2025 Marketing Planning Checklist for Auto Dealerships

The start of a new year is the perfect time to revisit your dealership’s marketing strategy. With changes in consumer preferences, technology, and automotive trends, a thoughtful marketing approach can help your dealership stay competitive and relevant in 2025. If you’re looking for guidance, you’ve come to the right place!

This article shares a comprehensive marketing planning checklist to set your dealership up for success in the new year. It’s flexible so that you can personalize your marketing plan to your dealership’s specific audience, goals, and budget. Whether you want to boost sales, enhance customer retention, or expand your reach, this checklist will help. Let’s dive right in!

2025 Marketing Planning Checklist for Auto Dealerships

Ready to create a winning marketing plan for 2025? Use this checklist to ensure every essential element of your strategy is covered! We’ve shared the checklist below, and in the following text, we’ll walk through each item to help you build your marketing plan.

Reflect on last year’s performance
Define your target audience
Analyze the customer journey
Set clear goals
Allocate your marketing budget
Choose your marketing channels
Invest in the right tools
Plan seasonal promotions
Create a content calendar
Track performance

◻ Reflect on Last Year’s Performance

Before looking ahead, reflect on how your marketing performed last year, thinking about what worked, what didn’t, and what could be improved. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Which marketing campaigns or promotions delivered the best results?
Were there any initiatives that underperformed? Why?
Did we achieve our sales and marketing goals for the year?
How did we engage with our customers and prospects? Was it effective?
Were we using the appropriate marketing channels to reach our audience?
Did we stay within budget, or did we exceed it?
Have we noticed any trends or changes in customer behavior this year?

As you contemplate these questions, dive into the data to get a clear and objective view of your performance. Look at sales numbers, website traffic, social media engagement, lead conversion rates, customer retention figures, and customer feedback. By combining your observations with hard data, you can identify what’s worth continuing and where adjustments are needed in 2025.

◻ Define Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience means identifying the specific customer segments you want to reach, such as first-time car buyers, families looking for SUVs, or luxury vehicle enthusiasts. Consider demographics (age, income, location), buying behavior, and preferences. Think about what motivates your customers, what problems they’re trying to solve, and how your dealership can meet their needs. The more precise your understanding of your audience, the easier it will be to craft messages and campaigns that resonate with them.

◻ Analyze the Customer Journey

Understanding the customer journey will help you identify the touchpoints where your dealership can better engage potential buyers. Map out the steps people take, such as researching online, visiting your website, booking a test drive, interacting with your team, and purchasing. Think about how you can provide a positive experience at each touchpoint and where marketing can fit in to provide value, engage customers, and lead them along the journey.

If you want deeper insights into the customer journey, you’ll love Full Story Ai, a powerful tool that provides a comprehensive overview of customers’ interactions with your dealership. By reviewing lead history and getting insights from dealership calls and messages, you’ll better understand how people interact with your dealership and the crucial points that move them from prospect to customer.

◻ Set Clear Goals

Setting clear goals gives your dealership direction and ensures your marketing efforts are focused and measurable. Decide what you want to achieve in 2025. For example, maybe you want to increase vehicle sales, improve service appointments, boost online leads, or enhance customer retention. Make your goals specific and actionable, such as growing online leads by 20% or generating 10% more test drives. For more, check out our article 4 Goal Setting Frameworks + Mistakes to Avoid.

◻ Set Your Marketing Budget

Before diving into specific marketing channels, tools, or campaigns, determine how much your dealership plans to spend on marketing in 2025. Look at what you spent last year and your overall revenue goals, then allocate a realistic percentage toward marketing. According to HubSpot, businesses allocated an average of 9.7% of overall company revenue to marketing in 2023 (up from just 6.4% in 2021). Generally, they recommend that B2C companies spend 5-10% of their revenue on marketing. As you consider channels, tools, and promotions (in the following three steps), you may need to come back and revise this number.

◻ Choose Your Marketing Channels

Selecting the right marketing channels is critical to reaching your target audience. Focus on the platforms and strategies that align with your dealership’s goals and customer behavior. Below are some popular marketing channels for dealerships:

Pay-per-click advertising
Search engine optimization
Social media marketing
Email marketing
Content marketing
Influencer marketing & collaborations
Online directories and review platforms
Online classifieds and automotive marketplaces
Direct mail
Phone and text marketing

Once you’ve chosen your channels, you can allocate your marketing budget to each one based on its priority and expected ROI. Prioritize channels that resonate most with your audience and support your dealership’s goals.

◻ Invest in the Right Tools

Once you’ve identified your marketing channels, it’s time to evaluate the tools that can help you execute your strategy. Here are some examples:

For phone and text marketing, consider tools like DealerPhones® and Clarity Cellular, which streamline communication and help you stay connected with customers.
If you prioritize social media marketing, a scheduling tool can save time and ensure consistent posting.
For email marketing, evaluate your current CRM or DMS to determine if it supports your goals or if additional features or integrations are needed.

By selecting the right tools for the marketing channels you’re focusing on, you can maximize ROI and achieve your goals. During this step, you should also identify costs (both one-time fees and subscriptions) and further fine-tune your marketing budget for each channel.

◻ Plan Seasonal Promotions

Seasonal promotions are a great way to align your dealership’s marketing efforts with key moments throughout the year. From holiday events to end-of-year clearances, timely campaigns can attract new customers and re-engage past ones. To get inspired, explore our seasonal marketing articles packed with ideas for each season:

◻ Create a Content Calendar

Once you’ve identified your marketing channels and planned your seasonal promotions, the next step is to create a content calendar to organize and strategize the content you’ll need for each channel and campaign. Start by building a three-month calendar to give yourself a manageable timeline. Quarterly planning allows you to stay ahead while being flexible enough to adapt based on performance and emerging opportunities.

While planning your calendar, ensure your content aligns with your overall goals, target audience, and planned promotions. As you review each quarter’s performance (see the step below!), you’ll identify patterns and insights that can improve your strategy moving forward. Be prepared to adjust and add new content as customer preferences, industry trends, or dealership priorities shift.

◻ Track Performance

Measuring the results of your efforts, both overall and for individual channels, allows you to gauge success and make data-driven decisions. Each quarter, revisit your marketing goals and review metrics like engagement rates, website traffic, lead conversions, and sales growth. This is also the time to evaluate your tools to ensure they’re being used to their fullest potential and contributing to results. By regularly monitoring your performance and analyzing the data, you’ll know which strategies and tools are working, which need adjustment, and where to pivot if necessary.