Moving vehicles off of your car dealership’s lot is difficult. If it was easy, you wouldn’t have any competition. The vehicle buying journey is a long and winding road.
Today’s journey begins with online research. Once consumers find the make and model of a vehicle and double-check the reviews, they begin to find dealerships in the area that have it in stock. Once they’ve confirmed your dealership has it in stock, only then will they come in for a test drive and have a discussion with you.
Having a strong online presence in today’s car dealership marketplace is essential. This, unfortunately, means that your wacky waving flailing arm person out front isn’t attracting buyer-ready prospects.
To promote your dealership, attract buyers, and move vehicles off of your lot, here are a few tips that drive results.
Five Ways to Move Vehicles Off Your Car Dealership’s Lot
Optimize Your Car Dealership’s Website
It all starts online. Whether you have 30 locations or one, a properly optimized car dealership website is essential. The first and most important element of this is SEO (search engine optimization).
When your website has a strong SEO presence, search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the like, recognize you as an authoritative source for information and as a car dealership. Far too often car dealerships think they need to have a snazzy, catchy website that displays their fleet of vehicles in a more unique way than their competitors. This is great for humans, but search engines don’t care about the layout. They care if people can find information and your website has a strong online presence. You want search engines to find you when humans search for services you provide.
Target Your Existing Contacts
If you have an existing database of contacts, you have an extremely powerful trick up your sleeve. Before you start to think that about blasting your database with every type of promotion you can think of. Be meticulous about your database and how you want to get in touch with them. The most important thing you want them to do is come to your physical location. See new vehicles, speak with a salesperson.
If you have already segmented your contact database based on the type of vehicle they were interested in, promotions that brought them, or something else that is critical to their contact information, you’re off to a great start. If you haven’t yet done so, the first thing you’ll want to do is clean up your data. Clean data is priceless.
Create an email strategy where you can target smaller segments of contacts to let them know of special deals. You need to provide them with information that is beneficial for them to take action. Without something that gets them to take action, the messages they receive will fall on deaf ears.
Properly Utilize Social Media
Social media is a powerful and most importantly, FREE marketing tool for car dealerships. It isn’t enough to regularly post on social media. You need to provide information and content that is relatable and relevant to your audience. Show off your fleet of vehicles, inform on a new vehicle that just arrived, highlight the services you provide.
Growing your social media presence is more than just posting on a daily basis hoping people will like, comment, and share. You need to give them something to share!
Networking and Partnerships
Word of mouth and reputation are marketing tools that are earned, not bought. Your reputation speaks for itself and when you can partner with other people and businesses who will speak on your behalf, you’ve gained an instant leg up on the competition.
By partnering with local businesses, you can have them promote your car dealership and have these prospects say that that business recommended you. If this person ends up buying a vehicle from you, you could send them a thank you letter and a small gift as a token of appreciation. You can also return the favor and suggest their business when someone is in need of a service they provide. The goal is to have one hand washing the other.
Leverage Your Reviews
When you have customers who are RAVING about you and your car dealership, let people know! People want a trusted source and if people are loving you and openly posting that online for the world to see, share it and help give it legs.
Happy customers are the best customers. Leverage their reviews and share them on your website, social media, include them in promotional materials. You have powerful words to utilize in your sales messaging. Do it!
Put Your Car Dealership Marketing Together
Ready to take your car dealership’s marketing efforts to the next level? Market Doctors can help. We’re the premier digital marketing agency for car dealerships and our over 20 years of experience speaks for itself.
Our solutions will help get and stay on the first page of search engine results and increase your online presence, local awareness, and generate buyer-ready leads.
Get in touch with us today to get a free quote and start moving more vehicles off of your lot.
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