Is Your Dealership's Video Marketing Relevant to Its Target Audience?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. That is, of course, if your content is relevant to your target audience.

People usually agree that video is the most popular content online, and it gives you a tremendous opportunity to jump ahead of your competition by getting it right. If you think having your staff dance in your showroom while lip-syncing to the latest pop hit is quality video marketing, however, stop reading this article now, please.

Are you trying to get video views, or are you trying to build valuable relationships? Just because thousands of people watch a silly video of your staff embarrassing themselves doesn’t mean that video marketing is helping your dealership build viewers’ desire to become your customers.

If your intention is to increase your search results, boost your position as an authority in your industry, or to enhance the familiarity of your dealership to gain consumer confidence, the more quality videos you have, the better chance you’ll have of gaining the right viewers. If you’re going to embark on launching or expanding your video strategy online, start with deciding what role you want video marketing to play in creating more opportunities for you to do business.

If you want to know where to start, focus on a customer-focused and geo-targeted plan. Create only quality content that will address strategic business growth goals, and just in your primary market area. You’re not Steven Spielberg, and you’re not producing a blockbuster movie.

The goal is to drive customers to engage with you. Content is critical: It must be relevant, valuable, quality content. The creative development of content takes time and effort. It doesn’t (always) take a lot of money. Well-researched and well-written content can be shot on most smartphones, then posted online for a meaningful viewing experience.

Focus on delivering a message that provides insight, information, answers, and/or solutions. If you can do this in an interesting and engaging way, your success rate of completed views and dealership contacts will multiply exponentially. Aside from relevant, valuable, and quality content, it’s critical to have your video served up by search engines as often as possible. To do this, you need to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to recognize your video as relevant to the customer’s search.

Make sure you provide the necessary details of the video — title, description, thumbnail, and a relevant file name — to aid search engines in indexing your video efficiently. Also, link back to your site in the description or video to increase the chance of the viewer getting to your website, rather than remaining on YouTube or wherever the video is hosted. It’s also worth noting that video is now given priority in social media algorithms on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook is improving its video capabilities rapidly, and Instagram now serves up live videos. Then there’s Vimeo, Snapchat, Metacafe, Dailymotion . . . the list continues to grow. Seemingly everyone is in the video space. Are you?

Scott Toland has more than 30 years of marketing experience with local dealerships, regional associations, national manufacturers, and media companies. In 2003, Scott established The Marketing Academy — then a four-day marketing workshop, today an online video platform with more than 200 ideas, strategies, and solutions. Visit TheMarketingAcademy.com.

Previous articles by Scott Toland:

Service: Now Is the Time for Dealers to Get Serious

The Dealer’s Dilemma: Spend or Invest?