10 Jun Luxury Car Marketing Strategies For 2020 & Beyond

We have been heavily involved in luxury car dealership marketing for a very long time due to my passion for motorsports and an absolute love for all things fast. Unlike the exciting new models that come out of luxury car makers yearly, the marketing strategies for luxury car dealerships has always been very stale. If you follow my work on our luxury marketing blog, then you know I love to think outside the box and help our clients stand out.

This time around I’d like to talk about the various luxury car marketing strategies we’ve executed for our clients. Well, at least the ones that we don’t have an NDA with. I also don’t want to give too much away, but I love to showcase a few tactics you can try out literally tomorrow.

Just Say No To Boring Car Marketing

The amount of luxury car dealerships we come in to help all seem to be stuck in the past when it comes to marketing. Their clients are spending a lot of money on the product, and we think the buying experience should be something that reflects that. Obviously there’s a difference between someone buying a new BMW M2 or the latest McLaren, and the marketing tactics need to be stepped up because more than just a single sale depends on it.

You’re creating a brand fan with this next sale, and you’d better hope they want the latest and greatest model in a few years when they get bored with their current ride. If that client knows the exceptionally unique sales buying process you have, your chances for decades of business are yours to reap.

Strategic Car Spotting

We’re going to start with this strategy because it’s not only so easy to do, you can literally head out in an hour off the car lot and put it into action. A couple years ago, working with Alfa Romeo of Victoria right here in my hometown, I got to take the Alfa Romeo 4C for a few days to get a good sense of what this car was all about. While this post is not a car review, the 4C is, however, one of the most fun cars I have ever driven.

Since this car is pretty rare, even for this area where a lot of exotics are cruising the streets on a daily basis, it always drew in a crowd. Every single time I pulled up somewhere and got out, a group of folks would come up and start asking me about it. This was the plan all along because I set out to visit and park in the most affluent neighbourhoods in Victoria, and this little Italian beauty sure did shine.

Beyond just that, here’s what I have done when working with luxury car dealerships in order to drive more leads and sales their way. First and foremost, I recommend having stickers for the car printed up so you can put @yourdealership on the windows for when people start snapping photos.

• Park it for a few hours in affluent areas or in front of luxury hotels, coffeeshops, restaurants where you can sit and observe as well answer any questions easily within earshot.
• Drive around certain areas letting that exhaust do all the talking without speeding around town like a jackass.
• Take the car to any car meets like Cars & Coffee.
• Go park it outside of a rival dealership for half the day with the cameras rolling. You can take this even further with some trolling if you have the willingness to get playful.
• If there’s a local track, drive it up there even just to park it in their lot and let car enthusiasts snap pictures and talk about it.
• Invite local models for photoshoots in key locations, which opens you up to not only their follower-base, but the photographer’s as well.

This should give you a head start and I almost guarantee no other luxury car dealership in town is doing this, or to the extent I’ve put forth. There are other ways to expand on this luxury car marketing strategy, but you’ll have to contact us to find out more.

Local Car Influencer Ride Alongs

Whether it’s the Alfa Romeo 4C or the latest Ferrari model, you know that the car has lovers all over your city and nowadays there are tons of local influencers. We highly recommend you have a little fun with your social media channels, both paid and organic, and target and invite the right people to come for a ride along, test drive or photoshoot.

Another angle I think is brilliant and does more than just help sell cars, is giving back to the community with ride alongs in various ways that benefit everyone involved. Local to me here in British Columbia is a fantastic guy who runs The Driven Project which provides supercar therapy for kids battling life-threatening illnesses. If you’re not doing this in your city, why not?

This is a great chance to network, create joy with families from all walks of life and yes… it does provide some sort of backend marketing benefit for you. While that sound a bit “greasy” it is just the byproduct of doing something good, and that’s something I can certainly get behind.

There are a variety of other methods in this space to play around with but we will be keeping those private for our clients who don’t want to give their competition any bright ideas. We find that once you start pushing out these car marketing strategies, it looks awfully corny for the local competition to start copying you so make sure you’re the first.

