CHASING THE LOW-MARGIN HALF
Parts and service produced 39.6% of gross profit on 12.6% of revenue across the major public groups in 2024. The advertising mostly went elsewhere.
The Profit And The Marketing Budget
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01Fixed Operations Is Where The Margin LivesThe Presidio Group’s analysis of six publicly traded dealership groups found that in 2024, parts and service generated $9.4 billion of gross profit — 39.6% of the peer group’s $23.7 billion total — from just 12.6% of revenue. New vehicles produced 46.4% of revenue and 17.3% of gross profit, at a 6.1% gross margin.
Roughly speaking: the half of the business that gets the advertising produces less than a fifth of the profit.
There are structural reasons for the imbalance. Vehicle sales are seasonal, campaignable, and easy to attribute. Service is recurring, unglamorous and harder to tie to a single click. But the marketing consequence is that the highest-margin revenue in the industry is chronically under-marketed — which is an opportunity for anyone willing to work on it.
Service marketing is also a genuinely different discipline. It’s retention rather than acquisition, driven by intervals rather than campaigns. The wins come from things that don’t look like advertising: online booking that actually works on a phone, service reminders timed to mileage and history, transparent pricing on the jobs people shop around for, and reviews maintained at the location level rather than the brand level, because service is chosen locally even when the brand is national.
For a multi-location service operation, that last point is most of the work. A national brand with 300 locations doesn’t have one reputation — it has 300, and the local ones are what customers actually see. -
02“Automotive” Is Four Industries In A Trench CoatMost automotive marketing content treats the sector as one thing. It isn’t, and the differences matter more than the similarities.
Franchise dealerships operate inside a tier structure — OEM national advertising, regional dealer association campaigns, and individual dealer marketing — with co-op funds that reimburse only spend meeting brand guidelines. Marketing runs off live inventory feeds where the product catalog changes daily and every unit is unique. It’s a specialized field, well served by entrenched incumbents, and we don’t claim it.
Service and repair — franchised chains, independents, specialists — is a local, recurring, retention business. Booking, reviews, transparency and interval marketing decide it. This is where our work is strongest.
Aftermarket and parts is ecommerce with a hard technical constraint: fitment. A customer needs to know a part fits their exact year, make, model and trim, and the entire experience turns on that filter working. Get it wrong and you generate returns, not revenue.
Enthusiast and motorsport brands sell identity rather than utility. The customer is knowledgeable, opinionated and community-driven, and marketing that talks down to them fails immediately.
A strategy built for one of these applied to another is a waste of budget. The first question worth asking is which business you’re actually in. -
03Aftermarket Marketing Is A Fitment Problem Before It’s A Marketing ProblemFor a parts or accessories retailer, the highest-leverage marketing work usually isn’t in the campaign — it’s in the catalog.
Fitment data determines whether a search lands on a page that can convert. It determines whether shopping feeds are accurate, whether dynamic ads show the right product, and whether the customer trusts the site enough to buy. Bad fitment data produces traffic that bounces and orders that come back.
It also shapes what content can rank. Year-make-model landing pages are a legitimate and large search opportunity for aftermarket retailers, but only if built off a data model that can generate and maintain them without a person writing each one. That’s an architecture and data question that happens to determine SEO outcomes — which is exactly the kind of work that falls between a marketing agency and a development team, and gets done by neither.
Our ANRKY Wheels work is this problem — a custom wheel catalog turned into a brand experience. -
04The Federal Rule Went Away. The State Rules Didn’t.Automotive advertising is unusually constrained, and the constraint moved recently.
The FTC’s CARS Rule — targeting deceptive vehicle pricing and add-on practices — was vacated nationwide by the Fifth Circuit on 27 January 2025, on procedural grounds: the court held the FTC had failed to issue an advance notice of proposed rulemaking as its own regulations required. The rule never took effect.
That has been widely read as automotive advertising becoming less regulated. It didn’t. What it removed was a federal layer on top of a state patchwork that remains fully in force — and state automotive advertising rules are among the strictest of any retail category, typically governing how a price may be advertised, which fees must be disclosed, how disclaimers must appear, and what qualifies as a bait advertisement. The FTC also retains its general enforcement authority and continues to work with state regulators.
For marketing this lands on the assets that move fastest and get reviewed least: paid search ad copy, landing page pricing, promotional creative and disclaimer treatment. Those are produced weekly, often by whoever is closest to the campaign, and they’re exactly where compliance problems appear. We build claims and disclaimer handling into the templates rather than relying on each campaign to remember.
Our Automotive Marketing Work
AAMCO – Franchise lead generation, with conversion up 120%
AAMCO has franchised auto repair shops since the 1960s, but its old site drew unqualified leads and did little for its “outdated” perception.
Our experts reworked the information architecture around investment costs and benefits, and wrote every page to SEO best practices.
The right prospects now convert, increasing conversions by 120.8%.
NASCAR – Reaching a new generation, with 36% new fans in one quiz
NASCAR wanted to reach a younger, digitally native audience and grow its fan base beyond traditional marketing.
We developed an interactive, motion-driven quiz that matches fans to a Cup Series driver, collecting emails upfront and tailoring questions by fan type, with merchandise and social prompts on the results page.
It gathered more than 80,000 emails, 36% of them from brand-new fans.
ANRKY Wheels – A luxury wheel maker, climbing the search rankings
ANRKY forges custom wheels for exotic and luxury vehicles, though its site undersold that craftsmanship.
Our team led with a story-driven homepage and manufacturing footage, built a searchable gallery and laid an SEO foundation.
Organic traffic has risen roughly 40%, with top-3 keywords up more than 15 times.
ShadePro – An RV accessories leader, with revenue up 155.8%
ShadePro sells RV awnings and outdoor accessories, but a disjointed site created friction that cost sales during the decision moment.
