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I recently had a chance to take the stage at NADA 2020 to share some new insights with attendees. The feedback I got was so positive, I felt it was important to share that same message with those of you who were unable to attend my session, or those who did attend and simply want to revisit the material. Either way, this blog’s for you!

What if I told you that we’ve all been marketing backwards all these years? Most dealers are hyper-focused on customer acquisition with the mindset that the more traffic you can get, the better. While that may sound good on paper, the reality is driving traffic without first considering the destination will lead to poor — if not catastrophic — results.

Since I love analogies, let me put it to you like this. Imagine you inherited a restaurant from your retiring uncle. You have fond memories of this restaurant from all the time you spent there as a kid. If you close your eyes and concentrate hard enough, you can practically taste your uncle’s amazing food. Needless to say you can’t wait to fulfill your life’s dream of being a restaurateur.

However when you arrive that first day to sign some paperwork and pick up the keys to the restaurant, you discover things aren’t exactly as you pictured them in your mind. It looks like the place hasn’t been cleaned in weeks, if not months. The waitstaff is lazy and uncaring. And to top it off,  you’re pretty sure you saw a mutant cockroach scurry into a vent when you turned the lights on in a storage closet. Seriously?!?!

So. Knowing these are the current conditions of your new business, what would you do first?

1. Drive traffic to your restaurant by allocating $20,000 on a digital marketing campaign inviting local diners to come in for a bite?
2. Deep clean the restaurant from top to bottom, hire a new staff and contract the best exterminator in the biz.

I think it’s safe to assume that you’d pick option 2. Why? Well because it just makes simple business sense, right?

The irony is that as dealers we make the wrong decision month in and month out. We throw our budget in the advertising machine to “drive traffic”, we direct that traffic to somewhere on our website, and then we think about the results of what that traffic did after the fact.

Look, I’m not trying to be harsh here. But if you have a traffic first mentality, you’re the restaurant owner who chose option 1 despite all the evidence staring him or her in the face that was a terrible idea.

Are you picking up where I’m going with this?

 

TRAFFIC IS NOT THE STORY. CONVERSIONS ARE THE STORY

It takes significant dollars to double your traffic, but it doesn’t take significan dollars to double your conversion rate.

Here’s an example using simple numbers. Let’s say you’re spending $500 / month to earn 1,000 web visitors which nets you a 1% conversion rate or 10 conversions.

If you wanted to “double” your conversions, logic would say you’d simply pay 2x more to double your traffic, right? In other words you’d spend $1,000 to get 2,000 visitors and with a 1% conversion rate that would net you 20 total conversions.

So you did it, right? Well yeah. But you had to double your budget to do it.

What if, instead of doubling your budget, you just focused on making sure your website was better equipped to convert the traffic you were already paying for?

Think about it like this. If you could double your conversion rate from 1% to 2% with the same amount of traffic, you’d get the same result — 20 conversions — for a lot less money.

So how do you do it? Well if you want to maximize your ROI, you need to start with your website experience first.

 

DESTINATION. MEASUREMENT. ADVERTISING.

The philosophy I’m talking about here is something I call Destination. Measurement. Advertising — or DMA for short. And when I say Destination, I’m referring not just to your website, but to the overall customer experience. When that traffic arrives on your website, where do you want them to go? What do you want to happen when they get there? What is the intended outcome?

It’s important that you think about those questions because the ideal customer experience has evolved and become more demanding of car dealers in 2020. Simply having a fast and mobile friendly website isn’t enough anymore, that’s the expectation.

79% of shoppers will leave and never return to buy as a result of frustrating website performance.¹

 

Destination

Above and beyond fast and mobile friendly, your website really needs to be positioned to instantly answer a shopper’s most important questions at any hour of the day (or night).

It shouldn’t shock you to learn that lead form submissions are down across the industry. Why? Because filling out a form and the waiting for a response doesn’t meet a modern consumer’s demands of instant and easy.

