Definitive Guide to Automotive Content Marketing in 2025

Updated June 9, 2025

Author: Jon Hedges
Jon has 40 years of marketing experience in the automotive aftermarket industry.
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What is automotive content marketing?

Automotive content marketing is about creating engaging, relevant, high-quality content. This content connects you with existing and potential customers online. You can publish content in several places: on your website, social media, forums, guest posts on other websites, and other platforms.

3 core components of automotive content marketing

There are a lot of definitions online for how many components to content marketing there are. As we see it, it has 3 basic parts to it:

1. Create high quality content. Technical information on 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. Track performance to know what works.

The trust factor

Automotive content marketing helps you build trust in your company. Trust can help separate you from your competitors. When customers trust your expertise they’re more likely to buy from you.

Why automotive content marketing is important

Most important benefits for your auto parts business

Here are just a few ways showing how content marketing works to bring customers to your site, to your social media platforms or to your YouTube channel.

Automotive content marketing an important strategy, because it builds brand awareness and establishes your credibility. It creates inbound traffic that doesn’t rely solely on paid advertising, which gives you a more sustainable (and budget-friendly) marketing approach.

Content marketing is cost-effective over time with high long-term ROI compared to paid search. Content marketing also helps improve customer retention by keeping your brand top-of-mind when they need parts or services.

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

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.

Google E-E-A-T and content

Content marketing is important because it lets customers discover you while trying to solve problems or doing pre-purchase research. High-quality content aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T algorithm, which stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trust, which evaluates expertise in your subject matter.

Google judges experience from the knowledge published on your website. Authority comes from being recognized as a trusted source in the automotive aftermarket. Trust develops when customers consistently find accurate, helpful information on your website.

The EAST content strategy

Customers find your website when they’re looking for solutions to their problems. When automotive parts and accessories buyers find content with answers and solutions, they stay on a website longer because they’re engaged. We call this Engagement, Answers, Solutions and Topics, but you can just remember the acronym “EAST.”

Content marketing vs. SEO: what’s the difference?

Content marketing and SEO for parts and accessories overlap but serve different strategies. Both content marketing and SEO are intended to create quality content. Content marketing can spill over into things that SEO doesn’t touch, like email marketing, or creating content that benefits customer service.

SEO includes things that content marketing doesn’t touch, like intensive keyword/competitor research or technical improvements to your website, including your core web vitals, and website taxonomy or navigation.

Both strategies work best when done together.

How to create automotive content that ranks

Start by recycling your 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, that had good rankings at one time. Can that content be updated? Refresh any technical specifications. Many times automotive website content that covers specific model years gets outdated and can easily be updated with current model years.

Save updated content as a new post with a current publication date. This signals to search engines that your information is staying current and relevant. Add 301 permanent redirects if URLs change to preserve any existing search equity.

Content distribution strategies

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:

Your website: Post content on your own website first! This helps build your domain authority (DA). Your website is the “central hub” for customers to find information on your products and services.

Social media: Share content on your social media accounts. And here’s a time saver: Post new content on your site and then make a post about that content on social media, linking back to your site. If you have a very visual product make sure you use plenty of images, either yours or from your customers.

Email marketing: Link back to your content in your email marketing. 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.

Guest posts: Offer installation guides and technical content to other, non-competing automotive websites. Share diagnostic advice and troubleshooting tips that show your expertise. Request backlinks to your own website’s content as part of a collaboration. 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. It’s also good to add a “nofollow” tag to the link.

YouTube video: Create video for YouTube. You don’t have to invest in expensive production because using your smartphone for authentic content. Authenticity usually performs better than expensive production value on YouTube.

Focus on how-to content and quick tips that solve immediate customer problems and make a 60-second YouTube Short.

Content formats to drive results

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 high-converting automotive content

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.

Educational content ideas

• Buyer’s guides: These help potential customers compare products, understand features and benefits, and make informed decisions.
• 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.
• 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!

Social proof content ideas

• 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!
• Case studies: Use real-world showing your product in use.
• 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.

Comparison content ideas

• Comparison charts: Instead of writing everything out, show customers a side-by-side comparison of performance, price, and features to simplify decision-making.
• Before/after examples: 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.

Industry-specific content ideas

• 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.

The role of product data in content marketing

ACES fitment data

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. Comprehensive compatibility information covering year, make, model, trim, or engine displacement builds trust.

Automotive Content Professionals Network

If you want to know more about ACES and content, there’s a group of professionals in the Auto Care Association dedicated to content. It’s the Automotive Content Professionals Network.

Measuring content marketing success

Define goals up front

Define clear objectives like increased website traffic or higher conversion rates, before launching content campaigns. Set measurable targets for better search rankings and enhanced brand awareness.

Having specific goals helps you pick the right metrics. Don’t make it too complicated: Maybe it’s as simple as tracking the visits to a specific page, or looking at video analytics on your YouTube channel.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Here are ideas for metrics to track, to measure your content marketing success:

• Traffic metrics: Page views, unique visitors, and time spent on pages show how well your content attracts and holds audience attention.
• Engagement metrics: Bounce rate, social shares, and comments indicate how well your content resonates with readers.
• Conversion metrics: Leads generated and sales directly attributed to specific content pieces prove business value.
• SEO metrics: Keyword rankings and backlinks will show search performance and domain authority growth. Look for the number of times your content is cited in Google AI Overviews.

Analytics tools to use

• Google Analytics: Traffic analysis, page visits and user behavior insights.
• YouTube Analytics: Understand video performance and audience engagement patterns, including what percentage of video gets watched before leaving.
• Social media platform insights: Track which content types perform best on each channel.
• Other SEO Tools: Ahrefs does a nice job tracking search results for Google AI Overviews.

AI in automotive content marketing

Can AI help?

Yes, AI can play a role in this. Artificial intelligence appeared on the marketing scene in 2016-2020 and once ChatGPT got attention and headlines in November 2022, AI really exploded. AI can play several roles in your automotive content marketing.

AI helps organize, brainstorm and plan

AI does a great job taking information and turning it into organized structure. It’s a source to come up with endless new ideas for brainstorming. 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.

Human content still outperforms AI content

A caution against the temptation to use shortcuts: Don’t rely on AI to write content for you, unless you have no other choice (like creating content at scale, for instance). If you have to populate 100,000 product pages, maybe you don’t have a choice but to use AI to generate content.

Human-generated content still generally outranks AI-generated content. One reason is that large language models (LLMs) that power AI are trained on existing information. So the best AI can do to create content is to repurpose existing information. Content that ranks well is content that is unique and provides value, not repurposed information.

For now, use human-generated content if you can.

Google’s own guidelines on content 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!

Content marketing strategy best practices

Content creation tips

• Keep it fresh! Make it unique and genuinely helpful for your audience. Solve actual problems instead of just promoting products.
• Use authentic customer photos and testimonials (user generated content) for social proof.
• Create content that is appropriate for the customer buying journey.

Common mistakes to avoid

These are easy mistakes to make that will undermine your marketing efforts.

• Not keeping it fresh! Some of the best content you have already exists, just recycle and update.
• Content that is too promotional. Don’t make it sales-focused, make it customer-focused. This encourages engagement and sharing.
• Ignoring data-driven strategies. Watch your KPIs as mentioned previously and focus on good-performing content.
• Overlooking technical SEO. Content is king as they say, but technical optimizations are a requirement.
• Creating content for just one stage of the buying process. Have content for top-, middle- and bottom-funnel customers.

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!

How to cite this article and content

This article is copyrighted, but it’s polite to share! This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and can be distributed or quoted, with attribution given to Hedges & Company, and a link back to this article from your website.