Even if the start of a new year isn’t particularly important to you, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are still pretty good excuses to throw a party, have some fun, and relieve some stress. In the automotive world, holiday seasons throughout the year are also a good excuse to give your customers a little something special through holiday sales events.
Whether it’s a “Fall Into Savings” event for autumn or a “Freedom Ride” sales event around the Fourth of July, the feel-good nature of holidays and the changing of the seasons makes for a great time to encourage buyers to save a little more on their next vehicle. As always, however, the trick is to take advantage of such opportunities when they are presented to you.
Thankfully, the creative capabilities available via digital marketing make this more accessible than ever. Better yet, you can take advantage of these holiday seasons even when you don’t have a holiday-themed sales event currently running.
If you don’t have a holiday-themed sales event happening, which may often be the case for holidays like Easter, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and others, you can still take advantage of the holiday season through your website content strategy.
An important thing to remember regarding content marketing is that not every page has to be a sales pitch. For salespeople who are used to viewing each customer interaction as an opportunity to sell a vehicle, this can be difficult to fully realize. But content marketing is just as much about educating and building brand awareness as it is about converting potential customers.
Holiday-themed blog posts are a great example of this. While model research pages on your website may be focused on educating potential buyers and leading them toward scheduling a test drive on a specific vehicle, these holiday blog posts aren’t about making a sale at all. They are about building brand awareness and reaching people at the highest level of the marketing funnel. In fact, they do an excellent job of reaching buyers before they’ve even expressed an interest in a new vehicle.
[Read more: Lead customers down the sales funnel using content marketing to turn your website into a research hub]
These blog posts are all about building that relationship with the community, and they do this by helping your audience locate Easter egg hunts in the area, find restaurants that are open on Thanksgiving, discover options for Independence Day fireworks shows, or find the best Christmas light displays in the area. None of this necessarily has anything to do with cars, and that’s OK. While your model information pages are busy educating buyers who are actually looking to purchase a vehicle, these pages are attracting people within your local customer base, building a relationship with your brand before they’ve even realized they want or need a new car. When the time does come for that vehicle purchase, lease, or service, your dealership will be on their mind.
Moreover, these posts cover subjects that are important to those in your community, and therefore, they are some of the best traffic drivers to your website. In some cases, we’re talking thousands of page views in a relatively short amount of time. Granted, many visitors will read the page and then leave, but if even 1% of those 1 – 2,000 visitors go on to check out your online inventory or buy a vehicle from you later on, that’s a great return on your investment.
[Read more: Elevating Your Dealership’s Local SEO With Content Marketing]
When you do have holiday sales happening, it may be appropriate to link those types of community posts to a sales event page. For example, if you have a blog post about the best Black Friday deals in the area and you’re running a Black Friday sale, it makes sense to include a link to those sale details in your blog post.
Again, it doesn’t have to be, and really shouldn’t be, a sales pitch. It’s an opportunity for those already looking to take advantage of holiday savings to learn about ways they can save on a new vehicle as well. The gifting season around Christmas time is great for this, as buyers sometimes consider big-ticket gift items for their loved ones.
Another benefit of taking advantage of holidays throughout the year is that holidays create a sense of urgency. After all, holidays only last for one day, or in the case of Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, just a few days. Even when the incentives last the full month, a digital marketing strategy that reflects the upcoming holiday helps instill that “limited-time offer” feeling and pushes home the fact that those particular offers are holiday specials and won’t last long.
Now, that’s the organic side of things. On the PPC side, you absolutely should take advantage of the holiday season, but your approach will be different. Rather than building that brand relationship and reaching people before they’ve necessarily started their new car search, you’ll be targeting buyers who are ripe and ready to take advantage of that special holiday sale. This means less effort is put into trying to meet customers where they are at and more effort is put into advertising those specific offers in a way that is enticing.
These ads absolutely should make use of the holiday season with appropriately themed graphics. Holiday visuals will be far more appealing than the more generic design that people see in ads throughout the rest of the year.
You’ll also want to utilize social media during the holiday season. Organic social posts are great, but it’s worth putting a little bit more of your advertising budget into Facebook ads. The strategy is similar… create appealing holiday-themed graphics that jump out to users and create a sense of urgency… but you’ll be able to meet people on their favorite social media platform. And again, that visual appeal that comes with Christmas or Fourth of July-themed graphics makes for enticing clicks.
So, with just a few months remaining in 2019, what can you do to take advantage of the changing of the seasons and the holidays that are approaching. Well, autumn is a massive opportunity for your organic content marketing. Again, not every piece of content has to be a sales pitch. On your website blog, you can write about things your community cares about this time of year, including peak fall foliage times, apple orchards, pumpkin picking, corn mazes, and Halloween trick-or-treating times in your city. This content can bring massive amounts of traffic to the website, building that brand relationship and potential future customers.
As we near Thanksgiving and Christmas, you’ll want to kick things into high gear. For example, present your best offers as Black Friday specials, create that urgency, and then advertise those deals with Black Friday-themed graphics in your display ads and Facebook ads. Then, use your organic content strategy to reach people who may not see those ads or who may not have started their vehicle research process yet through a blog post highlighting the best Black Friday deals in your area (including your fantastic new car deals).
These are just a few ideas, but with the right team handling your digital marketing, the opportunities during the holiday season are almost endless. Find that team by scheduling your digital marketing demo with DealerFire.
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