For example, a Get E-Price CTA that doesn’t give a shopper an actual price is wasted real estate.  The fact of the matter is 75% of consumers won’t walk into your store until they know what that vehicle is going to cost them based on their credit, down payment, and trade-in. A modern digital retailing solution like Online Shopper: Electric™ can provide all the information a shopper needs to make a personal, educated decision with no friction, and most importantly — no waiting.

With VDP Automated Messaging, you can program CTAs like Evaluate My Trade to launch experiences that take place within our advanced messaging platform, Conversations™ that are designed to provide real and instant value for the shopper all while capturing a lead for your team as well.

So those are just a couple of ways you can optimize your destination website experiences for your shoppers and increase your conversions.

But if you’re not measuring correctly, you’ll have no idea what’s working or and what’s not. So let’s talk about measurement.

 

Measurement

More important than anything – as a basic measurement fundamental — you must define what your baselines are. What are your average metrics right now? You need to know those baselines to understand the impact of any of your marketing efforts.

Remember, measurement is not just about looking at numbers after the fact. It’s also about giving yourself and your team a target to hit because If you never set goals, you can’t score. Period.

To start, gather your KPIs to set your baseline measurements. For example, you may want to just focus on the metrics that most impact the overall health of your business:

• Traffic by Channel (Direct, Paid, Organic)
• Conversion Rate
• Lead Count

Regardless of which KPIs you set as baseline health metrics, it’s important to understand that numbers don’t always tell the whole story without context. Setting a baseline for Bounce Rate for example might sound like a good idea, and you may see really positive or negative numbers, but without context they won’t have real meaning.

Let me explain. True story. A dealer friend recently texted me to say that he’s not happy with me because he’s seen his bounce rate go way up, and his conversion rate go way down. So I hop into his Google Analytics, and yup, it’s plain to see that he’s correct.

But I also notice that his web traffic is way up. Where is it coming from?

I dig in and discover that a recent SEO blog we wrote for him is the #1 organic result for “How Long Do Toyota Camrys last?”. That piece of content is getting a ton of traffic — 59% of which is from out of state. Well of course these visitors are bouncing, they’re not going to contact a dealer 1,000 miles away!

So let’s look at these same analytics again with new eyes. Bounce rate up, conversion rate down, traffic up… what really matters?

Well, your leads are up I tell him. Even though your conversion rate is down, the total number of conversions is up.

In the end I tell my friend none of this matters. The bottomline is there are more customers contacting your dealership and the “negative” metrics are because of a positive development — your website’s SEO is ranking on a national level. #fistbump

When it comes to measurement sometimes context is everything and you just need to do a little digging to understand the why.

 

Advertising

Ok so we’ve set up our destinations, defined our goals and set our baselines — NOW we’re ready to advertise, so let’s spend…

WAIT!

Before you start shoveling your budget into the ol’ advertising machine, I need to share a few more secrets with you. Just because you’ve optimized your destination and are prepared to measure your marketing activities — you can’t just willy nilly start spending loads of cash without direction or discretion.

There are two psychological concepts I want to touch on here that you can incorporate in your digital advertising. One is based on the predictably irrational mind and the other has to do with loss aversion. You can use both to help you drive the outcomes you want.

Capitalizing on the predictably irrational mind is actually easier than you think. Essentially if you give some a choice between two options, most people will gravitate toward the cheaper option. And that’s not what we want to do.

We want to add a third option, a decoy if you will, that’s just close enough to the highest price option that make most people think that the highest priced option is the most appealing.

Think about what you can do with this, with your inventory, ads, and landing pages. If you just put these two options, the base Civic vs. the top-line Civic — your brain highlights the cheaper option. Looks like a good deal. What could be so different about the Touring for another 4 grand? But introduce a decoy option, and it totally changes your view. For just an extra $20 bucks I can get the top-of-the-line Civic with all the best tech features? Sold!

You’re probably more familiar with the second psychological concept you can use in your advertising, known as loss aversion.

In behavioral economics and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains (i.e. it’s better to not lose $10 than to win $10).

So how can you use this in advertising? Well, you can position your offers to be less focused on the joy of driving a new car, and more focused on how much it would suck to miss out on these savings.

Look at this display set below. These are actual ads that we A/B tested for a client using loss aversion principals. Same design, same vehicle, but different copy.

