Tag: Digital Marketing

Is Your Website Mobile-First?

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Having a mobile-friendly website is one that correctly displays on mobile and handheld devices. This makes for a streamlined experience for your dealership staff and online car shoppers when viewing your website. According to Google, w hen web users visited a mobile-friendly site, 74% of people say they’re more likely to return to that site in the future.*

And as the automotive industry moves toward a more digital-first environment, many car shoppers use the internet to shop for cars, so you must make the experience as easy as possible.

Today, many businesses want their website to be fully responsive because it’s essential to have a mobile version of a website. This means the design and development of your website responds positively to the car shopper’s screen size, platform, and orientation.

But at Dealer.com, we use the latest, advanced, mobile-first technology to deliver a user-focused, search-engine-optimized experience when car shoppers visit your site with any device. We mobilize and optimize your site for any smart device.

But you might wonder what’s the difference between a fully responsive website and a mobile-first website.

A Fully Responsive Website

Today, almost everyone has a fully responsive website, meaning the browser will rescale itself to keep the user experience and look and feel across all devices — with no irritating zooming, scrolling, or resizing. Fully responsive websites are also the easiest to implement and maintain and to build a mobile experience at scale. But having a fully responsive website without having a mobile-first strategy does not fully optimize the user experience.

A responsive site only takes the desktop site and makes it mobile friendly. While it can be an adequate mobile platform, it doesn’t optimize for the best mobile experience like a hybrid platform. It also doesn’t account for behavioral differences going from a desktop to mobile device. Just because a desktop site can respond to a device and scale down, doesn’t mean the shopper wants to use a scaled down desktop site.

Additionally, responsive websites are likely to load slower on mobile devices with customized CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) because it loads the website in its entirety. Ideally, users want a mobile experience on mobile device which would require the web-developer to write additional CSS to hide/add elements to the responsive website causing search engines to crawl more code.

Dealer.com takes today’s web site experience a step further and uses a mobile-first approach that allows us to optimize every mobile experience so dealers can render a specific experience to any device.

Why Mobile-First? 

Mobile devices are at the forefront of the digital revolution that has taken place in the last decade. According to Dealer.com, 62% of traffic to dealership websites comes from personal devices. That’s why it’s so essential to ensure the mobile experience for your website is uniquely optimized for each user.

We also know that as dealers, many of your sales and service staff use personal and handle-held devices to interact with customers daily.

Google announced that a website’s mobile friendliness would be a new ranking signal for grading websites. So, the more your website can adapt seamlessly from desktop to a specific personal or handheld device, the higher your website is ranked.

Mobile-first technology from Dealer.com works to deliver a superior user experience across every device while controlling each experience from an intuitive dashboard. This allows you to configure every aspect of your website, simplify site updates across devices, merchandise inventory with precision, and deliver digital deals through transparent automotive digital retailing.

Adapted to Every Car Shopper

We’re committed to using responsive technology to build mobile-first, adaptive websites for our clients— the industry’s most flexible website response capabilities. Our technology incorporates the essential parts of a fully responsive website with the ability for device-specific experiences, we are not just responsive or only responsive.

By optimizing each shopper’s experience for device-specific content and configuration, we give dealers more flexibility and customization opportunities than other providers. So, no matter if you’re shopping on an iPad Pro or Galaxy S22, we create a website specifically for each device.

At Dealer.com we believe that designing with a mobile-first mindset ensures every car shopper has the unique experience they deserve.

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* Google Search Central Blog

Amplify Your Fixed Ops Merchandising to Find Hidden Profits

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Current inventory shortages have caused dealers to look inward to find other sources of revenue. The most natural place for most dealers to look is the fixed ops department, which accounts for about half of the average dealer’s revenue, but only about 1/10 of the overall marketing focus.

Dana Ayer, manager of Performance Management at Dealer.com, recently spoke to dealers about how to find hidden profits through fixed ops merchandising. He shared how dealers can increase customer engagement, boost auto sales leads, and drive revenue with the right fixed ops messaging. Key takeaways from the presentation included:

  • A review of current market challenges and why fixed operations can increase profits
  • What vehicle owners expect from dealerships and their fixed operations departments
  • Fixed ops improvements that have been most impactful for thriving dealers
  • Best auto dealer marketing practices to get the most out of your fixed ops merchandising

Watch the webinar to see how your dealership can drive operational efficiencies, outpace your competitors, and improve profits by amplifying your fixed ops messaging.

