Marketing

IF YOU’RE running a powersports retail business, you’re a success-oriented individual. You might have started in the business because you love to ride or wrench, but at the end of the day, you want to see your business grow and flourish.

Online marketing, properly executed, is a powerful weapon you can use to make that happen. But if you’re not careful, you can fall into any number of traps – over-aggressive expectations, failure to understand your customer base and prospect markets, and focusing on delivery instead of creating a valuable marketing message (hint: content is king) are just three of them. These traps cost you time and money.

CUSTOMERS AREN’T UNIFORM. The people coming to your dealership for rides, parts, accessories, gear and service represent a diverse group of people who possess a wide variety of ages, incomes, interests, preferences and needs.

Does your marketing reflect that?

For generations, businesses advertised in a scatter-shot fashion, running advertising across a variety of broad-reach media such as print, radio and television, and using advertising appeals and messaging that were equally broad. Expensive direct mail efforts were about as targeted as marketing could get.

Enter online marketing. Regardless of the online venue — advertising, social media, email — you can precisely pinpoint customers and give them the most relevant marketing messages. This lets you distribute emails with subject lines and pre-headers that appeal to specific customer groups. This lets you target your online advertising to specific groups. This helps you create promotions and campaigns to are highly specific to niches within your customers base.

Hold on.