The automobile industry is a highly competitive market where anyone from a small car dealership to big brands are fighting to attract consumers’ interests. The majority of the shoppers depend on online research rather than sifting through brochures and car dealerships. With ongoing online marketing advancements, car dealerships should start to focus on using social media or automotive influencer marketing to increase their customer outreach.
Through automotive influencer marketing, dealerships can generate compelling content to attract customers towards their dealerships and build better relationships with prospective buyers using engaging trends and interactive content.
What is Automotive Influencer Marketing?
Automotive Influencer Marketing refers to creating digital content focused on the automotive industry. An automotive influencer is the key to getting the right audience and customer base to your dealership. These automobile influencers usually have at least 1000 engaged followers and good reach on social media organically. The right car influencer will promote your brand and dealerships to persuade his/her audience to make the right choice and choose your dealership for their car and other car related accessories purchase.
Influencer automotive marketing plays a crucial role in shaping a customer’s opinion and influencing the decisions of potential car buyers. With the help of engaging content and informative insights and reviews, these influencers impact the purchase behavior of the customers.
Why Influencer Marketing is Non-Negotiable for Success in the Digital Era?
With the rapid growth of social media, you probably don’t need a reminder of how pervasive influencer marketing can be. Influencer marketing in the automotive industry is changing the face of advertisements and brand-consumer dynamics. The majority of brands report that influencer marketing campaigns help yield better quality leads compared to other marketing strategies. Here’s why Influencer marketing is a non-negotiable in this digital era:
Boosting Online Presence
With the growing digital influence, automobile brands compete with each other in this saturated market by having a strong online presence. These car influencers help generate buzz around the automotive brand and show their products in the form of engaging scenarios, informational content and more within their trusted automotive fanbase. This increases the chances of brand recognition and potential sales while increasing the online presence.
Adaptability to New Strategies
Automotive brands have to constantly deal with changing technology and they need to reinvent themselves in order to keep up with the growing competition and changing environment. The use of influencer marketing represents the adaptability of brands towards new marketing strategies. This flexibility and adaptability towards growing marketing strategy can be beneficial to the brands by attracting potential customers.
Consumer Trust and Brand Loyalty
Buying a car requires huge investments as a consumer. There needs to be credibility to the brand in order to acquire potential customers. Influencers help build this trust among their followers towards a brand by using their existing trust with them. When an influencer promotes his/her personal experience with the brand, he can greatly influence the purchase behavior of his followers and can lead to better long term prospects and brand loyalty.
Human Touch to Branding
Automobile influencers help break down complex and technical aspects of the cars that may seem intimidating to a general consumer by using layman’s language and promoting products using relatable experience to their audience. This personal touch has a great impact on the purchase intent of a potential customer. A customer is more likely to convert if he or she feels connected to the brand on a personal level.
Emerging Market Segments
Ever since the new advancements in the automotive industry such as EVs and self-driving technology, it has become important for the automotive brands to reach out to the niche segment that have interests in both new technology and automobiles. Influencer marketing auto related niche can help appeal to prospective consumers. By partnering with these influencers, brands can promote their USPs to a highly engaged audience.
Challenges and Considerations in Automotive Influencer Marketing
The major challenge in automotive influencer marketing is to find the right influencer to promote your brand. You need to see if the influencer’s following aligns with your target market. If an influencer has a huge following but lacks your target interest or expertise in your niche, their potential reach might not lead to potential conversions. An in-depth research is needed in order to find the right influencer to align with your brand.
This is where automotive influencer agencies come in handy. Automotive Influencer agencies such as Spyne AI have a series of influencers connected with them which have a good reach in the automotive sector and can deliver a deliberate set of influencers depending on your targeting and brand to provide the best results to your influencer marketing campaign.
A right balance needs to be attained between authentic and promotional influencer marketing. If the content is overly promotional, it might lead to damage to both influencer and brand’s credibility. The content needs to be engaging and relatable to the audience for better success of the campaigns and to help maintain authenticity.
