Welcome to Conversations with Convertus, our new video series!
We’ve heard your frequently asked questions and we aim to clear up some of the complexities within this intricate thing we call digital marketing. We’re going to be de-mystifying some industry concepts and common practices, as well as sharing some tips to help improve your dealership’s digital strategy and sell more cars!
Today, we’re starting off with the basics.
“What even is digital marketing?”
Put simply, the term digital marketing includes all forms of marketing efforts that are shared online via digital channels like social media, search engines, email and websites. In digital marketing, there are many different strategies, platforms and channels to connect with customers, or users, online. Key purposes for marketing online include: to create brand awareness, increase web traffic (as well as in-store traffic), generate quality leads and customers, and ideally to help your dealership sell more cars.
The difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing is the platform in which its presented. We’ve shifted from primarily advertising in the physical world (brochures, billboards, print ads, television, radio etc.) to marketing across digital interfaces. Unlike many forms of traditional marketing, the impacts of digital marketing efforts are easily measurable. Businesses are able to view in-depth metrics and analytics in real-time to monitor digital marketing efforts and adjust strategies accordingly.
So, why should your dealership utilize digital marketing?
Well, 4.1 billion people are online as of July 2018. That’s why.
Chances are your target audiences spend a lot of time online across many devices, so it makes sense for your dealership to advertise there, right? In practice, we ensure your dealer shows up for its ideal audiences by using paid search (and paid social) campaigns through display ads, search ads and dynamic ads on various search engines. We also optimize your dealership’s online presence, whether it’s making improvements on the website to increase your quality score or managing your presence across Google (think Google My Business listings and inbound link-building from other websites).
Digital marketing is cost effective, can attract a higher amount of quality leads, produce better ROI, lead to higher conversion rates and, best of all, analytics and campaign results are easily measurable, as mentioned above.
There are a lot of moving parts and methods which make up digital marketing and over the course of our series we’re going to clear up some questions that you may have. To start off, we’re going to offer quick and easy definitions of two common terms within digital marketing: SEO and SEM
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
This is something that we do here at Convertus! We refer to SEO as Organic Search because Google organically selects search results based on factors including the user’s query and location, as well as the quality score assigned to the appearing websites. Our Organic Search team works their magic to optimize your dealership’s website through various improvements (including powerful copywriting, image optimization, page speed, effective title tags and meta descriptions and so on). All of these efforts help to improve your on-page experience (stay tuned, we’ll be defining quality score in our upcoming videos!), allowing your website to show up on the first page of Google, above your competitors.
SEM=Search Engine Marketing
SEM generally encompasses paid marketing efforts across a search engine (You know those ads that show up at the very top of a search engine results page, or as visual ads that appear on various websites? Those are paid for. Those are SEM efforts.) At Convertus, we refer to SEM as Paid Search. It’s paid advertising in the form of display ads (images) and search ads (text ads). Each one of these paid search methods are tailored to your dealership’s marketing goals.
Stay tuned because in our next few videos, we’re going to be doing a deep dive into the difference between Organic Search (SEO) and Paid Search (SEM).
Want to learn more about how digital marketing can contribute to your dealership’s success? Reach out to our amazing Customer Success team at support@convertus.com. We’ve got you covered!