Definitive Guide to Automotive Content Marketing in 2025

What is automotive content marketing?

Automotive content marketing is about creating engaging, relevant, high-quality content, and using that content to connect you with existing and potential new customers. The content can be published on your website, on social media, and many other places, as we’ll explain below.

It has 3 basic parts to it:

1. Create high quality content. This can include technical information parts and accessories, how-to guides, video content, blogs, solutions to problems, and other things that we’ll cover further down in this article.
2. Publishing your content. This can be done on your website, on social media including YouTube, by email, or guest posts on other websites or publications.
3. Measuring the results from your content. You’ll only know if something is working if you measure it.

There’s an important 4th part to keep in mind: Automotive content marketing helps you build trust in your company. We’ll explain that down below, too.

Why automotive content marketing is important

CLICK TO ENLARGE: Just a few examples how content marketing works to bring customers to your site, your social media platforms or your YouTube channel.

Content marketing an important strategy because it builds brand awareness, establishes your credibility, brings in web traffic, and has high ROI in the long run. It’s also important because it gives you another tool in your marketing toolbox besides relying on paid search ads. If you use paid search for parts and accessories, content marketing gives you a “balanced portfolio” for your marketing.

It also establishes trust in your company, which is incredibly important in 2025. Trust separates you from your competitors.

Content marketing is important because it lets customers discover you while trying to solve problems or doing pre-purchase research. Automotive parts and accessories buyers want to engage with content as they look for answers, solutions, and topics/parts. We call this Engagement, Answers, Solutions and Topics, or use the acronym “EAST.” High-quality content also aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T algorithm, which stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trust.

Is content marketing the same as SEO?

Content marketing and SEO for parts and accessories are very similar. There’s a lot of overlap. Content marketing can spill over into things that SEO doesn’t touch, like email marketing, or creating content that benefits customer service.

SEO can spill over into things that content marketing doesn’t touch, like intensive keyword/competitor research or technical improvements to your website, including your core web vitals.

Benefits to automotive content marketing:

Here are the biggest benefits from automotive content marketing, and why it should be a priority for your company:

• Content marketing builds brand awareness, and as a result it increases your trust and authority.
• It establishes you as a thought-leader, demonstrating your expertise and further increasing your authority.
• It builds a sales channel for inbound website traffic that doesn’t rely on paid search marketing.
• Content marketing is cost-effective. In fact, after one year the ROI on both content marketing and SEO is generally much higher than with paid search. (And be aware: if you’re just starting out, in the first month or two the ROI will probably be horrible!)
• It improves customer retention and repeat purchases by keeping your brand top of mind.
• It’s great for SEO! If you’re working on automotive search engine optimization, there’s a lot of overlap with automotive content marketing.

Recycle old content

If you’re looking for ways to come up with content, a good method is to recycle old, outdated content. Look for blog posts that are a few years old, and hopefully ones that had good rankings at one time. Can that content be updated? Many times automotive website content that covers specific model years gets outdated and can easily be updated with current model years.

Depending on your web platform, you may get a benefit from saving any updated blog content as a completely new post, with a current date. If your URL changes make sure you add a 301 permanent redirect on your site.

Where to use your content

There are dozens of ways to use your new content. Remember to keep your content fresh, unique and helpful. That also increases the options of where to post it. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Obviously, post it on your own website!
• Make posts on social media. Save time: if you post new content on your site and that’s all you have time for, then make a post about that content on social media. If you have a very visual product make sure you use plenty of images, either yours or from your customers.
• Send out email to your customers, linking back to your content. It gives you a good excuse to stay in touch with your customers using email, without constantly selling-selling-selling. And it brings people back to your site.
• Offer to create guest posts on other websites or publications for your products. This can be installations, tech tips, diagnostic tips, whatever. Don’t expect to charge for it, or get paid for it (paid links are against Google policies) but do try to get a link or two back to your website. Better yet, offer to swap content: create a guest post for another site, and offer to post their guest post on your site. That’s a win-win for both parties. Note: Link swapping is also technically against Google policies, just make sure the content is high-quality so the links are legit, and spread out when the content goes live by a month or more. It’s also good to add a “nofollow” tag to the link. Another way is to do a three-way link exchange (call us if you have questions).
• Create video for YouTube. Don’t invest in fancy or expensive production, just do a 60-second YouTube Short on your phone and post it.

Formats to use for your content

There are many ways to create content for marketing. It would be hard to list all possibilities in this article, so here are just a few popular formats to think about. Use your imagination and get creative. Who knows, you may come up with a better idea than what’s listed here! Just remember to keep your content unique and engaging.

