Women in Automotive Marketing: How Lexy Tabbert Built a Rural SEO Powerhouse

When Lexy Tabbert scanned the local paper after moving back to her South Dakota hometown, she wasn't looking for a career in automotive. She was looking for work. The ad that caught her eye was for a service department manager at the Ford store in town — a role she had zero qualifications for. She applied anyway.

That decision set in motion a career that now has Lexy running women in automotive marketing at a scale most solo marketers never touch. As Director of Sales and Marketing for Beadle Auto Group, she oversees digital strategy across four rooftops and eight OEM brands — Ford, Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Ram, Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep — in one of the most sparsely populated markets in the country. She manages paid search on Google and Microsoft, Meta campaigns, SEO across multiple brand websites, CRM, content, analytics, and inventory merchandising. All of it. By herself.

And she's competing with stores that have entire agencies behind them.

Getting In Without a Roadmap

Lexy's path into the industry followed a pattern that's more common than the automotive world acknowledges: she bet on herself before the credential existed. The service manager role she landed had no formal training program. She walked into a department staffed by senior master technicians with four decades of experience and figured it out from the floor up.

What she gained there wasn't just technical knowledge — it was the customer-facing fluency that makes great automotive marketing possible. She learned how to translate complex repairs into plain language. She learned how customers process anxiety in high-stakes transactions. She learned what trust actually sounds like in a dealership context. That foundation, built before she ever wrote a Meta ad or optimized a model page, is what separates her work today from someone who came up exclusively through a marketing program.

A few years in, a marketing position opened up at the group — three rooftops, two towns. No formal marketing background. She applied anyway, got the job, and dove in the same way she'd approached everything else: self-educating relentlessly, moving as fast as the industry would allow.

That mindset is exactly what CDK Global's 2025 Dealership Workplace Study identifies as a differentiator for women who build lasting careers in auto retail. Women who gain cross-departmental operational experience early are significantly more likely to stay long-term. Lexy's service drive years weren't a detour. They were the foundation.

What Full-Stack Dealership Marketing Actually Looks Like

The dealership marketing role has transformed faster than almost any other position in retail. A decade ago, a rural store's marketing director managed local newspaper buys, a radio budget, and maybe a basic website. Today that same role requires real-time fluency in paid search, programmatic advertising, SEO, CRM workflows, inventory merchandising, and increasingly AI-assisted analytics — often all at once, often without support staff.

Lexy describes her current scope with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who has simply gotten used to wearing every hat. Paid search across Google and Microsoft. Meta campaigns. SEO across multiple brand sites. CRM. Content creation. Analytics reporting. All as a solo marketer, across a four-rooftop group representing eight brands. The level of sophistication that once required a full agency retainer is now within reach for a single marketer willing to learn the tools — and that, she argues, is where the real competitive opportunity lives for rural dealers right now.

"The playing field is leveling," she says. "Rural dealerships can compete with big-city stores in ways we never could before — if we are willing to embrace the tools and put in the effort. The dealers who figure that out are going to win."

The SEO Initiative That Changed Everything

Ask Lexy what she's most proud of and she doesn't mention a campaign that drove record lead volume or a month where cost-per-acquisition hit a new low. She talks about SEO — specifically, the moment about six months ago when she stopped believing it was out of reach for a store like hers.

For most of her career, strong search engine optimization felt like a big-city advantage. Agency SEO packages are expensive. The stores that ranked well, she assumed, had resources she didn't. Then she found an affordable platform that helped her understand both the technical and authority sides of search — and something shifted in how she saw her own position.

So she started writing. Dozens of articles targeting the real questions her customers ask before they buy — model comparisons, trim guides, towing capacity breakdowns, financing questions specific to rural buyers. The centerpiece is a Ford content cluster she built from scratch, now live at beadleford.net/find-my-ford.html — a hub of buyer-intent content tied directly to Beadle Ford's inventory and model pages. Traffic numbers have been climbing steadily since launch.

The Beadle Ford blog now carries her byline on a growing library of content that reads exactly like what it is: written by someone who has sat across from these buyers, answered their questions in person, and understands what makes them pull the trigger. That's the SEO advantage no outside firm can manufacture.

The work hasn't gone unnoticed. Lexy was accepted into a national automotive marketing 20 Group — a selective peer accountability and benchmarking circle for dealership marketing leaders. It's the kind of recognition that doesn't come from a press release. It comes from results.

The Perspective No Agency Can Replicate

The data on women as automotive buyers is unambiguous. Women influence more than 85% of all car purchase decisions and represent over 62% of new car buyers. Yet women make up only about 25% of dealership employees nationally — and far fewer in marketing leadership. Lexy doesn't spend much energy on that gap. What she thinks about is what the gap costs dealerships that aren't paying attention to it.

Vehicle buying is one of the biggest financial decisions a family makes. Buyers come to it with real emotion — excitement, anxiety, the weight of a significant commitment. The marketing that cuts through is the kind that acknowledges that emotional weight and responds with clarity and trust rather than pressure and urgency. Lexy believes women bring that understanding naturally, and she's built her entire approach around it.

The CDK data puts hard numbers behind the gap: only 12% of female dealership employees say their store actively invests in programs that attract and support women. That number reflects a cultural deficit that shows up in marketing output too — in messaging that doesn't resonate with the primary buyer, in campaigns built for an audience that isn't actually making the decision.

What She Tells Women Considering the Industry

When asked what she'd say to a woman early in her career eyeing automotive marketing, Lexy doesn't hedge. Her answer is essentially two words: do it.

The industry is complex and fast-moving in ways that keep it genuinely interesting. It will challenge anyone who enters it. But the skills that modern automotive marketing demands — understanding how people make decisions, communicating in ways that build confidence, earning trust before asking for a transaction — are skills that women bring naturally.

She also points to something less quantifiable but equally important: the relationships. The colleagues, the peers, the national network she's built through her 20 Group participation. For a solo marketer working without a team to challenge her thinking, that professional community isn't optional — it's infrastructure.

"The opportunity is real," she says. "Go get it."

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