According to Andy MacLeay, Director of Digital Marketing with Dealer.com, eliminating quality inventory on your lot might mean finding an effective marketing campaign that un-limits your dealership’s consumer reach.
As dealers continue to struggle to generate demand for their inventory in the current post-peak environment, what help is out there for them?
Macleay explains what will work in digital marketing, technology, services and people for dealers to sell this inventory.
“I talk with dealers every single day.  And I think that most car shoppers are pretty hopeful right now, and I think that for the most part, we are still selling a lot of cars. Dealers are trying to figure out ways to un-limit their potential. There are several different ways that we can do that.
How to Help Shoppers Find the Car They Want
According to Macleay, the key to unlocking dealer potential to sell the car is directing people to the right car, at the right time with the right marketing budget for a dealer. He also says, only 32 percent of shoppers know exactly what kind of car they want to buy when they start the shopping process.
“This means that car dealers have the ability to implement over 68 percent of car shoppers throughout this purchase cycle. So a big piece of that is how do you most effectively spend those dollars and how do you drive them to move and implement at the right time,” he says.
How to Un-limit Dealer Potential
Today dealers are looking for new ways of management and marketing beyond the traditional to unlock the greatest dealer potential for car selling.
“Dealers are smart and sophisticated these days. They are looking for ways to take their dealership to the next step. They do that by way or technology, by way of good services and by having the right people there for them.”
Key Factors to Landing the Car Deal Online
Dealer.com operates 60 percent of all dealership websites in the U.S. Are shoppers primarily in the final stages of their shopping process when the hit a dealer website.
I see websites as a really practical place to create a demand for the marketplace. We’ve all been hammered with this idea that the shopping is a funnel where we lump car buyers in the top and then out the bottom comes car buyer sausage, and that is just not the reality of how people really shop.”
Macleay says there are key factors that make a shopper land on a dealer website and shop. Like a personalized digital shopping experience, which helps shoppers to inventory quickly. Most shoppers will land on the page with the inventory that they are looking for rather than the home page. Organically, through a paid search ad or through a personalized experience.
“What we want to do is remove the clutter in the shopping experience, and just make it a much smoother transition for a shopper to get to the inventory that they are looking for.”
According to the 2017 Cox Automotive Car Buyer of the Future study, 60 percent of consumers doing their car shopping process online. So, what If a shopper pauses their shopping even after they land on a dealer site?
“During the amount of time a shopper takes in that car buying process, we can use things like re-targeting and like paid search to stay relevant and to stay at the front of that shopper’s mind. It’s just as much about creating new demand as it about capturing the existing demand,” says Macleay.
One of the best ways a dealer can do this without being intrusive is to continue to provide relevant information to the car shopper.