Watch the Webinar

Learn more about Dealer.com

Close More Deals with Your Digital Retailing Tools

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It’s no longer enough to simply implement digital retailing tools. To be competitive and close more deals, you have to understand the “why” of digital retailing. Why do consumers seek out these experiences? Why do they choose one dealership’s digital retailing over another? And, most importantly, why should you pay attention to consumers’ answers to these questions?

Amanda Hilerio, eCommerce Performance Manager at Dealer.com, recently spoke to dealers about how to take their digital retailing game to the next level. She discussed five talking points to help dealers attract more car sales leads and get the most out of their digital retailing investment.

  1. Consumer behavior trends and the factors affecting consumer decisions
  2. Why you should pay attention to these consumer trends
  3. How to align your processes with consumer trends
  4. Technology integrations that make your processes easier
  5. How to connect your digital storefront to your physical dealership

Watch the webinar to see how your dealership can connect with more dealer leads through your digital retailing experience.

Watch the Webinar
Learn More About Dealer.com

Marketing in a Cookie-less Future

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Automotive internet marketing is changing. Third-party cookies—data used to display personalized ads and track internet users between websites—are going away for good. Advertisers will no longer be able to track and target shoppers the way they always have. They will have to rely on their own first-party data to deliver the personalized shopping experiences customers expect. So, what does that mean for your dealership?  

Data and Marketing Basics  

The more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them. If you know that a particular customer keeps looking at a particular vehicle online, you can take action to advertise specific makes and models to that customer. You may also be able to identify that customer’s current vehicle, price range for a new vehicle, propensity to buy, and more. All this data makes automotive digital marketing more effective. But as third-party cookies go away, you’ll know less about your customers, and your advertising has the potential to be less personalized and less effective.  

The Importance of First-Party Data 

If your dealership doesn’t have a way to track consumers outside of third-party cookies, your advertising audience is about to get smaller. Dealerships that have access to first-party data have a better chance of coming out on top in this new landscape. But what is first-party data exactly? First-party data—data that you have the right to collect and access—includes the following:  

  • – Data stored under your website
  • – Data stored in your CRM  
  • – Data stored in your DMS  
  • – Tier one data, including some OEM data  

Your Dealership’s Auto Advertising Plan  

Your dealership can approach auto advertising and take advantage of first-party data in one of three ways. You can: 1) manually provide advertisers with your first-party data, 2) purchase first-party data to create audiences, or 3) partner with an advertising provider that already has access to large amounts of first-party data.  

  • Manually Provide Data: This approach involves providing transaction records from your DMS, for example, to your automotive advertising agency to create specific audiences. You may also be able to provide this data to cable television companies to show ads tailored to your audience. 
  • Purchase First-Party Data: The approach involves purchasing consumer data from companies that aggregate different pools of first-party data so dealerships can target and personalize auto advertising.  
  • Partner with an Advertiser with Access to First-Party Data: If an advertiser is already part of an ecosystem of companies that collect data about consumers, your dealership automatically has access to more first-party data and can advertise more effectively to a wider audience. 

Advertising with Dealer.com   

When your dealership advertises with Dealer.com, you get access to exclusive first-party Cox Automotive data throughout the entire buyer’s journey. That includes first-party signals from three out of every four car shoppers. That is the biggest basket of first-party data available to dealerships today. This data allows you to track customers and households based on their browsing data from Kelley Blue Book, Autotrader, and Dealer.com websites to create targetable profiles that make your dealership’s advertising more effective. 

As third-party cookies go away, it’s time to meet with your advertising team to reevaluate your advertising approach. Whether leveraging your DMS and CRM data, purchasing data, or partnering with Dealer.com to leverage the largest pool of first-party data in the industry, create an action plan now that can help you personalize your customers’ experience and keep them coming to your dealership. 

To learn more about the importance of first-party data and how your dealership can gain an advertising advantage in the coming months, watch our detailed video all about marketing in the cookie-less future. 

Get The Most From Your Digital Marketing

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Digital marketing is more important to your dealership’s success than ever before and has the potential to create highly personalized marketing experiences for your customers and drive sales.  

As consumers demand more personalized marketing experiences and digital mediums become more expected, your dealership must stand out from your competition with a custom-built digital marketing strategy. And when it comes to creating the digital marketing strategy for your dealership you need experts to help get the job done.  

Featuring top-notch agency-quality services that drive impressive sales and service opportunities, Marketing Services from Dealer.com help enhance your dealership’s marketing strategy to help get more car buyers to your website. 

