While most people slow down and unwind a little during the second half of December in anticipation of the upcoming holiday season, car dealers work harder than ever to close as many deals as possible before the big ball drops to ring in the new year.
So that means right about now you’re hopefully finally catching your breath and reflecting on how your dealership dealt with the challenges that 2020 presented, and how your business can grow in 2021.
If 2020 was good for anything, it showed us that your digital platform is your most valuable asset and taught us a lot about the good digital habits that are helping dealers win in this changing landscape. If we can all take what we learned and really commit to those habits year-round, we can take dealer ROI to the next level in 2021 while future-proofing the dealership experience for years to come.
So without any further ado, here are some New Year’s Resolutions that’ll help your dealership win 2021!
1. LOSE 10 LBS. (ON YOUR WEBSITE)
In the past two decades, we’ve looked to our websites to just generate leads so your team could then reach out and set appointments after they’re gone. But with customers now expecting and sometimes needing to complete more of the car buying process remotely, 2020 proved your website needs to be so much more to make the most of every opportunity.
Your website truly needs to be a digital dealership, where shoppers can quickly find vehicles, get their questions answered, and connect with friendly experts on your team who can start guiding them down the Road To The Sale to purchase, just like in-store.
That starts with having the right messaging (with live video) and digital retailing solutions that work seamlessly with your website experience — as well as the right commitment to using those tools — but assuming you already have those, let’s resolve to making sure shoppers can easily find them.
As dealers added new solutions in 2020, websites have put on a lot of excess weight with buttons and widgets that get in the way of guiding shoppers down clear paths — wasting opportunities on shoppers who give up trying to find instant, easy answers to their questions like “can I afford it?”. This excess weight is something that happens to all of us, especially around the holiday sales events, but now is the perfect time to reevaluate your website experience to foster a healthy conversion rate in 2021.
Not all buttons have the same value for you or the customer, so funnel your traffic to the buttons that are more likely to drive sales (not just form-fills). For example, a shopper who quickly filled out an [Unlock Extra Savings] form to see how it affected the price (someone will be in touch to tell them later) is not as valuable as the shopper who clicked [Explore Payment Options] and instantly personalized their payment, valued their trade, saved an account on your website, and started to add accessories and insurance products — so send more shoppers that way.
By taking a deeper look to discover website design mistakes like too many conflicting CTAs, or disconnected shopping experiences that are causing your customers to bounce instead of convert, you can make a serious impact in your business KPIs without spending more advertising dollars to acquire more traffic.
2. START WORKING OUT (YOUR DEALS ONLINE)
Once you have shoppers clicking the right buttons to start the buying process on your website — make sure your team is there to help them! These engaged shoppers exploring payment options online are just as valuable as the opportunities that physically walk into your store, so it’s important to staff your digital showroom and build the habits that will continue and close those deals that start online.
Instead of creating a dead-end to their online experience and forcing them to come in for an appointment to learn more, you have the tools to keep up the momentum and guide them closer (or all the way) to purchase online. Of course many customers will still want to visit the dealership before signing, but the further you can get them into the process online, the more likely they are to follow through and stick with your dealership. They may have submitted leads with other websites, but you’re clearly positioned to win if they’re actively working a personalized deal with you.
Whether they’re on your website in the moment or just left, watch how easily (and instantly) you can pull online shoppers back into the buying process by simply texting the kind of personalized question or recommendation you would offer in the showroom.
No matter what digital retailing solution you have, it needs to be backed up by your dealership’s people and processes, so now is the perfect time to re-acquaint your salespeople and BDC agents with your tech stack to ensure they understand how they can quickly close more deals like these, more efficiently.
The days of “just get ’em in” are officially over. In 2021, resolve to stop saying “just get ’em in” and instead say “let’s go Online to the Sale!“. You’ll have happier customers, and a happier team.
3. BE SMARTER WITH YOUR (ADVERTISING) MONEY
By the end of 2020, something else that became clear was that targeting audiences in your Digital Advertising campaigns was about to get a tad trickier than before.
With Google updating their Personal Advertising Policies restricting your ability to target specific zip codes, combined with the impact of COVID-19 on your business — it’s critical that you reevaluate not just how you’re spending your budget — but on what platforms, and which geographical areas you’re targeting.
The first thing you can do is reassess which areas your dealership did the most business in last year, so you can ensure you have optimal coverage with your paid search campaigns. You don’t want to start the new year by overspending in geographical areas that are no longer providing a sales ROI due to shifts in consumer behavior, and underspending in areas that have historically proven to lead to sales.
The easiest way to do this is to use your CRM or DMS customer data to plot your sales on a map to visually highlight your highest converting areas. You can then use that visualization to work with your Dig Ad provider to adjust your targeting as needed to maximize your spend.
Another recommendation is to use that data from your CRM or DMS to add a customer match layer to your audience targeting on your Google and Facebook ads that’ll help ensure you’re staying in front of all your sales and service customers when searching or surfing. Keeping your dealer’s brand top of mind is going to be more critical than ever in 2021.
You’ll also want to consider how to maximize the reach in your defined geo-targets by diversifying the platforms that you’re advertising on besides Google. For example dealers who have been advertising on Microsoft Bing have seen a 36% higher Impression Share and a 77% higher Click-Thru Rate compared to their same ad campaigns on Google.
Lastly, 2021 will officially usher in the era of true in-market audience targeting with highly valuable first party data. It’s critical that you understand what audience data you’re using to power your advertising, because it can be the difference between guessing and knowing that you’re targeting people who actually want to buy a car.
For example, powered by Cars.com’s 25 million monthly active shoppers, FUEL: In-Market Video has a 100% pure in-market audience, so you know every penny spent is getting in front of local shoppers who are looking for a new vehicle in the short term. Watch the difference that made for Julie Chisum’s advertising ROI at Toyota of Cedar Park!
As we start the new year, it’s a perfect time to rethink and refine where your dollars are going — and resolving to continuously optimize through the year.
4. BE MORE PRESENT (FOR SERVICE KEYWORDS)
COVID-19 brought many challenges, but in a weird silver-lining kind of way, it also helped reveal some opportunities that you have to improve the overall operations of your dealership.
If your dealership had to shut-down the sales side of your biz because of the pandemic and you were only able to operate your service business for a period of time — you probably focused on your Fixed Ops marketing in a way you haven’t in years. And as a result, there’s a good chance you had your eye on the local big box and independent service centers that are aggressively marketing to steal your market share.
Make this the year that you finally fix that leaky fixed ops marketing and resolve to build up your service department’s digital marketing to the same level as your sales department, so you can fend off these competitors and win back customers.
The first step is making sure you’re set-up to capture the local high-intent searchers who are looking for service providers like you. By having the right paid, organic, and local search strategies in place for your service department, you can show up first three times in front of these valuable customers.
Considering upwards of 70% of searchers are on mobile, that top placement is critical for capturing those valuable customers — since only the very top placements are visible without scrolling down.
To take your strategy to the next level on the SERP and beyond, check out our Fixed Ops Marketing Strategy Webinar so you can get the tips, tricks, and info you need to get up and running with a comprehensive cross-channel digital marketing strategy. This year you can optimize your dealership’s service presence to not just fend-off, but overtake, the competition (and without breaking the bank to do it).
5. SPEND MORE QUALITY TIME (WITH YOUR HAPPY CUSTOMERS)
A decade ago, review generation was all the rage because we recognized just what powerful (and free!) positive reviews could and would do for our business. However, it’s possible that over the past couple of years you may have lost sight of keeping your reviews fresh because you felt that your dealership had “enough”.
It’s understandable if your focus shifted from generating new reviews to other matters you felt were more pressing, but you really can’t ignore the fact that 97% of shoppers use reviews to choose their dealership, and 86% of shoppers don’t consider reviews over 3 months old helpful (BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey Dec. 2019).
Those two stats should tell you that you need to constantly be driving new, positive reviews each and every week. But it’s 2021, so don’t think you can rely on the same tactics you did a decade ago to drive new reviews, because this year it’s not just the review that will matter — it’s the actual words in the review that will give your dealership the boost it needs.
Oh good, you’re still reading! Remember way back at the beginning of this blog post when I said that your digital platform was your most valuable asset? Well, I should probably amend that statement to say it’s your digital platform AND your people that are the two most valuable assets your dealership has.
When it comes down to it, consumers often see dealerships as all being the same because many dealers tend to look the same, and say the same things. For example, I personally worked for three different dealerships that each claimed they had the largest inventory in the state — and I can assure you, for two out of those three dealers, that wasn’t the case.
If you virtually attended REFUEL 2020 then you had the opportunity to see famed entrepreneur, Jesse Itzler, tell the story of how a college marketing professor changed the trajectory of his young life by asking him one simple question during his final presentation — “what makes your brownie different from all the other brownies on the market?”.
The point Jesse goes on to make is that no matter what you do, there are thousands of other entities doing the exact same thing. So how are you going to do to stand out? How will people know that your dealership is different that all the rest?
To answer that question, we say that in 2021 you should embrace (and market) the people and processes — the customer experience — that truly make your dealership different. Don’t settle for the same old USPs that you’ve been relying on for years. Develop your your real “Why Buy” message and tell the world what it is that you and your people do and offer that no one else does, and why should that matter to car shoppers in your market.
That unique ingredient will make all your marketing efforts perform better, all year.
LET’S MAKE 2021 THE BEST YEAR EVER, TOGETHER
Everyone here at Dealer Inspire knows just how challenging 2020 was for our car dealer partners. The pandemic still isn’t over, and new challenges are going to be thrown at us along the way, but together we have everything we need to win this year.
If you would like to talk about your dealership’s overall marketing strategy for 2021, just drop us a line and we’ll schedule some quality time to talk things over.
Wishing you and your team nothing but the best in 2021 and beyond!
What if your website was like a real salesperson? What if it could ask “where ya from?
If it could, it would do a much better job selling your cars. Like a real salesperson, it would listen to that information and make a smarter, more relevant, more helpful pitch to the customer — instead of repeating the same thing to everybody, whether they care or not.
That technology is a thing now.
With Dealer Inspire’s Personalizer, and its built-in geofencing technology, your website can now automatically adapt to individual users’ shopping behavior, interests, and current location. Your site doesn’t have to ask “what are ya looking for?” and “where are ya?”, because it already knows, and it will instantly make a pitch tailored to that individual shopper.
The power of customizing offers and content to each online shopper based on wherethey areand what they want is infinite, and to date, largely untapped. Dealer Inspire is currently the only automotive website provider to feature personalization with built-in geofencing technology, and it gives you the potential to position your dealership as the uniquely best choice for shoppers in each area, or even each specific building, in your market.
IMAGINE WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH GEOFENCING
Imagine you could target shoppers on your competitor’s showroom floor — shoppers that know which car they want, are ready to buy (from your competition), but want to check the internet one more time to see if there’s a better deal in the area. 67% of showroom floor shoppers do just this — cross-shop for better deals on their smartphone while inside the dealership.
Imagine that, while the salespeople at your competing dealership have been talking to this customer all afternoon, your website can instantly adapt itself to make a better offer than them. With geofencing, you can speak directly to these showroom cross-shoppers by having the homepage adapt itself to undercut your competitor.
Draw a geofence around a competing dealership
Which displays a special offer for those cross-shoppers
This is a pretty simple, blunt example** using only one variable (location) to clearly illustrate the power of the technology, but there are infinite ways to use it in more nuanced, personalized ways. Using additional personalization rules, you could tailor this message much more specifically to the individual shopper, customizing the homepage offer for what model they are looking for (based on shopping history rule sets), and how likely they are to buy soon (based on Datium shopping behavior rule sets). This additional information would inform what you would offer — whether it be a different amount, an exclusive perk or service, or simply one of your dealership’s Unique Selling Propositions that set you apart from your competitor.
Let’s try out a few other ways you can use geofence marketing, beyond conquesting competitors:
Push Model Offers By Area
In each neighborhood of your market, there is an average demographic more likely to buy a certain type of model than another. College kids on the nearby campus are more likely to convert on used compact car offers, while the family-oriented neighborhood near your dealership is more likely to convert on new SUV leases. If there’s any rural/farming areas, lumberyards, or construction companies near your market, your inventory pages could display banners for truck specials. Essentially, geofencing can adapt your site to push the models you want to move, to the people most likely to buy them.
Get More Sales From Outside Your Market
Geofencing enables you to deliver messaging to shoppers outside your market and persuade them to do business with your dealership instead of the one around the corner. For example, if you’re out in the suburbs of Chicago, but would like to generate more sales from city dwellers, you can have your homepage display a message about your online purchasing experience complete with at-home test drives and delivery. By putting your customer experience up front for people who may only be visiting your website to compare the price they got from their local dealer, you could end up winning that shopper over and creating a new customer for your dealership.
Make Community-Based Offers
With all that’s going on in the world today, it’s more important than ever to show your support for those in your community who need it most, such as people who work in Hospitals or Schools. You can create geofences around all of the educational institutions and medical facilities in your area, so that when someone within those buildings visits your website you can proudly let them know that if their vehicle needs service or routine maintenance performed, you are more than happy to pick it up from home or work, perform the service, and then drop it back off when it’s done. Not only will you be helping these folks with an immediate need, but you’ll also be providing a convenience to these customers that will build lasting brand loyalty.
The possibilities for what you can do with geofence marketing are endless. Leverage your USPs, unique aspects of your community, your competition’s weaknesses, and your creativity to personalize your website for shoppers. And, if you need any help coming up with ideas, you can always reach out to us!
LEARN HOW TO GEOFENCE IN 2 MINUTES
Learning how to create a virtual perimeter that pin-point targets customers — down to the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of your competitor’s showroom floor — sounds like you and your team need to learn how to build and launch satellites first, but it’s actually as easy as drawing a circle (or a square!). Check out this #DIHOWDOI to see how it’s done!
GOOD GEOFENCES MAKE GOOD MARKETING
Marketing that is pin-point personalized is going to convert far greater compared to one-size-fits-all marketing, because you’ll actually be speaking and selling to that person’s interests, situation, and stage in the buying cycle — instead of letting one message wash over a majority audience that it won’t directly apply to. Geofencing is a powerful variable within personalization that helps you deliver relevant context marketing to car buyers. All it takes is a Dealer Inspire website and a few minutes deciding who you want to target, and what you want to offer them.
If you have any personalization or geofencing strategy questions or ideas, drop a comment below! We’re really excited to see the different, awesome ways you all can leverage geofencing to your dealership’s advantage.
Now more than ever, we need to make every dollar count and acquire more customers online, for less budget. Each opportunity in the current climate is that much more valuable, so together we need to up your digital game to get more of the shoppers who discover your dealership all the way to buying from your dealership.
That’s the game — carefully bridging the shopper through each phase of journey with you, avoiding all the pitfalls, gotchas, and other nasty surprises that can cause your online customer to have an unpleasant experience that’ll send them searching for somewhere else to shop.
If you’ve played this game in real life or in the classic 8-bit video game Super Kart Buyer 2 that we just made up — then you know it’s not easy. But with a little guidance, skill, and a connected platform of solutions, you can create a seamless shopping experience that will take more shoppers all the way from search to signature.
In order to win the online game of car shopping, you have to seamlessly connect the four phases, or levels, of the customer journey:
Advertising: where in-market shoppers first become aware of your dealership.
Website: where you engage and convert your shopper into a lead.
Follow-up: where you connect shoppers with a salesperson to guide them to purchase.
Dealership: where you meet the customer — at your place or theirs.
So how do you master these four levels of the game? Simple! All you have to do is tune into this webinar and we’ll share all the tips, tricks and cheat codes you need to succeed.
…But to give you an idea of what you’ll need to do, let’s break down the four levels of the customer journey you’ll need to navigate to lead to a sale.
LEVEL 1: ADVERTISING WORLD
Car dealers are no strangers to digital advertising. From paid search to paid social and everywhere in between, most dealers dedicate a significant portion of their overall advertising budget to digital channels.
But did you know that 10% of digital ads lead to a disconnected experience? That’s what our team found when performing an audit of over 1,000 ads from other DigAd providers. That means 10% of the time, when a user clicks or taps an ad, they’re being taken to a webpage that’s not related to the ad copy.
When you consider that the automotive industry spends about $12 billion annually on advertising, that means there’s at least one billion (BILLION!) dollars of spend being wasted on disconnected experiences.
And that doesn’t even take into account the times when an ad and its resulting landing page are aligned, but the actual website experience is so poor it causes the user to bounce off the website before taking a single action.
Usually the first level of a game is relatively easy compared to later levels, but for this game it can be super challenging if you don’t have the right skills to get through it.
In order to escape the Advertising World, all you have to do is change the way you think about customer acquisition in order to make sure you’re not wasting a significant portion of your digital advertising budget.
The issue is that most car dealers are marketing backwards. You shovel a bunch of cash into the ol’ advertising machine to “drive traffic”. The resulting traffic is sent somewhere(?) on your website and then 30 days later (maybe) the results are looked at but all you see are the final performance metrics and you don’t have a real understanding as to why things turned out the way they did.
In order to fix this, you have to reverse your actions so you can make the most out of every single dollar in your budget. We call this new approach D-M-A, and this is how it works:
Destination: Before you spend a single dollar on advertising, you start by building the perfect destinations (aka your website and resulting landing pages) for your customers to land on from your ads.
Measurement: Next, you need to make sure your analytics are set-up so you can monitor and measure the success of your campaigns.
Advertising: Once you’ve set all that up, that’s when you launch your engaging, relevant and targeted ad campaigns..
And look, we get it. Getting all this set up and working properly can be challenging. Thankfully there’s a cheat code that will help you ace the Advertising World each and every time.
CHEAT CODE — HIGHLIGHT TO REVEAL
DigAd + SEO + Managed Services + Website = INVINCIBILITY!
When you have all of these services under one roof — when you can just call up your Performance Manager and have them connect all of your campaigns across channels and all linking to the right experience on your website (whether that’s on desktop or mobile) — you are basically invincible from ever having a disconnected campaign.
So I know it sounds weird for an advertising agency to tell you not to spend money until you’ve embraced the D-M-A mindset, but it’s truly the best thing you can do to set your dealership up for success. Because if you don’t, you’re going to really struggle getting through the next level of the game — Website World!
LEVEL 2: WEBSITE WORLD
We just touched on this above, and now let’s take a deeper look as to why it’s so important to have a great website experience. First up, there’s the simple fact that 79% of shoppers will leave and never return if they have a bad experience.
So it doesn’t matter if they found your website from a Google search, a Facebook ad or YouTube video — if that person visits your website and has a bad experience, not only are you losing that customer in the moment, but you could be losing them for good.
I think we can all agree that’s not a situation you want happening on your website, so how do you make sure you’re not serving up a poor website experience? Well, there’s a lot of factors involved — from technical aspects like pagespeed to design elements and accessibility. But to truly master this level, the one thing you really need to address is, how well does your website answer questions?
You see, every visitor is coming to your website to find something out. Do you have the content and tools to answer them?
For example, one of the most important questions that almost every car shopper has is, “Can I afford it?”. What we have found is that 75% of shoppers won’t even consider visiting your dealership if your website doesn’t answer this basic question in a transparent and meaningful way.
And make no mistake, answering this question with an MSRP or “Internet Price” won’t cut it. Shoppers are looking for real payments based on their personal preferences, terms, and credit.
How you deliver the answer to the “Can I afford It?” question is equally important. For decades now, car dealerships have relied on Get E-Price type CTAs to capture leads by withholding the pricing answer from potential customers — the only problem is people expect instant answers to their questions.
Think about it. A shopper visits your website, does a bunch of shopping, fills out a form but they don’t get the answer to their question. So now what, they have to wait? For who? For how long? Why don’t you know? And why do you not want to tell me right now? Is this what it’s going to be like when I go into the dealership? This isn’t fun!
And look, I’ve done enough mystery shopping in my life to know that even after a shopper clicks the Get E-Price button and fills out a form, a lot of dealers still won’t even respond with a meaningful quote. This is one of those frustrating experiences that will make a shopper take you off their list and move on to the next dealer.
Online Shopper™, our end-to-end digital retailing solution, is designed to solve the question problem along with many others: when you remove extraneous CTAs and focus on driving your shoppers to explore their payment options with Online Shopper™, not only are you giving your visitor everything they need to make a thoughtful and educated decision, at the same time everything they do will be delivered to you within the lead that’s created so you can have more productive follow-up.
And speaking of follow-up…
LEVEL 3: FOLLOW-UP WORLD
A lot of dealers mistakenly think they’ve won the game once the lead is received. And I get it because I know that seeing your advertising entice folks to visit your website and then seeing those visitors have a great experience that also results in a lead for your dealership can be highly satisfying. But the game’s not over yet, not by a long shot.
