A recent Marketing Dive piece we read featured the insights of marketers that weighed in on what they’ve seen as the biggest lead generators for their business. Spanning various industries, the study by Ascend2 noted that 47% said email marketing was the most effective in lead marketing, then video marketing (45%), social (40%), web personalization (33%) and SEO (33%).

So what does this mean for your dealership’s marketing strategy?

When looking at these numbers and what marketers say is really working for their businesses, are you implementing these strategies to bring more customers into your dealership? Another notable portion of the study revealed where marketers were shifting their budget to in the next year. That included:

• 82% plan to increase their digital spending over the next year by an average of 49%
• 73% listed search and social as most important channels

While your dealership’s overall budget has the largest impact on what you can put towards marketing, it is important to take note of these statistics. Are you investing in these kinds of strategies to get the most return on investment?

Marketers in the study also said that email marketing is the most valuable for BOTH generating leads as well as nurturing them. If your dealership struggles to manage leads that come in and when to follow up with them, utilizing a tool like ours to manage and track the workflow of leads could be critical.

When it comes to video marketing being listed as the second strategy most effective for lead generation, it’s important to look at how much video or imagery your dealership currently participates in. Is there video anywhere on your website or on your social media channels? If not, it’s probably time to consider some ways to integrate that. With most phones having video capabilities with quality cameras nowadays, there are a lot of opportunities to create short and professional looking videos for your dealership. Here are some ideas we’ve written about in the past that show how you can integrate video into your marketing strategy along with examples of different videos you can start with.

Social media came in at number three for marketers, so if you think it won’t work for your audience, you’re wrong. We’ve seen tremendous success with our dealers social media channels. Even if you don’t feel like your dealership can devote the time to working with us to manage your social media pages, even signing up for our Inventory Broadcaster product to automatically post inventory to your pages has provided our dealers with over 300% more visitors to their website! Check out how social media helped these two agriculture businesses in a big way here.

If you aren’t investing in any of these marketing techniques, feel free to reach out to us at marketing@commercialwebservices.com to start a conversation about how you can easily integrate this into your broader lead generation strategy.