Integrated Messaging Software for Unparalleled Customer Experiences
ActivEngage Messaging Software revolutionizes your website by effortlessly integrating live messaging, providing endless opportunities for customer engagement. This integration goes beyond the surface, as it is intricately woven into the entire Cox Automotive suite of web applications and services, ensuring a comprehensive approach to digital customer experiences.
Imagine your website visitors being warmly welcomed by well-trained experts around the clock, offering personalized assistance and guidance. With ActivEngage, there’s no need to worry about frustrating chatbots or impersonal automated responses. Each interaction is managed by highly skilled professionals, guaranteeing a fulfilling interaction experience for every shopper. Get ready for unmatched engagement possibilities!
As a dealer, you understand that selling cars is a people business. There’s an actual human being at the other end of every transaction. Every car you sell or service is connected to a person with an opinion. And in a day and age when everything gets shared on online, their opinions about your dealership and their experience are fair game.
Unfortunately, far too many opinions that get shared online tend to skew negative. The squeaky wheels get the grease and the happy customers are less likely to share their views. But there is a way to generate more positive reviews and leverage positive opinions to your advantage.
If you don’t have a system in place for generating reviews and giving voice to satisfied customers, the unsatisfied customer reviews will probably paint an inaccurate picture of your dealership online.
Make online reviews a priority. Take the time to research the right technology and technology partner to realize the benefits of this resource. