7 sales strategies for vehicle suppliers

A good marketing campaign helps you connect with your current customers and attract new leads.

In the industry, where there is so much competition, having a solid automotive marketing strategy can help you better connect with that potential audience and show what makes your brand different compared to your main rivals.

For this reason, in this article you will learn 7 sales strategies for vehicle suppliers and how this type of business can face digitization.

If you want more direct information, review all the points in this article.

Index

1. 1) 1. Adjust campaigns to trends
2. 2) 2. Learn more about your audience
3. 3) 3. Do not abandon traditional marketing
4. 4) 4. Appear in directories
5. 5) 5. Take advantage of social networks
6. 6) 6. Engage in email and text marketing
7. 7) 7. Use remarketing
8. 8) How to deal with digitization? The Future of Automotive Supplier Sales
   1. 8.1) 1. Establish a value selling culture
   2. 8.2) 2. Change of the sale of products to solutions
   3. 8.3) 3. Target your customers proactively
   4. 8.4) 4. Digitize and standardize sales processes
9. 9) Conclusions

1. Adjust campaigns to trends

SEO, digital advertising, content marketing. All of these tactics must fit the trends of the car buying industry.

For example, a trend in car buying today is that more people are looking for information online before making a call or visiting a dealership . You can capitalize on this type of trend by spending more time and effort on your content marketing and CPC campaigns.

But also the trends must be to the searches of the users. You can use tools such as Google Trends that allows you to know which car brand is being searched for the most in the place where you are. So you can modify your sales strategies or the acquisition of new products.

In this way, you will catch potential customers during their initial searches. For that, I recommend that you implement chatbots in your digital channels . Thus, all the high volume of attention that a bot is going to receive will have the task of reducing it.

2. Know more about your audience

To the average customer, all automotive marketing seems the same . And maybe that’s because it is. Most dealers have the same types of deals for certain days. They offer the same benefits packages as nearby competitors.

But, if you’re really trying to stand out, think about what you can do that’s unique to your brand. The development of these ideas can come from deep research about your target audience.

For that, ask yourself: What can I offer to people that will make them see my company differently from the rest?

For example, you can offer some type of contest or limited time offer to customers. You can also work in partnerships with other organizations. Or look for collaborators within your community so that potential customers have more security about your business.

3. Do not abandon traditional marketing

Digital marketing is popular, and it can benefit your business to be online and focus on web and social channels. But that doesn’t mean traditional marketing is dead. Print advertising is still content marketing, even if it’s not digital .

TV commercials are still forms of multimedia advertising, whether or not you put them on YouTube as well.

In an industry as big as auto, not all of your audience members are online , and not all of them are browsing social media for reviews and advice.

That’s why it ‘s important to learn about your target audience so you can find the right balance of digital and traditional marketing for your business.

4. Appear in directories

Before the Internet, if you wanted your service business to appear somewhere people could find it, you put it in the Yellow Pages . You can still do that today. The platform has just moved online .

Getting listed in online directories can help your SEO. They also provide information about your hours, location and commercial offers. Once again, if your competition is here, you should be too . And if they’re not, then that gives you another avenue where you can make the most of the market.

There are many online directories such as Yellow Pages, Yahoo or the Better Business Bureau (BBB). It is important not only to have these listings, but to keep them current and accurate with the correct information.

This makes your company look competent, which builds trust with your audience. Depending on the service, there are free and paid directory listings. It’s all a matter of digging deeper.

5. Take advantage of social networks

I already told you about how some of your audience may not be online, but there’s a good chance a lot of them are . And if they are there, you should be too.

Create social media strategies for your business on channels that make sense. For example, most automotive companies can benefit from having a Facebook profile . This is because Facebook caters to a wide demographic, has an emphasis on local advertising, and allows sharing of text and multimedia content.

Dealerships can benefit from an Instagram account because they can use the visual platform to share photos of their new inventory. If you have a small marketing team, they know perfectly well that you don’t have to be on every platform.

But you must be where your audience hangs out. That is, you must participate in the platforms where they have a presence. That means consistently posting and engaging with customers and prospects on each.

6. Engage in email and text marketing

Email and text marketing are a great way to keep in touch with past customers so they come back when they need new vehicles or more parts.

These are also useful tactics for collecting contact information from potential customers and keeping your business top of mind when they need it . There are many email and text marketing strategies to use in the automotive industry.

You can send out a newsletter, update people on new models or products, or offer sales incentives or discounts. Now, when I refer to text messages, I don’t mean SMS, but messages through digital channels.

For example, if you have the WhatsApp Business API , your business will be able to send personalized notifications to all the numbers in your database. That is, you can do mass message campaigns for WhatsApp . And as you well know, this application is one of the most used by your customers.

7. Use remarketing

Remarketing or retargeting allows you to send certain visitors to your website ads to remind them to take a specific action. This strategy helps you get a second chance to convert your visitors into potential customers .

Remarketing can reduce your bounce and abandonment rate and keep your business or brand top of mind as shoppers work through the upper levels of the marketing and sales funnel.

Google found that 95% of car buyers use digital sources of information before making a purchase . Therefore, that your business is noticed on a digital level, and combining that with traditional marketing efforts, you can meet people where they are looking.

This certainly increases brand recognition and trust with your company , making them want to take the next step and become a customer.

How to deal with digitization? The Future of Automotive Supplier Sales

Chatbots, omnichannel, eCommerce, sales automation – digitization buzzwords like these have been driving sales organizations around for years.

So how can companies deal with these kinds of changes? Through countless research on industry sales projects, five key success factors in the new world of B2B sales have been identified :

1. Establish a value selling culture

The main goal of blind shopping is to get comparable deals so that price alone is the deciding factor in who gets the deal. The most effective counterweight to this is, and will be for the foreseeable future: highlighting the value your offer has for customers, aka “value selling ”.

The good news is that digitization can help you with this. Either through CRM systems in which it stores all relevant customer information.

The important thing is that you establish a clear value sale process that covers everything from repurchase, through how to handle the request for quotes, to the execution of the project.

2. Shift from selling products to solutions

The business world is more complex than ever, and car sales are no exception. Whereas in the past, companies simply sold individual components and were done with them, today (and in the future), customers demand comprehensive solutions .

Basically, they are not looking to buy a product, but rather a complete answer to their problems or challenges. This trend toward end-to-end solutions requires additional sales roles and more professional communication with customers .

Companies need not only capable key account managers, who understand customer needs, but also competent solution managers , who can compile a comprehensive solution from different product areas.

3. Target your customers proactively

Right now, many sales teams are too receptive. Bearing in mind that more than 50% of the purchase decision has already been made by the time the supplier receives the quote. Sales efforts must be increased before that point is reached .

Clients assess, determine and define their needs in detail, prepare for purchase, pre-select suppliers and finalize specifications before submitting a quote request. The key to proactively starting to sell during this phase is understanding customers and helping them through this process.

In the pre-acquisition phase, a number of activities are crucial to ensuring successful sales, including: Finding out what challenges customers have and how your products and solutions can help them . In addition, you must learn how to approach customers and what activities should be planned based on these findings.

4. Digitize and standardize sales processes

Digitization is not only a challenge for automotive suppliers, as mentioned above, it can also be the solution . All the proposed measures have full impact if they are supported by tools that standardize and automate a large part of them.

Therefore, it is important that you have an omnichannel platform. In this way you will have all your service channels in one place. What to avoid having areas for each type of channel.

By integrating all channels, you make customer information much more efficient when it comes to saving and analyzing it.

Conclusions

Digitization is changing the way vehicle suppliers can sell their products. However, this transformation is very useful since it allows us to know even better what the customer’s behavior is. or what solutions they are currently looking for.

Additionally, through precise segmentation, a vendor can reach potential customers who are most likely to purchase . However, for this, their service channels must be optimized so that the service to this type of user is the most optimal.