These are not only 3 new rules, but perhaps the only 3 rules that will have a positive impact on your dealerships’ sales efficiency and profitability in today’s automotive market through the foreseeable future.
Before we get to the 3 new rules let’s make sure you’re clearly aware of how the automotive shopper has changed from the yesteryear’s of 2014 to today. What has changed is that there are 3 fundamentally new characteristics in the nature of online automotive shoppers today. You may be completely aware of them, if not you’re encouraged to Google the following characteristics to do your own research to learn more about these differences in today’s online automotive shopper behavior.
The 3 fundamental characteristics of online shoppers today:
Characteristic Number 1: Automotive shoppers today engage in over 30 online digital touch-points before deciding which dealer(s) to engage with. In other words, people interested in your brand and shopping for cars in your market will find your dealership website regardless of your physical location, your site ranking, quality score, social media presence, or online reputation. They’ll find and visit your dealership online whether you like or not.
Characteristic Number 2: Because it’s easier to find you today, and because every device, desktop, mobile, tablet… even smart-watch facilitates that ease, today’s shoppers compare your dealership and your products to many of your competitors and 3rd party sites with relative ease. They find similar makes, models and compare prices faster than you can find your facebook admin password.
Characteristic Number 3: They are driven by time and money, not advertising message or prior experience with your dealership. Today’s shoppers want you to make it easy for them, they want you to show them that you respect their time, and to be transparent with your pricing. If not you’ll see them as someone you could have sold, but didn’t.
So, if we can agree on those characteristics that define today’s shoppers, here then are the 3 new Automotive Marketing Rules:
- Treat all of your “visitors” as unique individuals. They’re not deals, statistics, eyeballs, they’re not ups, they’re not site visitors… they’re people. Real people like you and me. They express their needs in great detail on the phone, in your showroom, and they even do so on your website. If you have the right tools and skills, they show you whom they are and what their interests and intentions are. Treat them accordingly. Treat them as individuals. Market to them as individuals.
- Focus on your organic traffic. Consider Characteristic Number 1 above, online shoppers find you – always. They’re interested in your brand, you’re one of 2 to 3 dealerships in a reasonable geographic distance from them that carries that brand, they will visit your website whether you like it or not. Every honest digital marketing vendor will tell you that organic traffic (people) on your website converts at higher rates than the paid-search “click bait” people on your website. They not only convert at a higher rate, their lead to sales rate and their per unit gross profitability is higher than those people of paid-search traffic. You have more – much more organic traffic than your team can handle. Your organic traffic is quite literally a gold mine. Spend your attention, time, and money on the people who chose to be on your website voluntarily (organic). Work to convert more of those people to visitors in your showroom. That is more profitable, significantly less expensive and much easier to do than trying to force people (drive traffic) to your website.
- Inspect what you expect. You expect sales, specifically vehicle sales – inspect that. Inspect with great attention and detail how many sales you are generating from the leads that you’re getting from your website. You expect sales daily and your sales are a direct result of the people on your website choosing to engage with you (leads: either form submissions, phone calls, or otherwise) – measure those leads daily like you measure your sales. Too many dealers make the mistake of measuring sales daily yet only measuring leads and sales from those leads monthly – if at all. Everyday work hard to ensure that your dealership website is engaging and converting more and more of the people that are visiting your website (what you used to call visitors). BTW: 2-3% website conversion is woefully anemic. Just because it’s average it doesn’t mean that’s what you should settle or strive for. From those converted leads measure again with great attention and detail the amount of sales that you’re getting from those leads. Those are the only two metrics that matter: Lead Conversion and Sales Conversion. That’s it. Number of people visiting, number of people clicking, search engine rank, the amount of products they look at are all merely distractions. Why? Review Characteristic Number 2 above. It’s too easy for online shoppers to find and visit your website today. If you believe that because you’re in position number on Google and because of that people shopping for your product do not ALSO visit the dealers at position 2, 3, and so on… you are a dinosaur with your head in the sand that’s losing a lot of deals and you will soon be replaced by managers and dealers with even average market dynamics awareness.
Times are very different today in the automotive marketplace – particularly online shopper behavior. As I’ve said: Times aren’t changing, they’ve changed. This would be nearly a 10 page post if I were to list all of the automotive online shoppers studies that prove that fact. You can no longer execute a PPC campaign and expect to incrementally improve sales than you can hope to improve your pre-owned business profitability by listing pre-owned inventory at higher prices that aren’t in line with market dynamics and comparable prices. You know that in the pre-owned business inventory-management tools exist specifically because of the nature of how people shop online. In 2005 you would never have considered measuring a sales person by his Yelp reviews but you do today. Why? Because you do know that the way people shop is different. Similarly you won’t be successful with the search engine marketing strategies and KPI’s that you used when “responsive websites” weren’t even a thing, back when Google didn’t penalize you for not having them in search algorithms. It’s really simple actually – if you’re still measuring the online metrics you used two years ago you are in the dark and in as much trouble as Barnes & Nobles executives were when they measured their business by how many more books they sold this month over last month, or this month over the same period last year. You know how the story ended for them… they believed their old strategies would be sufficient in the new way people shopped. Don’t let their fate be yours. Times aren’t changing, they’ve changed.