Many dealership in the country have something they hang their hat on. Something they feel separates them from the competition. These are known as unique selling propositions or USP’s. While most dealers use conventional methods to promote their USP’s, many ignore the digital element for making consumers aware of their exceptional offer.
Your dealership may offer free car washes or loaner cars with service. You probably have some kind of service rewards or points program, either set up by the manufacturer or a third party. In most cases these offers are posted in the service area, on the website and perhaps in your newspaper ads, but they can become stagnant. When your USP becomes part of the furniture, it becomes less effective.
Do you have a well optimized web page on your dealership site dedicated to each of your USP’s?
At our store we feature a Nationwide Lifetime Warranty. We have plenty of point of sale collateral around the store and on the cars, but we also make sure that we maintain an online presence that keeps it front and center.
One area that is often overlooked are your new and used car custom comments. Your dealers USP’s should always be highlighted in your custom comments. For example; If you have a used car Lifetime Warranty, Lead off your comments with **LIFETIME WARRANTY** you will also want to be sure to have your USP’s added to all of the marketing areas in Autotrader, Cars.com, and any other third party inventory hosting site you use.
One easy way for a dealer to digitally promote their USP is through online press releases. Free press release sites like PRLog.org and Free-press-release.com are great for marketing your USP’s as well as SEO. Another effective method is by posting articles about your USP on your dealer’s blog, add to that the social media aspect and you have an ideal way to keep your dealers USP top of mind. Here is an example of a recent press release I did for our Lifetime Warranty.
Many of you may have done this already, but have you done it lately? It’s like what we tell our sales people, if you talk about it and the competition doesn’t, then we have it and they don’t. So take the opportunity to take a fresh look at the USP that has been gathering dust and write a new press release about it.
Another great way to promote your dealerships USP’s digitally is with video.
We recently produced a video showcasing our pick-up and delivery service at our luxury import store. You can really bring your USP’s to life with sight, sound and motion. These videos are a great asset on your website and can be optimized online for branding and SEO.
If you don’t have the ability to produce good videos in-house, some vendors like Titan Dealer Solutions; the company that we use for our lifetime warranty can provide you with good promotional video content. We also use a video search optimization company called Car-Mercial. We have our sales and service USP’s added to our videos so that we can maximize the exposure and branding opportunities.
Finally, get your sales and service teams talking about your dealerships unique selling propositions again. Treat them like they are new and breathe life back into your USP’s making them as effective as you wanted them to be at the start.
What are you doing to showcase your dealership Unique Selling Proposition?