We improved the path to purchase with a custom sales configurator that recommends products by need, turning more visitors into buyers.
Daily revenue jumped 155.8% weeks after launch,
Where Automotive Marketing Budgets Go Wrong
ONE REPUTATION, 300 LOCATIONS
Service is chosen locally even when the brand is national. Reviews and listings managed at brand level leave every individual location to fend for itself.
FITMENT DATA AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT
For a parts retailer, the catalog is the marketing asset. Bad fitment data produces returns, not revenue.
COMPLIANCE IN THE CAMPAIGN, NOT THE TEMPLATE
Ad copy and landing page pricing move weekly. If disclaimer handling isn’t built into the template, it depends on whoever built the campaign remembering.
WHY DIGITAL SILK?
Our Automotive Digital Marketing Services
Service And Fixed-Ops Marketing
Interval-based retention, online booking conversion, transparent service pricing and local reputation — marketing the margin rather than the volume.
Multi-Location And Franchise Marketing
Location-level visibility, reviews and listings at scale.
Aftermarket And Parts eCommerce
Fitment-driven catalog architecture, year-make-model landing page systems, and shopping feeds built on data that’s actually accurate.
Enthusiast And Motorsport Brand Marketing
Community-led marketing for audiences that know more about the product than most marketers do.
Paid Search With Compliance Built In
Ad copy, landing pages and disclaimer treatment structured to meet state advertising rules by default.
Automotive SEO
Local search for service operations, catalog-scale search for aftermarket retailers.
Why Automotive Brands Work With Digital Silk
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01A Defined FocusService, aftermarket and enthusiast. We’ll tell you when a dealer-tier specialist is the better fit.
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02Margin-LedWe market the half of the business that carries the profit, not the half that carries the revenue.
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03Project OwnershipOne team across strategy, content, campaigns and the site itself, so catalog and campaign decisions get made together.
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04Scale ExperienceAAMCO, ANRKY Wheels and NASCAR.
Our Automotive Digital Marketing Process
Every campaign we run for dealerships follows the same structured approach, so here’s how it plays out from start to finish:
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01Strategy & DiscoveryWe start by learning your dealership or group, what you sell, who buys it and what’s working right now.
We review revenue and margin by business line, new, used, service, parts and finance, since the recommendation usually points somewhere different than where the budget currently sits.
We define goals, identify your competitive position and determine which channels fit what you’re trying to sell. -
02Audience & Channel PlanningWe map out who you’re trying to reach before any campaign gets built.
That means audience research, competitor analysis and a channel plan across paid search, paid social, OEM co-op and any other channel your market calls for.
If your group covers multiple locations or brands, we sort that out now, since a gap caught in planning costs almost nothing compared to fixing it mid-campaign. -
03Creative Direction & MessagingSome campaigns need fully custom creative built from zero. Others work better with proven templates tailored to the brand and loaded with the right offers.
Our team figures out which approach fits your goals and your budget, then builds every asset with messaging placed where it moves buyers toward a visit or a call.
You review it all and nothing moves forward until you sign off. -
04Campaign BuildOur team takes the approved creative and turns it into live campaigns.
We handle tracking setup, landing pages, lead routing and any CRM or DMS integrations the campaign depends on.
Every claim and disclaimer gets checked against the advertising rules in each state you operate in before anything launches, so issues get caught here instead of after the fact. -
05Launch & OptimizationWhen you’re happy with everything, campaigns go live. We watch performance closely in the first few days since that’s when small issues tend to surface.
After things settle, we shift attention to how campaigns are performing, which offers get clicks but no leads and where budget is working hardest. We use that data to keep improving results over time.
We don’t consider an automotive campaign finished just because it launched.
Automotive Digital Marketing FAQs
Do you work with car dealerships?
Not on inventory-feed dealer marketing — that’s a specialist field with entrenched incumbents and we’re not the best option for it.
Our automotive work is service and repair, aftermarket and parts, and enthusiast and motorsport brands. If you’re a dealer group looking to grow fixed operations rather than vehicle sales, that’s a conversation worth having.
Why focus on service instead of sales?
Because that’s where the margin is. Across six large public dealership groups in 2024, parts and service delivered 39.6% of gross profit from 12.6% of revenue, while new vehicles delivered 17.3% of gross profit at a 6.1% margin.
Service marketing is harder to attribute and less exciting, which is exactly why it’s under-competed.
Did the FTC CARS Rule change what we can advertise?
Not in the end. The Fifth Circuit vacated it nationwide on 27 January 2025 on procedural grounds, before it took effect.
But state automotive advertising rules are unaffected and remain among the strictest in retail — governing advertised pricing, fee disclosure, disclaimers and bait advertising — and the FTC retains its general enforcement authority. We build compliance into ad and landing page templates rather than leaving it to each campaign.
We sell parts online. What matters most?
Fitment data, usually before anything else. It decides whether search traffic lands somewhere that can convert, whether shopping feeds are accurate, and whether year-make-model landing pages can be generated and maintained at scale.
It’s a data architecture problem that determines marketing outcomes, and it tends to fall between agency and developer.
We’re a multi-location service business. Where do we start?
Location-level visibility. A national service brand doesn’t have one reputation, it has as many as it has locations, and customers only ever see the local one.
Listings accuracy, location-level reviews and booking conversion usually beat brand campaigns for this model.
Can you handle our website too?
Yes — see our automotive web design services. For aftermarket retailers especially, the catalog and the marketing are the same problem, so keeping them with one team matters.
Speak With Our Automotive Marketing Team
Tell us how revenue and gross profit split across your business lines, and where the marketing budget currently goes. Those two things rarely match, and the gap is usually the opportunity.