From everything to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure you’re at the top of search results to original content that increases on-site engagement and aligns with your campaign strategy and dealership advertising goals, Marketing Services from Dealer.com is your one-stop-shop.  

And if you’re already taking advantage of Marketing Services from Dealer.com, specifically Dealer.com Managed SEO and Content & Creative services – you’re doing great! But do you know the opportunities offered with our Premium SEO and Content & Creative Services? 

Explore what Dealer.com Premium Managed SEO and Content & Creative can offer to take your digital marketing to the next level.  

Dealer.com Managed Premium Content and Creative 

Dealer.com Content and Creative packages allow dealers to create compelling, coordinated digital marketing campaigns with content that attracts more car buyers to your website.  

Our Premium Content & Creative services are a cut above, giving you additional resources and campaigns to reach even more customers. With our premium services, you’ll have a dedicated campaign coordinator to provide strategic guidance and proactive campaign management and help summarize and analyze campaign performance.  

And the more campaigns you send, the more people see your content and visit your website. With Premium Content & Creative, you get the opportunity to send even more integrated marketing campaigns each month to increase the traffic to your website. 

Dealer.com Managed Premium SEO 

Although 88% of buyers use the internet to shop for cars, 91.5% of consumers click on a result from the first page of search results, so if you’re not on top, you’re not being seen.* That’s why Dealer.com Managed SEO helps drive your dealership to the top of the search engine results pages, differentiate you from the competition, enhance the volume and quality of your website traffic, and generate more leads for your dealership website.  

But did you know upgrading your current SEO service could give you even more? Our Dealer.com Managed Premium SEO service assures your website is at the top of highly competitive organic searches to generate even more high-quality traffic and leads to your website.  

In fact, Dealers using Premium SEO experience 52% more VDP views, 30% more website views, 14% more form leads and 59% more phone leads.** 

The market is ripe for dealers that do digital marketing right. Marketing Services from Dealer.com allows you to leverage the expertise of automotive marketing experts to deliver a specialized digital marketing strategy and campaigns aligned to your dealership’s goal.  

Are you considering upgrading your services? Contact your performance manager to discuss our premium offerings and find out more here.  

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**Source: Based on a study of 43 franchise dealerships running Premium SEO and Dealer.com Advertising for 12 consecutive months (Jun 2018 – May 2019). The analysis compared site performance during the 6-month period prior to adopting Premium SEO (Dec 2017 – May 2018) to the 6-month period after adopting Premium SEO (Dec 2018 – May 2019) . 

You Say You Want A Revolution…

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You-Say-You-Want-a-Revolution-Blog_Bob-George

By: Bob George, AVP of Products at Dealer.com

If dealers have learned anything over the last few years, it’s to stay on their toes. Whether they have leaned into digital retailing or overhauled their consumer privacy protocols, dealerships have seen more innovation in the last two years than many have seen in their whole careers.  The marketing game has also fundamentally changed. It’s no longer about being everywhere all the time. With the right data, dealers can market more efficiently and reach the right consumer, with the right message, at just the right time.

An industry-wide movement is taking place and dealerships who resist or don’t get onboard risk seeing their lots get left in the dust. The million-dollar question is: How do dealers embrace this revolution and make the RIGHT marketing changes to support the current landscape and set them up for success in the future? 

Get Personal 

As consumer behavior changes and digital competition continues to increase, dealerships must figure out how to cut through the noise and get personal with consumers. That starts with figuring out how to make your best offerings discoverable. But it’s not enough to focus on new customers; you also need to tie these acquisition efforts to retention, which drives long-term, sustainable growth. 

Remember, a seamless experience isn’t just cross-channel marketing, it’s about moving customers along the buyer journey with traditional marketing tactics, while instilling a long-term sense of loyalty and value. Find the balance between what the consumer wants to get out of any given interaction with your brand and what your business needs to get out of it, then make sure to keep the barrier to entry for consumers as low as possible. 

Data is Gold 

Dealers decrease the leads they generate by 164% if they fail to use a data-driven, multichannel strategy. However, marketers need to do more than just gather data—the data needs to be meaningful to improve marketing campaigns. 

To future proof your marketing, intent data is key. Intent data is information specifically about a person or company’s activities. It can be gathered from a company website by looking at which pages a customer visited, how long they stayed on those pages, and which links they clicked or procured from a third party. Intent data can be used to prioritize the best customer prospects and create more personalized campaigns to drive better conversion.  

A version of this article originally appeared on DrivingSales. 

