Every single year franchise automotive dealers (not including independents) spend billions of dollars a year on advertising. According to NADA last year new car dealers spent 8.9 billion dollars on advertising. This is a combination of both digital marketing (Google, Meta, Video ads, etc.) and traditional advertising (newspaper, TV, mail, etc.).
Disclaimer: We do not endorse or otherwise support any service or organization below, we are simply showing examples and encourage you to do your research and make your own decisions.
The question then becomes, how do independents begin to compete with that? Another article (linked below) states that you should assume an advertising budget of $250 dollars per vehicle, which at 50 vehicles is $12,500! For smaller dealers with a 10-12 unit volume per month or less how is this realistic? In truth, it may not be so other ideas and routes need to be taken.
LINK: https://www.autosweet.com/marketing-spending-industry-averages-guidelines/#:~:text=Dealerships%20should%20look%20for%20a,our%20customers%20set%20their%20budgets.
Let’s get creative! How can we best utilize time to ensure that our inventory leaves our dealerships? Social media. Below are a number of ideas to start to gain traction in the digital marketplace, without spending thousands per month.
Step One:
The most important ingredient in our recipe to gain more leads for an affordable amount is the only one that costs some cash out of our whole list. A website.
A website is the oldest route to advertise on the internet. Before social media, before smartphones we had websites. They used to be basically white backgrounds with blue links and clunky huge images. The original internet was ugly if we are being honest. Now you can get beautiful websites that do a ton of different things for relatively inexpensive, or even free in some cases!
A URL, or Domain, or a web address. This is part one of step one. Yourcompanyname.com is the best but .net or even .biz or .auto are also options. This can cost as little as $5 per year up to tens of thousands of dollars (depending upon how much your preferred domain name is).
The industry leader in domain sales GoDaddy has a few tips in the article linked below for coming up with what name to go with.
LINK: https://www.godaddy.com/resources/uk/smallbusiness/10-tips-choosing-perfect-domain-name
Ultimately that choice is yours and some places to purchase a domain name are:
Google, GoDaddy, NameCheap, and thousands of additional sites. Some automotive dealer website providers will even purchase one for you as part of the deal!
So who should I have “Make” me a website? Well, there are a number of ways to go. You can theoretically sell vehicles on a simple Shopify shop. You shouldn’t because it is not made for it, but you can. Instead, you should look for the “right” features.
- CRM (Customer Relations Management)
- Contact Form
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- WCAG (Accessibility Optimization)
These are the critical things to focus on when deciding if a providers cost is worth while. Some are sub-$100 others are hundreds of dollars a month. You have to decide which is the best fit for you.
Here are a few to take a look at:
- $39 – $49 Monthly – https://www.dealerwebsites.com/pricing/
- $99 Monthly – https://dealers.carsforsale.com/pricing-demo/
- $? Monthly – https://www.dealer.com/products/websites/
- MANY MANY MORE!
There are literally thousands of choices, and I wanted to limit it to three so that you can get a taste for what is out there. But your website is extremely important. It will be the key to all of the rest of our strategy.
Part Two: Showing off your inventory! How you take pictures matters! If your lighting is poor, the image quality is bad or it is simply too far away to really see the fine details of the car you are failing when taking pictures of a vehicle.
For a ton of great advice and insights, I will point you to this article from AutoRevo
LINK: https://autorevo.com/pdf/automotive-photos-whitepaper.pdf
At this point, you have an amazing website with all of your vehicles listed, and an amazing domain name so that people can easily find you on Google and Bing search engines (maybe DuckDuckGo if you prefer) so you are off to the races right? Nope. You met the minimum height to ride this ride. Now we go from the kiddie pool into the deep end.
Let’s level your marketing up! The Cisco Annual Internet Report shows that videos accounted for 82% of Internet traffic in 2022. And that number keeps increasing! More platforms, more ability to share those videos, but right now let’s focus on just getting some videos for your website.
In this Medium Article, there are a ton of critical data points that dealers should look at. LINK: https://medium.com/@glo3d.com/the-power-of-video-marketing-for-your-car-dealership-a-must-have-strategy-eb70af0a601e
Here are the key points that are in it:
- A Google study of over 1,000 car dealerships found that video users experienced a remarkable 30% increase in online sales.
- Additionally, the same research discovered that videos influence 75% of auto shoppers.
- CarGurus revealed that almost half of all car shoppers watch at least 30 minutes of video content during their research process
Now don’t worry as part of our next article we will get more in-depth with videos and ideas for them! For now, explore the space and do some of your own research and see what ideas you can come up with! If you have some that you would like to share with us please feel free to do so! If they are awesome, and you are open to it we can even share it as part of our next article!
To close this first part of this article up we need to be honest with ourselves. The average American consumes thousands of hours of videos online every single year. We can either be a percentage of those videos or we can ignore that potential lead funnel. From funny videos to how-to and informational videos to even just videos doing 360 vehicle walkarounds you have the ability to increase your sales starting TODAY by just having a website, adding quality pictures and videos of your inventory.
In the next part we will talk about social media marketing more in-depth but today I simply wanted you all to dip a toe into the water of digital advertising. We encourage you to be lifelong learners and to focus on honing your sales skills, your marketing skills and making your customer’s experience working with you amazing. Starting with your online presence.
Feel free to reach out with questions on this information, and keep selling!