This next level of the game is so important because it’s all about having helpful follow-ups with those customers who’ve engaged with the technology you put on your website specifically to answer all their questions.
Just like shoppers are expecting instant answers to their questions on your site (well, everywhere really), they’re also expecting dealers to change the way they communicate. While an endless stream of emails and phone calls was once the standard for dealership follow up, today it’s just not effective enough.
Using the same out-dated tactics you’ve always used to follow-up with your leads isn’t going to work here for a variety of reasons.
The first reason is very practical. When asked how they’d like to receive their digital garage key to access Online Shopper™ from any device, 66% select text, and only 33% select email. So right off the bat, you CRM’s email-heavy follow-up process is rendered useless to a majority of Online Shopper™ users.
No email you say? Well great, I’ll just pick up the phone and call…
Not so fast my friend!
Before you start smilin’ and dialin’, make note that 76% of people won’t answer a phone call if it comes from a number they don’t recognize. Then to make it even more challenging, Apple recently added a feature in iOS 13 that allows a person to automatically silence any incoming phone call originating from a number that’s not already in their contacts.
I’m not trying to make you feel bad here, I’m just laying out the facts so you can see that the absolute best way to follow up with a lead is with a text message.
But what if there was a better way? What if there was a way to treat an online customer who’s on your website right now the same if they were standing in front of you on the showroom floor?
Well it just so happens there’s a cheat code for that!
CHEAT CODE — HIGHLIGHT TO REVEAL
Website + Live Messaging + Digital Retailing = A SALE!
The Dealer Inspire connected platform allows you to create an experience that treats every website visitor like a walk-in by giving you the tools to interact with guests in the moment to close the deal. Remember, you don’t have to follow-up with a guest if they never left 😎
For those customers who you do need to follow up with, I’d remind you that an Online Shopper™ lead is even better than a walk-in because of all the information you have up front before you make contact with the customer. You get their contact info, vehicles of interest, their preferred finance scenarios, credit rating, trade-in info and personalized monthly payments. So your job is easy, make a connection and guide them through the rest of the process leading to the sale. Piece of cake!
LEVEL 4: DEALERSHIP WORLD
Ok, here we are: the final level of the game.
Like the levels before, if you’re not prepared this can get really tricky and ultimately cost your dealership real money.
The reality is people are going to visit your website, use the tools you provide to customize their perfect deal and then one day they’ll magically appear on your showroom floor without you ever having made contact with them prior to their visit.
If your entire team isn’t prepared to handle the online to offline transition, the results won’t be pretty.
Think about it…a shopper knows exactly what she wants. She’s got her exact model and trim picked out, calculated her monthly payment, has 3K down, and even has her trade-in evaluated. At this point she’s done all the work on your website, and just needs someone to help her take the vehicle for a spin and then sign.
If your salesperson greets this customer and doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or does but doesn’t have the tools to actually continue the progress the shopper has made, that’s it.
Game over.
If you have a digital retailing tool, you need to set-up your dealership to greet shoppers and allow them to seamlessly continue their experience. With Online Shopper™ all you need is your website up on any device that’s connected to the internet, and that’s it.
Your salesperson can greet the shopper, ask if they started creating a deal on your website, and if the answer is “Yes”, then they just need to enter the customer’s phone number or email on whatever device is handy and all the work they did online will be available for both to review.
You don’t need a big fancy kiosk for this either (although they are pretty cool if you have one). The customer can literally just bring it up on their phone.
Again, this should be easy. At this point your salesperson’s job is to pick up where the customer left off, assist them in getting any last answers to their questions, going for a test drive, and then signing them up.
HOW WILL YOU PLAY THE END-TO-END GAME?
So there ya go, that’s the game and we at Dealer Inspire can help you play it at the highest level possible. Our company was literally built as an advertising agency first and then step by step we built the technology to bring that traffic all the way to signature.
Whether you’re an existing client using some or all of our solutions, or you’re brand new to us and are looking for help — It’s our job to help you use our connected platform to its full capabilities so you can grow your business efficiently and continue to adapt, especially during these uncertain times.
If you’d like to learn more about anything we talked about here, or just want some more tips and tricks for playing the end-to-end game, just drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!