When going for an influencer marketing automotive campaign, brands must make sure to keep realistic expectations. While influencer marketing is a viable option to improve brand image and reach, its results might not be visible instantly. It takes time to build brand loyalty and trust which helps in long-term gains.
Also, it’s important to not keep the consumers in the dark regarding the brand collaborations which is why a variety of regulations are in place by the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. According to which, brands must ensure that influencers disclose their partnerships appropriately to maintain transparency.
The last thing to keep in mind is to keep defining specific metrics of success to a campaign. Influencer campaign tracking is a complex task, which is why predefined tracking metrics should be listed to measure the impact of the campaign accurately.
How to Identify the Right Automotive Influencers for Your Dealership
As mentioned above, one of the most challenging aspects of any successful influencer campaign is to choose the right influencer. Here are a few things to keep in mind that can help you get on the right track:
- Aligned with Brand values: Make sure that the car influencers content and audience is aligned with your dealership’s brand values. An influencer more resonating with your brand can create more relevant and authentic content.
- Target Audience: The dealership’s target market and influencer’s target audience should be overlapping. Analyzing various demographics of the influencer’s audience such as age, location, and interests is essential to make sure the reach to potential customers is successful.
- Content Quality: An influencer who creates engaging as well as informational content regarding the automobile industry is more likely to impact and be trusted by the target automotive audience. High-quality and relevant content is the key to generating good quality leads for your dealership.
How to Evaluate an Influencer’s Reach, Engagement, and Authenticity
Measuring an influencer’s potential reach can be a complex task. Also, with growing social media, the number of fake influencers is also growing, which is why it is important to recognize the potential of a real influencer and discard the fake ones. Here are a few key metrics that can help you evaluate it:
- Reach and Followers: Only a high number of followers is not enough. You need to check whether the views, shares and comments align with the number of followers.
- Engagement Rates: Engagement rates define how involved a creator’s audience is with him/her. Higher engagement directly means a better possibility of a successful automotive influencer marketing campaign.
- Credibility: Authentic Influencers have a better hold on to their audience and can persuade more potential buyers.
- Consistent Posting: Regular posting is a clear indication of an active online presence and commitment towards their audience. This helps with the loyal fanbase.
- Collaboration History: Successful past collaborations especially in the automotive sector can be a potential indicator towards a successful campaign.
- Third Party Analytics Tools: Third-party analytics tools can be used to analyze influencer audience and demographics to be matched with dealership’s target audience.
Does Your Dealership Need Automotive Influencer Marketing Strategy?
Influencer marketing has been recognized for its higher return on investments as compared to other traditional strategies of marketing. It was also reported in the CBT news, that a consumer is 71% more likely to buy a product if it is recommended by a known influencer. Teaming up with an influencer not only amplifies your dealership’s visibility across various social media but also improves the credibility amongst the influencer’s audience.
Also, you might not need a big influencer to promote your brand right away. If you are a local dealership, micro influencers who are known locally in your area. This can help you with more credibility within small reach. This plays as a vital marketing tool if you are trying to reach out to local audiences and helps you create more brand authority in specific areas.
If you’re a large dealership, looking out for a national level known influencer could be the right approach. This provides you a wider audience segment within your niche as people tend to trust their recommendations which could bring in potential buyers.
In a nutshell, integrating influencer marketing to your existing marketing strategies could prove to be a beneficial stepping stone for your car dealership.
Conclusion
Automotive Influencer marketing is the perfect tool for car dealerships as well as big automotive brands to tap into influencer automotive reach, credibility and creativity to drive sales to their dealerships or websites. Influencers help engage with niche audiences to promote potential buying decisions of the target audience by providing interactive experience for their followers.
Choosing the right influencer for your dealership is a complex task, but the impact of reaching out to this niche audience is a game changer. If you are a small car dealership or even a large car dealership, choosing the influencer is not your cup-of-tea, then you can also choose an automotive influencer agency to do it for you.
  