• Videos: Car reviews, how-to guides, and virtual tours bring your content to life. And don’t worry about expensive video production; anything shot with a phone has credibility and authenticity.
• Downloads: PDFs of technical bulletins, how-to guides, or checklists a customer can print at home.
• Written content: Blog posts, articles, and product descriptions dive deep into topics and trends.
• Social media posts: Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube help you share quick tips, updates, and promotions. Having an active social media account also increases your trust factor; customers can tell you’re a real business.
• Email campaigns: Keep your audience informed with personalized updates and offers. Email addresses you collect are called “1st party data” because you own that data and 1st party data is increasingly important in marketing.
• Infographics, charts, graphs and tables: Simplify complex information with eye-catching visuals. Compare features and benefits of products.
• Case Studies and before/after results: Highlight real-world successes with products to build credibility and trust. Use customer-provided photos and quotes.

Types of automotive content marketing

Let’s look at different kinds of content you can create, specific to the automotive aftermarket. We’ll list a few types of content here, but like like our format examples above, use your imagination to come up with new ways to create and publish content.

• Buyer’s guides: These help potential customers compare products, understand features and benefits, and make informed decisions.
• Influencer content: No bandwidth to create content yourself? Work with an influencer in your market to try your products and make video and social posts.
• Technical installation guides: This can be how-to video, or step-by-step text showing a customer how to install a product. This increases their confidence in making a purchase.
• Comparison charts: Instead of writing everything out, show customers a side-by-side comparison of performance, price, and features to simplify decision-making.
• Maintenance tips: Create advice for do-it-yourselfers (DIYers) by creating how-to videos or a blog post to help customers extend the life of their vehicles. Ideally, because of your product!
• Before/after graphics: If you sell tires and wheels, there are interactive plugins to render a vehicle with specific tires and wheels installed. If you sell off-road parts, show before/after improvements in ground clearance or grades. If you sell performance parts, show before/after improvements in torque or horsepower.
• Trend reports: The automotive aftermarket has its own fashion trends. One year it’s rat rods, the next year it’s restomods. Keep your audience updated on the latest in design, tech, and trends in the automotive world. Publish photos of project cars from the SEMA Show if you have them.
• Project cars: Speaking of project cars, show cars or trucks that you’ve worked on. Have customers send in photos of your products installed and publish them on your website. Have a contest to get more photos sent in.
• User Generated Content (UGC): This can save time and increase customer loyalty. User Generated Content can include installation photos or videos, before/after photos, testimonials and much more. Plus, any image from a customer is really a testimonial for your company and your products. If you need more UGC have a contest or give away a free hat. And remember, people love to see pictures of their cars, it’s like bragging rights!

Data, data, data!

Technically, in a way, accurate product data and fitment is part of content marketing. This is where your ACES fitment data comes into play, so customers have the confidence that a product will fit their vehicle. There’s even a group of professionals in the Auto Care Association dedicated to content. It’s the Automotive Content Professionals Network.

Measure your results

Do you want more traffic? More sales? Better organic rankings for your SEO marketing? Define it up front and come up with a way to measure the results. Maybe it’s as simple as tracking the visits to a specific page, or looking at video analytics on your YouTube channel.

Does AI play a role in automotive content marketing?

Yes, AI can play a role in this. Artificial intelligence exploded on the marketing scene in 2016-2020 and really gained public awareness through news media in 2023-2025. AI can play several roles in your automotive content marketing.

AI does a great job organizing information into topics, and coming up with new ideas for brainstorming. It has an endless supply of new ideas. One of the keys to making AI work is the prompting that goes into it. That can be an entire article in itself, so we won’t devote space to that here, but here’s a link to a good article on automotive AI.

A caution against the temptation to use shortcuts: Don’t rely on AI to write content for you, unless you have no other choice. Human-generated content still generally outranks AI-generated content. But as AI evolves that may change. For now, use human-generated content if you can. If you have to populate 100,000 product pages, maybe you don’t have a choice but to use AI to generate content “at scale,” and that’s understandable, but the best content is still created by humans.

Google’s own content guidelines on quality:

Google publishes its Search Quality Guidelines, written for its human page raters. Here’s what it has to say about human-generated content:
“Consider the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content….the automatic creation of thousands of pages by running existing freely-available content…without any oversight, manual curation, etc., would not be considered to have human effort.” (That’s what AI would do if used to create website content in 2025!)

Here’s another quote from their Guidelines:
“Low level of effort: The [main content on a page] shows signs of a lack of effort by the website or content creators. Lack of curation or editing: Content that helps the page achieve its purpose is mixed with less helpful distracting or filler content.” (That’s also what AI would do to create website content in 2025!)

Here are examples of what the Guide defines as good content:
“The [main content on a page] is unique or original to the website; Original photos or video footage produced by the website or content creator; The content on the page is unique to the content creators, such as a personal perspective based on first-hand life experience.”

Just follow those guidelines and no worries!

Conclusion

Hopefully this helps generate some ideas for your automotive content marketing plan. Best of luck and if you have questions…or a good idea to add to this article…let us know!

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