Automotive Internet Media

Dealership Advertising

Maximizing ROI in 2025: Social Media as the Top Digital Marketing Channel

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Maximizing ROI in 2025: Social Media as the Top Digital Marketing Channel

In 2025, social media isn’t just for brand awareness. It’s the highest ROI marketing channel for businesses, including automotive dealerships. With more car buyers researching and purchasing online, dealerships that leverage social media effectively can see direct sales impact, higher engagement, and measurable results.

Published: September 24, 2025

Automotive Internet Media | Digital Marketing Agency

Social Media

The Power of Social Influence

Social media has a profound effect on consumer purchasing decisions. According to Sprout Social’s 2025 data, 81% of consumers are swayed by social media to make spontaneous purchases multiple times a year. In the automotive world, this means car buyers are increasingly influenced by dealership posts, vehicle videos, and customer testimonials shared online.

In-app purchasing and lead generation tools are also on the rise. Currently, 13% of consumers make in-app purchases, jumping to 50% for Gen Z. For dealerships, this translates into easier ways to track interest, capture leads, and guide potential buyers directly from social platforms to your showroom or online inventory.

Connecting Buyers and Vehicles Through Social Media

Social media has become a key channel for product discovery, especially among younger buyers. According to HubSpot’s 2024 Consumer Trends Survey, 64% of Gen Z and 59% of Millennials discovered products on social media within the past three months. For dealerships, maintaining a strong social media presence can be the deciding factor between capturing a lead or losing them to a competitor. Some effective strategies dealers can follow include showcasing a vehicle’s interior, technology features, or pricing details. Whether through a carousel of images on Facebook or Instagram, or a short, engaging video on TikTok or YouTube Shorts using popular sounds and trends.

Which Platforms Drive Automotive Purchases?

Not all social networks are equal when it comes to driving purchases. Overall, Facebook is the first platform for 39% of consumers ready to buy, followed by TikTok at 36% and Instagram at 29%. For Gen Z buyers, TikTok takes the lead, reflecting their preference for short-form, engaging content that drives discovery and spontaneous interest in new vehicles.

Source: Sprout Social, 2025 Social Media Marketing ROI Statistics

Understanding these platform preferences helps dealerships focus their social media efforts where it counts, creating content that resonates with the right audience and drives measurable ROI.

Maximizing ROI for Dealerships

To fully capitalize on social media in 2025, dealerships should:

  • Create high-quality, engaging content – Showcase your vehicles, highlight customer stories, and promote special offers. Make your content visually appealing and informative, whether it’s a carousel of photos, short-form videos, or live walkarounds.
  • Leverage platform-specific tools – Use in-app lead forms, shoppable posts, or test drive booking features to make it easy for buyers to engage and convert directly from social media.
  • Track conversions and revenue – Monitor leads, conversions, and sales to understand which posts and campaigns are driving real results, so you can optimize your strategy.
  • Stay agile with trends and updates – Social platforms change rapidly. Keep an eye on trending content formats, new features, and emerging audience behaviors to stay ahead of competitors.
  • Structure content around searchable queries – Think like your buyers. Optimize posts for terms your customers might search, such as “affordable starter SUVs,” “top family SUVs,” “starter sedans,” or “trucks for road trips.” For example, someone searching for “SUVs with red interior” could discover your dealership if your content aligns with that query.

 

Get Started with Automotive Internet Media

Want to supercharge your dealership’s social media presence and drive real results in 2025? Automotive Internet Media offers full-service marketing solutions designed specifically for car dealers. From crafting compelling posts to running high-ROI ad campaigns and tracking conversions, we help dealerships juice up their social media and connect with buyers where it matters most. Contact Automotive Internet Media today to get started.

Recent Posts

Automotive National TV Ad Spend Drops, Opportunity for Smarter Digital Marketing Grows

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Automotive National TV Ad Spend Drops, Opportunity for Smarter Digital Marketing Grows

Automotive national TV ad spend is trending downward, signaling a shift in how consumers are reached. With impressions and budgets declining, dealerships have an opportunity to embrace smarter, more measurable digital marketing strategies like Connected TV (CTV) and Online Video (OLV) to engage in-market buyers more effectively.

Published: September 17, 2025

Automotive Internet Media | Digital Marketing Agency

Automotive national TV advertising

Automotive National TV Ad Spend Declines
Automotive national TV advertising saw a significant decline in July, with spending down 24.7% year-over-year to $69.9 million and impressions dropping 21.5%, according to iSpot.tv. Year-to-date figures show a smaller but notable decline, with spending down 1.8% and impressions falling 15.8%.

