Statistics show that automotive inbound marketing is outpacing its outbound marketing counterpart. Companies are three times as likely to see higher ROI on inbound marketing campaigns than outbound. 

Stay Competitive with Automotive Inbound Marketing

So you want to get on the inbound bandwagon, right? To succeed at inbound marketing, which consists of regularly reaching out to customers with succinct but powerful messages while offering helpful free content, you must stay in touch with current technology.

You can’t have an antiquated website with Vehicle Description Pages (VDPs) that use fuzzy photos or stock photos in place of high-resolution pictures. Your VDPs should also feature videos. And, as a dealership, you simply cannot afford to be lax on your social media presence. Smartphones are so sophisticated that there’s really no excuse to fall behind in any of these areas.

In fact, you can cover the basic marketing bases for your entire dealership using only an iPhone.

Just an iPhone for Inbound Marketing Auto?

Ideally, you have more marketing tools at your disposal than a single iPhone.

But to prove just how easy technology has made things for us, we’ll show you how an iPhone can do the lion’s share of your marketing. (Most of us at 9 Clouds have iPhones so that is what we are most familiar with, but an Android device could likely handle the same duties for your dealership).

Photos

Smartphones have excellent cameras — certainly good enough for VDPs. Your iPhone can take care of photography duties in its sleep (as long as you have an iPhone 4s or newer; older generations may not be up to the task). Snap photos of those new vehicles — inside and out — in a matter of minutes. Email the photos to your website manager or, better yet, use a file sharing site like Dropbox to upload them directly to a shared folder to make the process even easier and expedite your automotive inbound marketing efforts.

Comparatively speaking, the process of shooting photos with a digital camera and bringing the storage card back inside and plugging it into your computer seems like a lot of work. Shoot and upload with your iPhone, and your photos can make it to the website before you get back to the showroom.

Videos

Videos are becoming increasingly popular and are expected to have an enormous impact during 2016. They are constantly growing in popularity on Facebook, which is the top-ranking mobile app. Guess what the second-most popular app is?

YouTube. Set up an SEO-optimized YouTube channel on your computer and run it completely from your iPhone. Use this app to shoot, upload and edit YouTube videos directly from your phone to your channel.

Social Media

While you can join a multitude of social networks to market your business, we recommend being active on at least three social networks: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Guess which device has apps for all three?

You guessed it. In fact, you can’t even really use Instagram without a mobile device. Keep track of all your social media responsibilities with your iPhone, such as:

• Social Publishing: update your fans with the latest happenings from your dealership
• Social Monitoring: watching all the incoming comments, reviews and more to maintain a positive social media image

Communicate with your Team

Communication between sales, finance, service, and marketing is important in automotive inbound marketing. There are many apps that will keep your team on the same page. We like to use Slack, which has a mobile app that will allow you to stay in constant contact with your team members.

Other Functions

Ideally, you also have an active email, blog, and lead tracking campaign. But your iPhone will cover the basics. There are many apps on the App Store, some of which include mobile access to CRMs such as Salesforce and Hubspot. So you might even be able to use your iPhone to advance those efforts.

Start with Instagram

Want to become a social media guru from your iPhone? Start by becoming an Instagram expert. Download our Instagram for Auto Dealers eBook below — for free!