Education

10 Effective Strategies for Car Dealership Marketing

August 21st, 2023

In today’s competitive automotive industry, it’s crucial for car dealerships to employ smart marketing techniques to boost visibility, attract more customers, and ultimately increase sales. In this article, we will explore ten strategies that have proven successful for car dealerships of all sizes.

More goes into car dealership marketing than people expect. We all need cars, so selling cars should be easy, right? Unfortunately, if you’re looking up effective strategies for car dealership marketing, you probably already know the answer. sMedia can help you! Schedule a demo today to learn more about how to develop and execute the best car dealership marketing strategy!

Marketing Efficiency

How to Sell your GM on an Attribution Tool

March 15th, 2023

“What brought you in today?” It’s a common question car salespeople ask every customer. It’s a tactic to get the shopper talking and opening up, and it can help find out what channels bring in dealership traffic. But it’s inaccurate, and it doesn’t account for much more than the most recent touchpoint a customer recalls. And it’s not the best way to measure marketing metrics. That’s where attribution comes into play.

It can be hard to justify the investment in attribution: why do you need it, what are potential benefits and how can it help meet your dealership’s goals? You know that there is a great deal of value in having an attribution tool, but what about convincing others? This blog post will give you some ideas for selling your general manager on investing in an attribution tool. 

Grow Car Sales

How to avoid RDR and hit sales targets before Q4

December 17th, 2019

Remember the last time you were relying on Retail Delivery Registration (or RDR) to hit your monthly targets?  

Every Q4 dealers face a harsh reality – the sales targets add up from previous months. Dealers often have to turn to RDR as they barely hit yearly sales targets.

With the growing demand of sales targets from the OEM, not to mention mid-month target change at times, how do you keep up in this volatile landscape?

Marketing Efficiency

Dealerships: are you wasting advertising dollars on poorly merchandised inventory?

October 8th, 2019

It’s no secret that dealerships invest a significant amount of money on their advertising. You could probably open your email right now and find a new opportunity to spend $1000, but should you? What happens when you have seemingly great campaigns but you still aren’t getting results? 

Grow Car Sales

Top advertising techniques to stay ahead of the competition this spring sales season

March 6th, 2019

Spring is right around the corner, and you know what that means for dealers – vehicle sales season is coming up.

March is traditionally the biggest month of the year for car sales. In the US, vehicle sales plummeted in March 2018 compared to the previous year (according to Statista).

Marketing Efficiency

How to save 25% on your ad fees: breakdown of the “tech tax”

February 21st, 2019

The Automotive industry is no stranger to digital advertising.


Both US and Canadian markets are continuously increasing investment in digital advertising and marketing. eMarketer experts forecast consistent growth in digital ad spending for Automotive through 2020.

Engaged Prospect Metric

Why VDP engagement is key: the main metric you should chase

February 8th, 2019

In traditional dealership advertising – whether it’ radio, TV, newspaper or direct email – GMs usually use one metric to evaluate ROI (return on investment): how many people come through the door.

When dealerships adopt online marketing, they lose focus in vanity metrics that have little to no correlation with sales. Marketers start chasing traffic spikes, bounce rate, time on page, or a number of clicks and hit the wall with advertising campaigns. They target wide segments of unqualified traffic for low engagement at a high cost.

Ad spend becomes a liability rather than an investment.