Deliver Next-Level (Not Generic) Consumer Experiences

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Your customers expect a unique and personalized experience. Failure to deliver on this expectation by giving them a generic, one-buyer-fits-all digital experience can lead to loss of sales. Both you and your customers deserve better. 

Dealer.com helps you find buyers everywhere and own every moment by harnessing the power of unmatched consumer data and the industry’s smartest marketing solution. That means you generate more online leads and your customers get the personalized buying experience they expect. With Dealer.com, you can:

  • Create engaging digital marketing experiences personalized to each shopper
  • Know how to target each shopper, and where and when to talk to them
  • Boost profits with a 216% higher lead conversion rate

Watch our video to see how you can generate more memorable and profitable consumer experiences with Dealer.com.

Make 2022 the Year of Premium Consumer Experience

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By Nuan Openshaw-Dion 

The beginning of a new year is always an inspiring time for me. While I’m always focused on continuous improvement, there’s something about flipping the calendar that makes the new possibilities and opportunities ahead more exciting than ever. It’s a great time to reflect and set an intention for the year ahead.  

I’ve been thinking about what our amazing team at Dealer.com achieved in 2021. We’ve been relentlessly working hard for our dealers, helping them market themselves more easily and effectively. That work has taken many forms, including maintaining excellence in our customer support teams, expanding our marketing channels, and updating products like Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions and Page Designer—targeted at making our platform even better, faster, and easier to use.  

We’ve also continued to embrace the rapid evolution of car buying with investments into a more flexible, digital buying process. Dealer.com’s Accelerate My Deal is an integral part of Cox Automotive Digital Retailing, a solution for dealers who want to own every purchase path, meeting consumers based on their buying preferences.  

And yet, though we’ve made so much great progress on behalf of our dealers, there is so much left to do! I’ve been thinking a lot about to how to tackle the work ahead, and one common theme keeps rising to the top for me: premium consumer experiences.  

The Dealer.com team shares the goal of making every experience a consumer has with a dealer—whether online, in-store, or both—an outstanding one. In today’s retail environment, those standout experiences separate the winning dealerships from the stagnant ones.  

With that in mind, I’m challenging my team and my dealership partners to do everything with a singular focus: make this the year of the premium consumer experience. Here are a few key action items I’m encouraging my team and my dealer partners to take to help us all get there.  

Implement Tools and Processes that Make Your Work Easier   

I’m challenging my team to find and implement tools that help them complete critical projects faster and better, and I’m challenging our dealers to do the same. Think about the various digital marketing tools you use. When is the last time you critically evaluated your processes for using those tools? Have new enhancements been released that could make your job easier if you made small process changes?  

As I mentioned, we’ve made some meaningful enhancements to our foundational tools this year. We’ve launched a new Page Designer that makes designing your dealership website more intuitive, expanded channels in Automotive Marketing Platform to make your marketing more cohesive and effective, and aligned and integrated Accelerate My Deal and Cox Automotive Digital Retailing to make deal workflows even smoother. If you haven’t updated your processes to incorporate these new capabilities, you’re missing out on opportunities to improve—and on opportunities to deliver the best possible consumer experiences.  

Prioritize Data and Meaningful Integrations  

You probably know by now that reliable consumer data is critical to success, not only for automotive digital marketing but also for overall dealership profitability. The right data enables you to generate more automobile leads by personalizing every touchpoint a consumer has with your dealership, from a display ad to deal making. In 2022, I’m challenging everyone to keep the value of consumer data in focus.  

For us at Dealer.com, that means taking advantage of the breadth and depth of the Cox Automotive data network, which includes insights from two out of three U.S. car buyers (2020 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey). For your dealerships, it means making sure you’re set up to successfully act on all the data and insights in your systems.  

You must have meaningful integrations to make data actionable. And it’s not just about integrations between marketing and sales tools (though of course those are important). You have to think about the data and system integrations between all your dealership departments. When marketing, sales, service, and operations are all in sync, you win. My team at Dealer.com is continuing to stay close to our peers at VinSolutions, Xtime, and Dealertrack DMS to continue bringing your dealership departments and data closer together.  

Evaluate the Value of Your Partnerships  

There’s no way around it—the right tools and the right data are critical to providing premium consumer experiences. But there’s a third critical element: the right people. Without the right people, even the very best tools and data will fall short.  

As you launch your 2022 marketing plans, I encourage you to take note of the role your marketing partners play. Are they making your job easier and acting as a true partner in your success? Or are they little more than technical support?  