Top Advertisers and Programming Trends
Top advertisers in July included Kia, Subaru, Lexus, Volkswagen, and Genesis. Sports programming accounted for a third of ad spend, led by MLB broadcasts and ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” while lifestyle and news programming also attracted significant investment.

Most-Viewed and Most-Liked Campaigns
Hyundai, Kia, Jeep, and Genesis ran the most-viewed spots, while Subaru and Lexus led in ad likeability with dog-themed campaigns. Lexus and GMC ranked highest for ads driving purchase intent, proving that creative storytelling still matters even as traditional TV viewership changes.

Opportunities in Smarter Digital Marketing
For dealerships looking to adapt, smarter TV marketing strategies, like Connected TV (CTV) and Online Video (OLV) advertising, offer measurable results and the ability to reach in-market car buyers more efficiently than traditional broadcast alone.

Partner with Automotive Internet Media
Contact Automotive Internet Media to learn how your dealership can maximize ad spend, increase visibility, and connect directly with active buyers through modern digital TV campaigns.

Recent Posts

20%-50% of Car Dealer Website Traffic May Not Be Human

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20%-50% of Car Dealer Website Traffic May Not Be Human

by automotiveinternetmedia | March 24, 2025 | Website Traffic, Automotive Industry

Non-Human Traffic

In the digital age, car dealerships face unique challenges. One of these is the issue of non-human web traffic. Studies suggest that 20%-50% of car dealer website traffic may not be human. This includes bots, crawlers, and fraudulent clicks, which can distort analytics data. Digital ad fraud is a significant concern. It can lead to wasted advertising budgets and ineffective campaigns.

Automotive Internet Media has analyzed non-human traffic across hundreds of automotive websites. Through our findings we help dealers optimize their online advertising strategies and target potential customers more effectively.

What is Non-Human Web Traffic?

Non-human web traffic is visitors to a website that are not human; these are frequently “bots” that load web pages, crawl pages, scrape pages, and falsely load ads. Not all of this non-human traffic is malicious – crawlers and search engine bots are good bots.

Non-human traffic can mimic human behavior, inflating website traffic numbers. This skews the analytics data that dealers rely on.

Recognizing the Signs of Non-Human Traffic

What are the indicators that website traffic is non-human? The following can point to traffic being non-human:

  • High Bounce Rate
  • Low Average Session Duration
  • Abnormally High Click Through Rates
  • Unusual Traffic Spikes
  • Unusual Geo Locations

Monitoring and Optimization: Ensuring Traffic Quality

Better quality media will have less non-human traffic and thus provide better outcomes. Monitoring campaigns and optimizing them to minimize non-human traffic is an integral part of what your agency and any paid media vendors should be doing. Eliminating poor traffic sources and placements will maximize the amount you are spending on driving real consumers to your website. Less non-human traffic means less advertising waste!

GET A FREE WEBSITE ANALYSIS

About Automotive Internet Media

Automotive Internet Media, AIM, is a leader in digital marketing and technology, headquartered in Hinsdale, Illinois. Our team specializes in media buying and campaign optimization for automotive dealerships across the United States.

Recent Posts

How to Increase your Dealership’s Online Presence

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Absolutely every dealership has some kind of Internet presence -they can be part of a large automotive group, single point location or independent used car lot – they all want the same thing: to reach the largest number of people while investing the smallest amount of money and getting the largest amount of sales possible.

There’s a very efficient method for achieving all of this while getting all your potential customers to know your dealership and inventory: CarClicks Inventory Marketing.

Unlike traditional advertising, CarClicks advertising is increasingly more accessible for every dealership and enables you to quickly, easily, efficiently and affordably reach serious, highly-engaged auto shoppers. That’s why CarClicks is gaining more ground among those dealerships that want to increase their online presence.

Having a website is fundamental, having a presence on social networks is indispensable and having a marketing strategy is necessary. The reality is that CarClicks Inventory Marketing is also essential and is becoming a more habitual and necessary practice by some of the best automotive operators in the industry.

What’s the biggest benefit to CarClicks Inventory Marketing?

Imagine that you have an attractive dealership on one of the best streets in town, open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is what happens when you invest in CarClicks: you automatically become visible to thousands of people who have been in the market for a vehicle but didn’t even know you existed!

A CarClicks strategy creates an integrated and cohesive approach to inventory marketing. We seamlessly promote your inventory to auto shoppers across multiple channels, while factoring in the different devices that auto shoppers are using to shop for your inventory. It’s all about driving the auto shopper to your website!

