Every car dealer is on the Internet, but not all of them are doing what they should online. Following these nine steps will give you a solid foundation to drives leads and sales online.
1. You need to share online why your dealership is the best. As more than half of your customers will be viewing your website on a mobile phone, it is essential that its mobile-friendly (responsive). Search engines also like mobile-friendly websites and will improve your rankings above those that are not.
2. Generate repeat customers with targeted email campaigns. Different customers require different messages. Don’t send your new 4×4 promotion to someone who just bought a 4×4 or to someone who owns a hybrid car. Segmenting your customers into interests and timings within you CRM will allow you to send more targeted promotions.
3. Using email workflows will enable you to close sales and get reviews. You can start by sending a series of emails to possible customers based on their interests. For those clients who have requested a quote send four to six emails over the next month providing content on features, competitor comparisons, introductions to your staff, and a clear reason why your dealership is the best.
4. Making sure that your web pages are optimised for search engines by employing search engine optimisation (SEO). Using SEO will make sure you are the first option customers will find when searching on Google (or any other search engine). You can do this on your existing website pages and by creating blog posts (see next tip). Choose keywords that are specific to your town and dealership and add them to your page titles, headlines, and page text. Don’t let your Web designer give you the same keywords as everyone else.
5. Build trust with your customers by providing blog content that will provide them with the information they need. If a client is going to do some research about their next car and is likely to read ten pages or more before buying, make sure as many of those pages as possible are from your articles. Educate potential buyers with blog content based on the questions your sales team hear most frequently. Share these posts through emails or social media with potential customers to build trust and speed up the buying process.
6. Position your cars versus the competition with comparison pages and landing pages. Create specific pages that compare your cars against the competition. These will show up on Google through search and provide valuable links that your sales team can share with customers via email or social media. Pre-empt potential clients from going elsewhere by providing an honest comparison.
7. Target potential new customers with personalised social media ads and search ads; these work best when they are specific to the person viewing them. Use social media and search engines like Google to show ads only to drivers who currently own vehicles from your competition.
Eye catching offers or discounted services will get them into the dealership. Then, you can turn them into a new customer.
8. Make sure you measure the performance of your campaigns so that you know the ROI on your investment with analytics. Don’t focus on impressions or traffic. Instead, analyse your spend for each marketing effort and the leads or customers they produce. These cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer metrics can be set up with Goals in Google Analytics and help your dealership make intelligent budget decisions.
9. You can use real-time behaviour tracking to send warm leads to sales reps before clients have even filled out a form. Very few people complete forms online because they know they will be besieged with follow-up calls and emails. That indicates customers are not telling dealerships when they are interested in buying. Learn, who is interested, by tracking the pages on your website that visitors are looking at. Compare this information with that on your CRM. If they have not purchased recently and are looking at multiple vehicles, send their name and phone number to a sales rep for a personal follow-up.