Can you guess which ad garnered the most interaction? Yup, it was the “Don’t Miss Out” ad that was just oozing with loss aversion.

We tested this at scale as well with paid search ads. Four identical offers with the same exact keyword targeting.

Again, it was the text ad with the “Don’t Miss Out” headline that drew the most clicks showing how loss aversion messaging performs better than basic marketing copy. Make sense? Of course it does!

So there you go, that’s DMA. Focus on the customer experience first (online and in store), define what success means and how to get it, and then position advertising to drive the specific outcome you want.

The End!

If after reading this recap of my NADA 2020 Workshop you want to know more about how Dealer Inspire can help you focus on your destination, define what success means for your dealership, and drive the outcomes that you want then drop us a line!

Let’s Connect!

Sources:

¹https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-page-speed-stats-for-marketers/

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If I asked you — what’s the purpose of your website? — could you answer that question in two words or less?

If you’re thinking “Sell Cars“, then you’re right about the end result, but the true purpose of your website and your entire digital platform for that matter is to ANSWER QUESTIONS. And the better your website becomes at answering the questions of online car shoppers, the more cars you’re going to sell.

At every step of the car shopping journey your potential customers have questions — and each of the answers they find online ultimately lead them to what car they want to buy, for how much, and most importantly, where. Your website is the foundation of your entire digital presence, and if it’s not providing answers, it’s not delivering customers.

Every single word and page on your website is potentially the answer to somebody’s question (inventory, price, hours, etc.), but the difference between general information and personalized answers can make all the difference — and that’s where you can really gain a competitive advantage by being more digitally helpful than anyone else out there.

Are you with me? I promise I’m not talking crazy (this time). Let’s break it down question by question, and answer by answer.

GOOGLE: THE ULTIMATE Q & A MACHINE

Before we get into the role that your website plays in answering the questions of car shoppers, let’s take it a step back and think about the way many people even find your website in the first place — Google Search.

Google is nothing more than a question and answer machine. It doesn’t matter what you type into that little white rectangle, you’re asking a question that can fit into one of these four search moments:

• I want to know
• I want to go
• I want to buy
• I want to do

Go ahead, try to search for something that doesn’t neatly fit into one of those search moments, I’ll wait….

Are you picking up what I’m putting down? Ok, now pay attention because here’s the critical point:

SHOPPERS NEED TO KNOW, BEFORE THEY GO

As much as some folks enjoy spontaneous road trips, like the daredevils who try new restaurant without checking Yelp reviews first (the humanity!), when it comes to shopping for and buying a car, 92% of shoppers¹ are going to build their confidence by researching online before walking through your doors, i.e. they want to know before they go.

How do people build confidence in a subject where they have a knowledge gap? By researching all the details, and Google Search plays a key role in providing those answers.

Google takes it a step further by taking that “I want to know” search moment, and breaking it down into five micro-moments of the car shopping journey:

1. Which car is best?
2. Is it right for me?
3. Can I afford it?
4. Where should I buy it?
5. Am I getting a good deal?

In order for a car shopper to become a car buyer, a customer needs to answer these five questions to build confidence in their final purchase decision.

The great news is that by understanding how your website, connected technologies, and digital marketing strategies can be positioned to ABA (Always Be Answering), you can be there to capture local in-market shoppers at every micro-moment along the way.

Let’s take a look at how you can ensure that your dealership’s digital ecosystem is set up to provide the A’s to shopper’s most pressing Q’s

 

BE THE ANSWER (SEO & SEM)

Of the 92% of consumers that begin their car shopping journey online, asking Google a question is the most common place for people to start, so it only makes sense to prepare your dealership’s website to have those answers when local in-market shoppers are on the hunt.

When we revisit our micro-moments listed above, you can tailor both your Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization efforts to align with those types of queries.

The “Which Car is Best?” and “Is it Right For Me?” micro-moments are high funnel queries typically performed by someone who just recently entered the market. Their intent is to create an initial consideration set, and then narrow the choices down to a few contenders. Because these types of searches are broad and ultra-competitive among OEMs, it usually doesn’t make sense for a single point dealership to dedicate a portion of their DigAd budget here. The cost-per-click is going to be high, along with the chance that you won’t be able to deliver a landing page that’s relevant to the user which can result in wasted spend.