At Dealer.com, true, meaningful partnership with our dealerships is at the core of our business. Your success is our success. With the right people behind premium consumer experiences, we all win.  

I couldn’t end a post about reflection and inspiration without saying how immensely grateful we are for our dealer clients. I continue to be personally inspired by your resilience, creativity, and success, and we couldn’t be more excited to continue to drive success together in 2022.  

4 Marketing Strategies for Overcoming Inventory Shortages

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Every dealership is dealing with inventory acquisition challenges. It’s an industry-wide issue that has had a profound impact on profitability. And while some dealers are choosing to “wait out” the inventory shortage, others are succeeding now.

Implement these four auto dealer marketing strategies to overcome inventory obstacles and supply chain challenges at your dealership.

  • Strategy 1: Evolve Campaign Types—Focus auto advertising on inventory acquisition. Promote that you’ll pay top dollar for used vehicles.
  • Strategy 2: Widen Your Geo-Target—As inventory shrinks, expand your audience beyond normal boundaries with messaging about buying used vehicles.
  • Strategy 3: Add Web Content—Use your dealership’s website to advertise acquisition efforts with home page banners, service page banners, and trade-in reminders.
  • Strategy 4: Dealership-Wide Plan—Ensure marketing, sales, and service are all in sync, connecting workflows across departments, to accomplish inventory acquisition goals.

The current inventory shortage is a major challenge, and it’s not going away anytime soon. With these four proven marketing strategies, you can outlast current supply chain challenges to keep profits high, even as inventory is low.

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Building the Path to Better Digital Marketing 

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By Heather Ellis, Dealer.com AVP of Dealer Marketing 

The auto industry often talks about the idea of being “better” in the market, but in truth there still is a lot of work to do to before automotive can catch up with other verticals. Time and again, “better” is a marathon and not a sprint. It is a continual, ongoing drive to fix what is broken, an unrelenting desire to push and to optimize. 

It’s not easy to unwind the nuances of automotive digital marketing, and no one-size-fits-all playbook exists to address the myriad challenges across all tiers of the marketplace. We are seeing an industry-wide common goal to create advertising programs that spend less and sell more, and ultimately move closer toward a trusted digital experience across the board. 

To accomplish this, it is imperative for both OEMs and dealerships to have the best consumer data at their disposal, and arguably it is even more important to know what to do with it. By harnessing the right data into the right insights, OEMs and dealers can work more efficiently to eradicate overmarketing and instead target their advertising to go directly where there is demand. 

Leading with first-party and audience data, maximized through strategic partnerships, results in improved connectivity that dives deeper and provides a crisper, clearer view of consumers to help automotive companies cut through the noise and propel the entire industry forward. 

Advertising strategy is complex and the market is ever-changing. Traditional advertising is not as effective as it used to be, and infinite other channels are competing for consumer attention. Failing to utilize a data-driven, multichannel strategy, dealers decrease the leads they generate by an astounding 164%, according to the Dealer.com Advertising Product Summary. 

The most successful dealers utilize a multichannel marketing strategy and approach auto advertising based on their unique goals. They can identify and target qualified audiences at the right time with the right message, to sell more cars profitably and deliver a superior dealership experience. At a time when inventory is tighter than ever, having an automated platform can help dealers instantly recommend the best match for their customers from current inventory without any manual input. 

That real-time targeting can only be fueled by first-party data across different channels. The right advertising maximizes return on investment by connecting real-time data across channels, and increasing website traffic, quality visits, engagement, and conversions. 

In this changing landscape of consumer demand, industry players will discover the solutions lie in working together toward a common goal to sell more cars and make more profits. To help get there, we should continually align the necessary jobs, prioritize them, and check them off one by one. We are going to have to adapt and change the way we do business to combat industry challenges using our best and brightest resources. 

Once the industry understands that the best solutions focus on activating based on behaviors and audiences first, and then matching channels, tactics and messages to that secondly — that is when the auto industry will be firmly on its path to “better,” finally starting to catch up with other verticals slaying the marketing game. 

There is an accelerated need in the auto industry for innovation and focus on the total consumer experience, a practice that is now commonplace in other industries — including first-visit personalization and first-party data application. OEMs and dealerships will celebrate success and collectively win when there is a common focus on the end consumer, and collective work to solve their problems. 

Ultimately, we all want an experience that’s efficient, productive, and complete, so it’s imperative to find the right partner offering the advertising solutions that deliver that level of flexibility and transparency. 

A version of this article originally appeared in Auto Remarketing.