery of that?

The best way is to start advertising where they already are: the Internet. The possibilities for digital advertising are virtually endless, but this page has a few online marketing strategies for bakeries to help you start using your site, social media, and paid options to their full potential.

Regardless of how they find your site, your goal should be to convince them to come to your bakery and make a purchase. Here’s how:

1. Simple navigation

Most visitors come to your site for basic information like your location, operating hours, and baked goodies, so make it as easy as possible for them to find those things. The best way is to include them at the bottom of every page, as well as creating a very basic navigation system for everything else.

You should be sure to have a clean and simple navigation bar at the top of every page so that users will be able to find exactly what they’re looking for at every location on your site. You can also precisely arrange your pages by creating drop-down menus within each of your navigation bar menus.

2.  Good-looking Photos

Delicious-looking photos can sometimes be all it takes to make someone come to your bakery, and are much more compelling than text. Because of this, be sure to include some images photos of your bread, pastries, and other baked goods.

The most important thing to remember when choosing photos is that they need to be real examples of your food. It should go without saying, but never use stock photos. You may think you’re saving time, but if the photos on your site look nothing like what you sell, customers will feel misled. Even a few quick photos shot on a smartphone are better than photos that aren’t authentic

3. Descriptions

In addition to photos, add descriptions of your baked goods to your site. This is important on the off-chance that your photos don’t load well for certain users, and will also help search engines understand your site.

Even the most advanced search engines, like Google, can’t process images like human eyes. So even if you include a hundred photos of specialty cupcakes, Google won’t be able to figure out that your site is a great result for someone who searches for “cupcakes.”

4. Purchasing information

Be sure to include information on where and how people can buy your baked goods. Do they have to visit your physical store? Can they order online? Can they place an order in advance for an event?

Make the purchasing process as clear as possible, and always include a map and phone number in case of confusion.

 5. What sets you apart

As unique as your bakery may be, the fact is that there are many other bakeries out there with similar options. When your potential customers are browsing their choices online, you need to show them what sets you apart.

What specialties do you offer? Are your recipes part of a family tradition? Do you have an interesting backstory? You don’t have to write a novel-length explanation, but you should make an effort to show visitors exactly why they should choose you over your competitors.

Of course, when writing your copy and including your images, you should be sure to do search engine optimization, or SEO. This will help Google and other major search engines find your site rapidly, and will assist in improving your page rankings.

If you aren’t sure which keywords are best suited for your business, think about how you would search for a bakery. What keywords would you input in the search engine? Are there any long-tail keywords (those that include phrases or geographic locations) that might be worth optimizing on a page or two? Do some research first, then include those keywords for the best chances of ranking well.

Start planning your perfect bakery web design today!

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