Tag: Inventory

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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Marketing in a Lean Inventory Environment

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Given today’s inventory shortage challenges, it can be tempting to cut back on advertising. After all, what’s the point in marketing when you don’t have as much inventory to sell. But experience has shown that cutting advertising can lead to significant, long-term setbacks.

Henry Ford understood this concept way back in the early 1900s when he said that stopping advertising to save money is like stopping a clock to save time. But that doesn’t mean your marketing has to stay at status quo. Here are a few smart ways to evolve your marketing strategy for lean inventory times.

Adjusted New-Inventory Campaigns

Now is a great time to focus your marketing on vehicles with more availability. Promote in-transit inventory and vehicles scheduled to arrive. Remove bargain pages and raising prices to match demand. It may also be wise to add urgency to advertisements that help customers understand the realities of availability limits. Fear of missing out can bring in new customers, even if those customers have to wait just a little longer to get their vehicle.

Used Car Advertising Campaigns

New cars may not be immediately available, but there are a lot of pre-owned cars in the world, many of which are prime for purchase and resell opportunity. Shift your used car advertising dollars toward pre-owned campaigns, targeted at shoppers with trade-ins and who are more likely to buy used. As long as you can continue to source used inventory, you can sustain sales operations until manufacturers catch up to meet new inventory demands.

Pre-Order Purchase Campaigns

A car doesn’t have to be physically on the lot for you to sell it. Advertise the opportunity to pre-order a car and promote the option to hand-select features, giving your customers a customized, personalized vehicle purchase experience. These types of pre-order campaigns can also direct your automobile leads to your dealership’s digital retailing tools, allowing them to complete large portions of the buying process online.

Brand Awareness Campaigns

Inventory may be scarce, but buyers are still out there. Brand awareness campaigns can keep your dealership top of mind with active or soon-to-be active shoppers, while reinforcing all the reasons to buy from your dealership. Just as importantly, these types of campaigns prevent competitors from stealing market share by filling an advertising void.

Service Campaigns

Less inventory also means more miles on your customers’ current cars. Shift some of your advertising spend to promote your service department. In doing so, don’t forget about lesser-known services like your wash bay, auto detailing, and other services that can be attractive for drivers wanting to make small upgrades and make do with what they have for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion

As Henry Ford predicted all those years ago, time and car sales continue to march forward. And while inventory shortages are only temporary, the customers you bring in through your marketing can last a lifetime and help your dealership sustain short- and long-term success. To learn more strategies for thriving in the current inventory environment, check out our free Lean Inventory Playbook.

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Why Flexible Inventory Pricing Displays Should Matter for Your Website Provider

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Dealer.com Pricing Calculations

Click for ePrice.

Show discounts, rebates, and MSRP.

Present only your asking price.

Display all of the pricing: MSRP, discounts, and add-ons.

Don’t show any pricing and just include a “call to inquire” button.

The combinations for displaying your inventory’s prices seem practically endless. And rightly so. Inventory pricing, and how your website displays it to the shopping public, is an important part of your sales strategy.

Depending on what you would like your shoppers to do next, you’re faced with multiple decisions. Are you displaying all of the pricing information – discounts, rebates, and add-ons, to name a few – in an attempt to build trust with and empower your shoppers? Or is your goal to gather consumer information so that your sales team can close the deal once shoppers are convinced to come in to the showroom? Or, does your strategy fall somewhere in between?

Whichever your strategy, your website should have the flexibility to accommodate any pricing equation – and give you the control to make changes yourself – to effectively advertise inventory to your shoppers.

In the past, website providers have offered only narrow pricing display options and very limited control, given the complexities of dealer-by-dealer marketing strategies and states’ various sales compliance rules. But as these rules have evolved, it’s become clear that limited pricing display parameters restrict dealerships because they diminish the multiple pricing combinations that dealers would otherwise use to their benefit.

With more inventory pricing display options and autonomy, dealers are empowered to show more of the price/cost breakdown to shoppers. Here are just a few combinations which become possible with flexible inventory pricing displays:

1. A-B+C = D – Show a discount first and then an ‘add-on’ value:

Example:
MSRP: $32,000
Discount of – $1,000
Retail Value: $31,000
Add On of $3,000
Internet Price: $34,000

2. A-B-C = D – Show two potential discounts fields or combine two discounts:

Example:
MSRP: $32,000
Discount –  $1,000
Retail Value: $31,000
Discount – $2,000
Internet Price: $29,000

3. A+B-C = D – Show an add-on and a discount field; showing middle price is optional:

Example:
MSRP: $32,000
Add On + $3,000
Retail Value: $35,000
Discount – $1,000
Internet Price: $34,000

4. A+B+C = D – Show the sum of all options:

Example:
MSRP: $32,000
Add On + $1,000
Retail Value: $33,000
Add On + $2,000
Internet Price: $35,000

Your pricing strategy is your business. Giving you the flexibility and control to display your inventory pricing should be the job of any website provider.

Comment below to share how inventory pricing display flexibility might make significant changes to your sales strategy. As always, we are happy to connect for a strategic consultation.