That said, there is an opportunity here to answer these types of questions with relevant SEO content published to your website. Dealerships and automotive groups who have embraced blogging on behalf of brands can stake their claim in the SERP by creating editorial or list type content that directly answers the “Which Car is Best?” and “Is it Right For Me?” questions of local car shoppers.

The other three micro-moments are all low-funnel consideration questions, and both your SEM and SEO efforts work in tandem to position your dealership as “the answer” for these types of queries on the paid and organic search results.

 

ANSWER INSTANTLY (24/7 Messaging)

Think about some of the CTAs you have on your website. Does a Get E-Price button immediately answer a shoppers question about pricing? What about Check Availability…does tapping that CTA instantly provide an answer if a vehicle is s available or not?

Nope and nope. All those CTAs do is open up a form that a shopper is required to fill out, submit and then wait….and wait…and wait. Who has time for that?!

With Conversations™ — our advanced messaging platform — you can reprogram common CTAs on your website to open up automated chat workflows instead of forms to automatically answer questions from shoppers like “What’s my trade-in worth?” and “What’s the E-Price?” that take place right inside a chat providing instant answers to your shoppers.

 

Enabling messaging functionality on your website is nothing new, it’s literally there to give your users an outlet to ask their questions. That said, a modern messaging platform takes it a (giant) step further by truly integrating with your website’s main CTA’s instead of just sitting on top of your website. Oh yeah, and your website is only the beginning. You can now instantly and automatically answer customer questions wherever they are — Facebook, Google, SMS, Cars.com — by integrating Conversations™ with your marketing channels.

We call it Native Conversion, because it answers shoppers questions (and captures their lead) right where they are without having to take another step.

 

PROVIDE PERSONALIZED (PAYMENT) ANSWERS

 

With a digital retailing solution, you’re providing your visitors with the best tool to answer their “Can I Afford It?” question. This question is so critical because 75% of car shoppers won’t contact or visit your dealership if they can’t get an answer that’s personalized to their variable (credit, down payment, trade-in, etc.)² Again, it all comes back to that one simple statement, shoppers need to know before they go.

With Online Shopper: Electric™ you’re upgrading the capabilities of your website to provide shoppers with real-time, personalized payment options on multiple vehicles of interest. The end result is that you’re providing answers to a car shopper’s most important question, while at the same time generating a lead for your team to follow up with. This in turn creates a bridge between the online to offline shopping experience that sets your dealership up to close more deals when the customer visits your dealership.

 

AND ANSWER THE “WHO” QUESTION

Being able to transparently (and instantly!) answer questions related to affordability and availability is huge, but you may not have realized that consumer behavior has shifted to the point now where shoppers want to know exactly who they’ll be working with at the dealership. As we become more accustomed to anxiety-free online shopping, customers want assurance that they’re going to have a good, easy experience when they go to the dealership — and connecting with a real, trusted salesperson before they make the trip makes all the difference.

97% of car shoppers say they’d prefer to choose their salesperson before they enter the dealership³.

On the Dealer Inspire web platform, you can use Salesperson Connect™ from DealerRater to enhance the user experience by highlighting your top salespeople on the most important pages on your website. The ratings, profiles, and reviews for each of your top salespeople are seamlessly incorporated into your VDPs and Staff Page to connect shoppers with your salespeople, effectively answering that “Who Should I Buy It From?” question.

 

THE CONNECTED (Q & A) PLATFORM

From appearing in search results as the answer for the “Where Should I Buy It?” question, to providing easy to access pricing information that answers to the “Can I Afford It?” question — the Dealer Inspire Platform works together to create a connected experience for car shoppers designed to answer all of their questions.

Want more information how our connected technologies can help future-proof your dealership? Just give us a shout and we’ll set something up!

Let’s Do This!

