Successful Dealer Branding to Improve Your Car Dealership Sales: 7 Steps

For car dealers, branding is important since it reflects their key customer promises.

Here are seven steps to successful branding for your car dealership.

1: Determine Your Car Dealership Brand

Within the larger OEM space, decide what your dealership stands for, your motto, your priorities, your promise to customers, etc.

Discuss this with your managers, team leads and staff and come to a clear conclusion.

2: Perform a Brand Image Audit

Before you try to change or fix anything, you need to understand the dominant customer perception about your dealership.

Perform your brand audit that includes visual identity, brand message, consistency of messaging across web and print, and more.

3: Prepare a Style Guide & Share it with Everyone

Once you have mapped the gaps in your brand positioning, work on a style guide and share it with everyone involved at your car dealership.

This style guide is a reference document that lets everyone know the standard to be followed for successful dealer branding.

4: Invoke Emotions

Emotional associations play a major role in customer loyalty. Ideally your brand identity like logo and signage should invoke customer trust.

Think of the ways to touch your customers and prospects emotionally, and map these touch-points to the customer journey.  

5: Put Technology to Use

Make use of modern technology to improve your brand communication.

There are dozens of tools out there that can work with your CRM system to send out email follow-ups, social media messaging, text messaging, etc. Explore this space.

6: Run Loyalty Programs

Your car dealership’s customers are the people who already trust and love you. Initiate a customer loyalty program to keep in touch with these customers to improve your sales, service income, and referrals.  

7: Keep an Eye on Your Competitors

Dealers in the same segments mostly sell vehicles that are quite similar in terms of price and functionality. The key difference that separates successful dealers from others is customer perception.  

Dealers need to monitor what competitors in the same market are doing, and benchmark their brand communication. remember, it is the ones that go over and above the average score who usually dominate the market.

For more information, Contact Us.