With the average new car costing $40,000, losing a sale can make a huge impact on your business. Repeating some of the biggest mistakes made by car dealerships can hurt you. Luckily, you can do a few things to reduce the chances of you making a mistake so you can keep the business running, and you can get even more sales.
One of the biggest mistakes made by car dealerships is not having a target audience or not knowing their target audience. While you may want to try to sell to anyone who walks into your dealership, that isn’t the best idea. If you don’t have a target audience, it will be much more difficult to market to anyone. By narrowing your audience, you can figure out what will make people in that group come to your dealership and buy a car.
Having an audience can also help you stand out from your competitors. If you know your audience better, you’ll be able to get in their head, and you can easily convince them to hire you.
Your target audience may include a certain age range or income bracket. Whatever it is, determine it now so that you can focus your marketing efforts better.
Another one of the biggest mistakes by car dealerships is not focusing on social media. Some dealerships either don’t have social media accounts, or they never post to the accounts they have.
Using your target audience, consider what social platforms are best for your business. For example, LinkedIn could be a good option for business owners, while Instagram is great for a younger audience. Once you set up your account on one or two platforms, post to it regularly. Create a posting schedule, and create your posts ahead of time so that you don’t have to spend time throughout the week doing that.
Social media is a great tool for customer communication for car dealerships. By having active accounts, you can use private messages to contact people and get them to visit you.
Your website is another great way to promote your dealership. However, don’t add another webpage just to add something. Each page should have a decent amount of content.
Google may not promote pages with less content because they aren’t that valuable to people. When someone is looking at buying a car, they need more than a few sentences. Try to write at least a few hundred words for each page. If you have customer reviews, that can be an easy way to increase the content on your page and add value to prospective customers.
Having fewer pages with more content on each will be better for your website. And you can keep navigation simple, making it easier for shoppers to find what they need.
One of the most important pages on your site is the homepage. It can be easy to leave this page with mostly pictures, but it’s a great place to add more content to help promote the dealership. For one, you can use it to link to different pages or sections of your site. You might include separate links to sedans, SUVs, and trucks to help shoppers narrow their search.
Whenever you run a special promotion, update the website to reflect that. Your homepage can get a lot of traffic, so you need to direct that traffic to the vehicle pages or other strategic pages.
When creating content for your website, you want to avoid using duplicate content. Make each page unique, even if two say similar things. Writing unique content can keep search engines from punishing your website for plagiarism. This can apply to duplicate content within your site and across other sites.
The warranty page is the biggest example of this, because it’s usually the same as other dealerships. When possible, link to a generic warranty page or write a unique version. If you want to write content for different types of cars, make each page unique. Try not to replace the word “sedan” with “SUV” when writing about different vehicles.
Another vital part of marketing for car dealerships is using pictures. Whether you’re writing listings for your website or creating social media content, use as many images as you can. Take photos of the inside and outside of the car, and include pictures of the different angles. If you sell used cars and one has a significant defect, make sure to get a picture of that.
Add as many photos as you can to the listings on your website. Then, buyers will have as much information as they need before they buy the car.
While social media platforms can restrict the number of pictures per post, include what you can. You may also want to take a video to show the car from various angles within one post.
Another thing you should avoid when marketing your dealership is using generic vehicle descriptions. While you want to include the basic features and specs, make it interesting. Instead of using a tool to generate basic descriptions, write them yourself. Consider what you would want to know if you were buying a car.
Think about your target audience and the language they might use. Then, use that information to write interesting car descriptions to share with each listing.
To help avoid duplicate content, write descriptions from scratch, even for similar models. That way, you won’t bore people, and Google won’t punish you for using the same text multiple times.
When writing a webpage, you have the chance to enter title tags to help your website’s SEO. Avoid using titles that focus on the name of your dealership and not of your location or the cars you have. On the other hand, don’t include every make or model of car within one title tag. That can make the tag too long to read, and it can be confusing for visitors.
Instead, make each title tag specific to the vehicle or category. Visitors can find what they need, and search engines will know when to show each page.
In the past, you could get away with stuffing keywords in your content to rank highly in search. However, keyword stuffing and other black hat SEO techniques aren’t as successful. You should still use keywords on your website to tell search engines about the content. But place them naturally in the text and in a few strategic places.
Keywords should go in the introduction or near the top of a page. Also, put them in the conclusion of the page, a header, and in the title tag. You can also include the keyword in your meta description, which shows up under your website link on Google.
You also need to select the right keywords to help people find your dealership’s website. Consider the search intent, which will usually be to find a car to buy.
Put yourself in the mind of a buyer to help figure out what keywords they may use. You can then use a keyword research tool to determine how competitive and popular the keyword is.
If you choose super competitive keywords, your content may not show up on the first page. On the other hand, if you use keywords no one searches for, people won’t find your site.
When deciding which keywords to use, focus on local keywords and local SEO. Of course, people won’t buy from your dealership if they don’t live in the area, so local optimization can help you attract the right customers.
You can also use a Google My Business profile to help display your location and website in search results. Then, people don’t have to click on your site to learn the basics of your business.
The profile can show up when someone searches for a dealership in your area or if they search for your business. Either way, local optimization can help you get more clicks, which may increase conversions.
Once you capture a lead or make a sale, you should send a followup. Handwritten notes for car dealerships can be a great way to add a personal touch.
After you sell a car, you could send that customer a note thanking them for their business and wishing them a good experience with the car. If someone looks at cars but doesn’t buy, you may also want to send a note.
The note can include a thank you for coming in, but you can also use it to promote your dealership. Perhaps you have an upcoming sale, and they can come in and buy a car then.
Some of the biggest mistakes made by car dealerships can cost you a lot in sales. If you make the mistakes regularly, you may struggle to keep your business running.
Fortunately, strategies like handwritten notes for car dealerships can help. Whether you send a personal note or update your social presence, you can keep customers coming back whenever they need a new vehicle.
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