Driving quality in-market car buyers to your dealership’s website is hard work. There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, but not all traffic is the same.
Obviously, there’s a lot of competition out there. You compete with dealerships from other OEM’s, dealerships from the same OEM’s, you even have to compete with dealerships within your dealer group, and why not, competition is good – especially when you win!
With all of this competition, you and your dealership need to stay ahead of the curve. Being that you are reading this blog, you are already a step ahead.
Here are three ways that dealerships fall short with their marketing and how you can fix the problems.
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1) Investing in ads that drive traffic to generic offer pages (or worse, the Homepage of your site)
The Problem: Traditional display advertising or generic SEM advertising that drives traffic to a non-specific landing page on the dealership’s site. Buyers can’t indicate interest in a specific car on typical landing pages. This means you’ll need to get this buyer to a VDP from the landing page. On most sites this process can take up to 4 steps.
Any digital marketer worth their salt will tell you that the more pages a person needs to navigate to find the information they’re looking for, the more site abandonment you can expect. Assuming half of the traffic continues on after each page, you can only expect about 12.5% of traffic coming from a landing page to ever reach a valuable VDP.
The solution: Invest into ads that drive traffic directly to your VDP. By doing this, you eliminate site abandonment and effectively only pay for ads that bring you highly valued VDP traffic.
2) Targeting your advertising only based on demographics & psychographics
When you target by demographics and psychographics, you are painting everyone in that category with the same brush. By doing so, you completely disregard the buyer’s personal preferences, and people are unique. You don’t have to look far to see examples how this type of targeting falls short.
Simply look to your peers: do they all drive the same type of car? Of course not. Even though they are similar to you, they all have their individual preferences.
The Solution: Try to target based on behaviour, real live action from an individual. The easiest way to do this is to use an ad technology that builds the profile of each buyer it encounters using a Data Management Platform (DMP). Marketers talk about segmentation of demographics and psychographics to find the right group of people more likely to have an interest in your cars. Today’s ad technology allows for a segment of 1.
By targeting the actual behaviour of the buyer (rather than the demographics or psychographics of potential buyers), the traffic generated in this way has a significantly higher probability of filling out a form or performing other meaningful actions on your site. This effectively increases your conversion rate and reduce your CPA
3) Only targeting active car buyers
When you only target in-market buyers, you’re missing out on a huge segment of potential buyers. The cost of purchasing a vehicle makes impulse buying prohibitive for most people. As a result, car buyers will spend numerous hours researching and selecting the vehicle that best fits their needs. This process takes 60 to 90 days or more in many cases. By only promoting your inventory through SEM, listing sites or other “active shopping” environments you are missing a massive opportunity to get your right vehicles in front of the right buyers.
Nobody knows your market better than you and auto shopping behavior changes constantly and quickly. Don’t be left playing catch-up in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Take the time to sit and brainstorm the next evolution in your dealership’s marketing direction.
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