A New Buyer Experience: The Supercar Shopping Vacation

This is something we explored with a venture here in Canada and it involved providing an even more exciting and unique supercar shopping experience for the client. Getting that new car in itself is a dream-like day, but the folks at Butiq Escapes offer experiences that nobody else on the planet provides. We worked with them to provide something extra special for new buyers that went beyond picking up their new ride at the dealership with just a mere cloth unveiling.

This experience sent the new customer on a journey with their new car across certain parts of British Columbia. The most amazing aspect of it all was that we worked with the dealerships to pitch to a worldwide clientele so sales were not just limited to this province.

Just what does a supercar shopping experience entail you ask? Well this one involved the client being picked up by private transportation at their home or hotel, and from there being driven to the dealership for their unveiling. The client was first met outside the luxury car dealership and a large bow-wrapped box was waiting for them to be opened. Inside was a custom pair of driving gloves and a racing helmet, both of which had their name, country and blood-type printed with colours matching their new car.

It didn’t stop there either. As you know, most knew cars need in a break in period, so what better way to do that than with a road trip on some of the best driving roads this place has to offer. For two days the client experienced their new car while also stopping along the way for amazing culinary delights, as well as staying in fantastic luxury hotels and private home rentals arranged for him and his wife. The final day concluded with driving instruction on the track with a professional race car driver before having the car loaded into transport and sent home without adding anymore mileage to it.

They then flew home privately knowing a whole lot more about their new car and picked up some driving skills along the way. This client, by the way, shared the whole experience within their private UHNW network of friends and family which resulted in several leads that turned into car purchases and experiences just like his.

Luxury Car Social Media Marketing

Everyone is already doing vast amounts of social media marketing within the luxury car dealership world, however, this arena changes so rapidly that most are just doing the minimal amount. We know how terrible ROI can be within various social media networks, due to either bad setup or just boring marketing strategy and content.

What we find most often lacking in luxury car marketing strategies for social media are in the following areas listed below:

• Utilizing TikTok for luxury marketing to grow organically locally and across the world
• Develop content for LinkedIn to target and reach HNW local members of your community. Aim to go trending in certain hashtags. If need be get the entire team to comment, like and share.
• Build targeted hashtag lists so you can easily deploy them within your posts; it saves a lot of time.
• Create great YouTube videos, and then aim to also have them rank highly in Google as well.
• Since organic reach on Facebook/IG is 5% or less, boost those important posts so you get traction.
• Constantly invite local car content producers to come in and have at it. Lots of local talent will do it for free.

If you work with your social media team and challenge them to push the boundaries and stay riding the wave of the latest trends, it will pay off in the long run. Social media marketing efforts tend to snowball when it all comes together, and you really cannot let off that momentum if you want to see a positive ROI.

Luxury Car Marketing Via Paid Advertising

Over the past few years, PPC and display advertising has grown into something so powerful and targeted that it makes reaching the right customers a breeze. It’s more than likely that you’re already doing PPC, media buys and display advertising within your luxury car marketing efforts.

More often than not, we see the typical half-assed Adwords and Facebook advertising in play and in 2020 this is not acceptable. If you’re running fewer than three different ad groups at the moment, not utilizing video ads, not geo-fencing or targeting by UHNW zip codes you are simply not targeting the right market.

Local newspaper, radio and print ads are often more than the bulk media spend that we come across and – while it still does work in a lot of cases – we all know that’s a rapidly dying channel. Not to mention the tracking and conversions are abhorrent most of the time, so why not reach directly into the pocket of your customer through their smartphone?

Car Dealership Marketing Strategies Beyond

If you’re looking to engage and employ some of these tactics and you want even more luxury car marketing strategies to try out, you can contact us online, send us a DM on Twitter or Instagram and of course ask for our WhatsApp contact info. We have a strong personal connection to the luxury car and motorsport marketing world and we absolutely love working within the space. At the very least, reach out to me to get a quick rundown on the gaps we see in your marketing and talk about how we can help your team dominate every single competitor in your local area.