 

Sources:

¹Think With Google: The Future of Car Buying – https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/the-future-of-car-buying/
²Cars.com “Drivers Seat” Consumer Survey, October 2018.
³Survey of 17,981 car buyers on DealerRater.com, October 2018

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When making a purchase as big as a car, consumers need to answer an assortment of questions before they’ll contact or visit a dealership. Questions like — Is this vehicle right for me? Can I afford it? Where should I buy it? and, Who do I buy it from?

 
While I think we all agree that things like pricing, transparency and building trust via online reviews are key considerations during the car shopping journey, you may not have realized that consumer behavior has shifted to the point now where shoppers want to know exactly who they’ll be working with at the dealership.

97% of car shoppers say they’d prefer to choose their salesperson before they enter the dealership.

*Survey of 17,981 car buyers on DealerRater.com, October 2018

Even without this super compelling stat from our friends at DealerRater, you can probably uncover this sentiment just by using Google Analytics to see how many pageviews your website’s Staff Page receives on a monthly basis. In my experience, it’s almost always in the top 15 most viewed pages on your website and often times it cracks the top 10.

That said, while your website’s staff page is great for putting a face to a name that a customer may have already connected with through lead follow up via text or a phone call — staff pages typically don’t do much on their own to start laying the foundation for building a genuine connection between a salesperson and a customer without prior contact.

 

MEET SALESPERSON CONNECT™

 
The good news is that we’ve been able to fill that gap by integrating Salesperson Connect™ from DealerRater® within the Dealer Inspire web platform. This new integration lets you enhance the user experience by highlighting your top salespeople on the most important pages on your website.

With Salesperson Connect™, the ratings, profiles, and reviews for each of your top salespeople are seamlessly incorporated into your DI website’s VDPs and Staff Page to drive personalized, 1:1 leads.

 

COMPETE ON YOUR REPUTATION, NOT YOUR PRICE

 
The data shows that not only do people want to choose who they work with at the dealership, but those customers who submit a lead via Salesperson Connect™ have an 89% higher lead-to-close rate and close 16% faster than regular website leads.

At a time when dealers are increasingly competing on lowest price, you can differentiate your store by highlighting your salespeople. By focusing more on your people, you’ll be able to stop racing to the bottom and win customers based on the value and experience your team can deliver.

When consumers trust your people, they are less likely to haggle and more likely to accept a fair deal, helping your store to increase margins.

 

IT’S GOOD FOR EMPLOYEE LOYALTY TOO

 
I’ve never met a car dealer who wasn’t hyper-focused on their Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) score. But did you know that there’s a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction? To put it simply, the more valued and professionally fulfilled employees feel by their organization, the more likely that positive sentiment will be passed along to customers as well.

Data suggests that employees at companies that invest in personal branding initiatives like Salesperson Connect™ are 27% more likely to feel optimistic about their company’s future; 20% are more likely to stay at their company; and 40% are more likely to believe their company is more competitive.

There isn’t an easier way to show your sales team you care by putting them front and center on the most viewed pages on your website.

If you’re already a DealerRater customer, you can add Salesperson Connect™ to your Dealer Inspire VDP’s and Staff Page at not additional cost to you. Not a DealerRater customer just yet? What are you waiting for!

 
Get Started

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When we launched the Dealer Inspire platform back in 2013, we made it dead simple for you to create custom inventory pages on your website all on your own ‒ in a matter of minutes.

No need to call or email support for help — you simply fire up the page composer on your Dealer Inspire Website and with just a few keystrokes and a couple of clicks, your custom inventory page can be live on your website.

Don’t believe me? Check out this #DIHOWDOI to see just how fast and easy it is ‒ even if your boss keeps piling on the requests.

 

WHEN SHOULD YOU CREATE A CUSTOM INVENTORY PAGE?

The idea behind creating custom inventory pages is to land a car shopper on a predetermined selection of your inventory that’s most relevant to their shopping needs, because the more personalized experience you can offer a shopper, the likelier they are to take an action that’s beneficial for you at the dealership (i.e. use your digital retailing tool, call, visit your store, etc).

When you plan on launching any kind of marketing initiative where the main goal is to get car shoppers to look at your vehicles, this is where you want to use custom inventory pages.