CarClicks is very important marketing tactic for both large and small dealerships alike, since with just a few bucks you’ll be able to get better visibility, which will certainly translate into an increase in website traffic and a boost in vehicle sales.

CarClicks Inventory Marketing campaigns are designed and well executed. Our campaigns will dramatically increase brand awareness and drive more auto shoppers to your dealership website.  

Increase your dealership’s online presence by contacting us at Automotive Internet Media at: sales@aimyes.com

Dealers Will Shift 60% of Advertising Dollars to Digital in the Next Two Years

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Digital advertising in the automotive industry has increased tremendously over the last decade. Analysts are predicting that the growth will continue for the next two years stating that digital will be 60% of a dealer’s ad spend by 2021 (Maryann Keller & Associates, MK& A Franchise Dealer Advertising Study).

Why the Continued Increase?

A Mobile World
A huge driver causing this increase has been consumers higher usage of mobile devices. Dealership Websites continue to see the percentage of their mobile traffic on the rise. In turn they are allocating more ad dollars to match and dedicating more time to optimize their websites for better conversion on mobile. Mobile traffic will account for 65.1% of auto ad spend in 2019 and 68.1% in 2020 (eMarketer, Mobile Ad Spending by Industry, 2019).

Better Attribution
Another reason why many in the automotive industry continue to raise their digital budgets is that they can better pinpoint what channels are delivering real results. At the dealership level this is extremely beneficial since many owners are dealing with rising operating costs and narrowing profit margins. Dealers can use data to do more with the same or less ad spend and know that it is actually making an impact.

Where Should Budget Be Spent?

If You Are Thinking About a Marketing Budget Increase Consider:

Video
Auto dealers have historically always loved TV advertising however today’s consumers are watching more and more video through means other than traditional cable. If you are thinking of increasing your digital spend, important areas to consider are social media video, pre-roll, connected TV and over-the-top media services (OTT). Focusing on these video channels can get you more impressions, reaching a wider audience, with more tangible results. Learn more about AIM’s video services.

Inventory-Based Display
In addition to video, inventory based display advertising is a great option to maximize your digital marketing dollars. Inventory based ad creative can be served across a variety of platforms and the best part is it can be optimized for each individual consumer so they see your inventory that is most relevant to them. Learn more about our dynamic inventory ad solutions Data Driven Targeting (DDT) and Social Clicks.

ATTRACT The Right Auto Shoppers

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Your Marketing

CarClicks Inventory Marketing

CarClicks Inventory Marketing Helps ATTRACT the Right In-Market Auto Shoppers to Your Dealership!

How you ask? We find the shoppers that are already ATTRACTED to the vehicles on your lot. 

CarClicks has the TOTAL PACKAGE to make in-market shoppers TURN HEADS! Make your dealership stand out by adding CarClicks to your marketing strategy.

Take the CarClicks Challenge and allow your dealership to APPEAL to the right consumers.

Not sure exactly what the CarClicks Challenge is? Reach out to us for a FREE demo on how to increase your online leads ASAP!

 

Buckle Up!

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YOU’LL NEED TO BUCKLE UP FOR THIS ONE….

Once you try CarClicks Inventory Marketing you’ll see FAST results!

Kick your marketing into FULL-THROTTLE with CarClicks today- what are you waiting for?

Take the CarClicks Challenge and allow your dealership to get up to SPEED with online digital sales.

FUEL your dealership with highly accurate and relevant advertising campaigns.

Take the challenge today and start seeing results!

Are you not sure exactly what the CarClicks challenge is? Go ahead, give it a TEST DRIVE and sign up for our free online demo.

Get AHEAD of the competition today!

 

Shark Bait

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You want marketing with a bite? CarClicks Inventory Marketing hunts highly engaged auto shoppers with a powerful impact.

DON’T BE A PRETENDER!

CHOOSE CARCLICKS INVENTORY MARKETING!

While other marketing is just treading water, CarClicks’ predator-like abilities attacks unprovoked consumers that can be found in the market for a vehicle.

CarClicks has no known predators other than, on very rare occasion, the non-digitally focused general manger. CarClicks Inventory Marketing is arguably the industry’s primary predator of online auto shoppers. We hunt fast and agile shoppers that are lower in the funnel.

Take the CarClicks Challenge to measure how powerful and forceful of an impact we can make for your dealership.

Not sure what the challenge exactly is? Reach out to us for a free demo on how to increase your online leads ASAP!