Topic: digital marketing
Four key digital marketing trends for a new 2020: Webinar recap

CarGurus recently hosted a webinar with Facebook and Bosak Motors to discuss digital marketing trends for a new 2020. The participants shared many key insights over 30 minutes. Here are four important takeaways:
Update your marketing messages for the moment
Make sure to update your creative and messaging to communicate exactly what’s happening at the dealership right now. Bosak Motors updated all their messaging to advertise the services they’re offering to help keep customers safe, such as home delivery, contactless services, and online vehicle sales.
Perry Hewitt’s digital marketing strategy tips: Navigate 2019 video

Does this statement ring true for you? Digital marketers are drowning in tactics and struggling to figure out what marketing really is—and isn’t.
Today’s marketing environment is complex, has been disrupted by technology and tools, and is constantly changing. Nodding your head? This session from our 2019 Navigate conference might help you untangle the marketing mess.
4 ways to handle after-hours leads

Your dealership hours might be nine to five, but your customers’ lives are not. More and more are doing their homework—73% of car shoppers research and compare exhaustively—and a lot of it is done online. Shoppers visit 13 auto sites on average. So it’s likely that their first contact with a dealership is after regular working hours.
The worst thing you can do with customer leads is let them sit, so there’s extra pressure on dealers to respond even when the physical shop may be closed. Here are four ways to capture and address those after-hours leads.
Takeaways from Navigate 2019: How to optimize your Google My Business listing

In the early days of the internet, websites were created with the desktop experience in mind. Mobile sites were an afterthought. Today, all websites are developed to be used on any device—desktop, mobile, or tablet—and the best websites are designed to be mobile-first.
Justin Brun and Ben Koller, co-founders of Dynamic Beacon, presented at last month’s Navigate conference on the importance of creating a dealership web experience that’s mobile first. In their presentation, Why Mobile First Design is Mission-Critical to Your Dealership Success, Justin and Ben cover tips and tactics for improving your dealership’s web presence—from optimizing your website for mobile, to mobile email best practices. You can download their entire presentation deck here.
A car dealer’s guide to videography
Dealers are no doubt aware of the impact a decent set of photos can have on a used car shopper, but video takes things one step further because it’s the next best thing to seeing a car in person. More and more retailers are using walkaround videos to show off their inventory, but as with any form of advertising, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.
We explain the dos and don’ts of producing a top-quality used car video that’s guaranteed to catch shoppers’ attention.
3 simple steps for improving your dealership website
Most dealers say their website is their highest converting tool. However, in my role as a CarGurus account manager, I often see a one-size-fits-all approach to dealership websites. They’re missing any personality or wow factor, and they can be difficult to use. Together, these website issues don’t make me want to explore the inventory on the site or submit a lead for a vehicle that fits my search.
There are plenty of ways to optimize your website for shoppers though, whether you maintain your website in house, or you rely on a website host to keep it up to date. Here are three things we suggest doing to improve your website.
Understanding the what and why of retargeting

You visit a website to check out a pair of shoes you’ve been eyeing. You leave without buying them. You visit TSN to check a score, then sign into Facebook to look at your newsfeed, and so on. Suddenly, you notice there are ads for the very shoes you were looking at following you around the web.
Maybe you ignore the ads at first, but after seeing the shoe ad for the tenth time, you decide to go back to the website and buy them.
That’s retargeting at work—and we’ve probably all had this experience in today’s digital age.
5 tips for writing compelling copy for online automotive ads
In the past several years, there’s been a surge in digital advertising spend in the automotive industry. And eMarketer forecasts that consistent, double-digit growth in digital ad spending will continue through 2021.
Yet all too often, dealerships treat the copy in their advertising as an afterthought. They toss in a few keywords, check the grammar, and hit publish. But copy is important—words matter!—and it should be treated that way.
We’ve put together some of the top tips for writing ad copy to help your dealership get the greatest ROI from online ads.
Tips for making your content more effective as a marketing tool

Effective dealership websites aren’t just lists of inventory. They’re full of useful information and advice, which attracts web traffic and ultimately generates more sales leads. The best way to create worthwhile content is through consistent and up-to-date blogging.
Here are a few blogging tips you can use to increase traffic to your dealership website—and boost your sales!