#ProTip: DI clients can get step-by-step instructions for creating inventory pages on our Training Portal

Here are just a few examples to give you an idea of how they can be implemented to work across multiple digital marketing channels:

 

Example 1: Facebook Advertising Campaign

In this example, let’s say you want to run a Facebook Ad campaign targeted to in-market shoppers who are looking for a new or certified pre-owned, 7 or 8 passenger vehicle for their family. Prior to launching the campaign, you could create a custom inventory page on your website that conveniently displays all of your new and certified pre-owned SUVs and Minivans, giving your target audience a shopping experience that’s tailored just for them.

 

Example 2: Email Marketing Campaign

I’ve never met a dealer who enjoys having aged inventory sitting on their lot, and Sales Managers are usually up for doing just about anything to find these vehicles a new home. Email campaigns can be a great way to let your prospects know that you have some sweet deals and you can create a custom inventory page to land customers on when they click the link in your email.

With the DI inventory shortcode builder, you can quickly put together an inventory page that lists all your pre-owned vehicles 90 days (or however many days you want) and older which will serve as the main landing page for your email campaign. The more eyeballs you can get on your aged units, the faster they’re going to sell.

 

Example 3: Video Pre-Roll

As you know, video advertising on YouTube and Facebook is a great way to reach a targeted audience with your messaging. Imagine creating a custom inventory page of all your pre-owned inventory that’s priced $15,000 or less and then pushing out a video ad aimed at younger car shoppers. Not only will you be able to deliver a relevant experience for those who engage with the ad, but you’ll also be reaching this audience on the platforms they use most.

 

DON’T FORGET THE SEO JUICE

In addition to providing your marketing campaigns with highly relevant landing pages, custom inventory pages can also be great for improving your overall presence on search engines (all while offering real value for car shoppers). When you create any new inventory page, make sure you follow these steps to ensure that it’s optimized for people, and search engines alike:

1. Give your new page an SEO friendly heading

When published, the page heading that you enter at the top of the page composer will be the H1, or heading tag. This all-important SEO tag helps tell search engines what a web page is all about.

 

2. Build your inventory shortcode

For this example we’re building a shortcode containing all used and certified pre-owned vehicles less that $15,000. Our goal here is to create a relevant inventory page that can be discovered via organic search.

If you didn’t know, you can select multiple items within a field by holding down the Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) key on your keyboard. This way you’re able to make multiple selections, and really begin to customize the inventory that will be displayed on your page.

Once you have your selections made, simply scroll to the bottom of the short code builder and click the Insert button, and the inventory shortcode will be placed in your page composer.

At this point you may want to click the Preview button in the page composer so you can see what the page will look like to users once published, and ensure that the correct inventory is being pulled into the page.

3. Add a short paragraph of text above the inventory shortcode

While you don’t want this paragraph to be so long that it pushes the inventory off the screen, it is helpful to shoppers and search engines alike if you dedicate a sentence or two describing what the page is about.

When published, the page heading that you enter at the top of the page composer will be the H1, or heading tag. This all-important SEO tag helps tell search engines what a web page is all about.

 

4. Add a Title & Meta Description using the Yoast SEO plugin

All Dealer Inspire websites come loaded with the Yoast SEO plugin. This handy plugin allows you to easily enter custom page titles and meta descriptions for your webpages. The Title element has a direct SEO benefit, so you want to make sure you take advantage of this space. In many cases it will closely match the heading you entered at the top of the page.

While the Meta Description tag isn’t taken into consideration by search engines for SEO purposes, this is the snippet of text that you’re suggesting search engines display when they list your page as a result. Think of this section as ad copy to place a concise and enticing message that users can’t resist clicking or tapping on.

And all that’s left to do at this point in time is publish your new page!

 

UNLIMITED POWER

In my opinion, the capability to create inventory pages all on your own is one of the most powerful tools on the Dealer Inspire platform. You have the control, and you can build these pages in a matter of minutes. There’s really no shortage of opportunities to create custom inventory pages. Your marketing campaigns, your user experience and your search engine presence will all improve as a result, so what are you waiting for? Start building some custom inventory pages for your dealership today!

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