Dealers' #1 source for auto industry news, content, coaching & analysis

How to electrify your EV marketing strategy

As the demand for electric vehicles surges, it is crucial for dealers to develop a sound marketing strategy to address these buyers.

Electric vehicles are becoming more prominent in dealerships. With customer interest in EVs rising along with occasional spikes in gas prices, it’s time to start flexing your digital muscle to sell these new kinds of vehicles. Strategies will vary based on the platform, so we’ll give you some basic ideas on how to market electric vehicles through paid search marketing, SEO, and social media.

Why do I need to do for advertising electric vehicles?

To be fair here, if your dealership is very active on the electric vehicles scene and you have sold all your electric vehicles and have a long waitlist of people waiting for an electric car, you might not need help selling another electric car in the next few months. 

For you, we want to help you know what to do once electric vehicles become even more mainstream, and what to do for service to create lifelong customers.

A huge reason to advertise for electric vehicles is that people simply don’t know much about them yet and people can readily be skeptical toward a vehicle not powered by a gasoline engine.

Another big reason to start advertising electric vehicles is that the market is becoming more competitive. There are more electric vehicles on the market and more dealerships that are beginning to advertise more actively for them. Not marketing your electric vehicles will make it take longer for you to catch up.

Advertising Platforms and Methods, and their uses

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization has outstanding long-term benefits for electric vehicles. The most important part of SEO is the need to build usable, reliable content which will in turn help it rank higher on Google and make your dealership a source of information for local customers. While there are many examples of things you could discuss on a webpage for SEO purposes, you could start by explaining how to charge an EV and go into more detail. Part of the idea here is to research concerns people have about electric vehicles and explain how your dealership can help.

Since some of the SEO content present on your website will likely be written by someone, ensuring your staff knows the answers to questions too.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is the long way of saying Google Ads or Microsoft Ads. These are great short and long-term strategies to use people’s search queries like “IONIQ 5 near me” to get your dealership into a higher spot with a unique message that makes them want to click. 

You can also use SEM to conquest. Find out which electric vehicles compete with ours and use those search queries to drive traffic to your site instead. You’ll pay for this month to month, and it’s a great way to jump-start your electric vehicle sales.

SEM and SEO are two great strategies. While I personally work in SEM a lot more than SEO, I find SEO to be a good long-term strategy that helps built trust while adding permanent high-quality content to your website.

Social Media

Social media blends the posting of free content to people who follow you and paid campaigns that can be targeted toward people who are generally interested in electric vehicles. Much like SEO, a good social media post is known for being helpful and potentially entertaining for the purpose of EVs. 

You can also make ads that target certain demographics in your area in regard to electric vehicles.

Conclusion

Digital advertising is an excellent way to help people in your area know that electric cars are available. While the specific recommendation about which methods to use depends on your specific scenario, a blend of SEO, SEM, and social media marketing creates the well-rounded support and messaging that most car dealerships will need.

Stay up to date on exclusive content from CBT News by following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Don’t miss out! Subscribe to our free newsletter to receive all the latest news, insight and trends impacting the automotive industry.

CBT News is part of the JBF Business Media family.

Ben Stewart
Ben Stewart
Ben is a contributing writer and reporter for CBT News with 10 years of dealership experience in automotive marketing. Ben loves all things cars and putting together strategies that help dealerships succeed.

Related Articles

Manufacturers In This Article

More Manufacturer News

Latest Articles

From our Publishing Partners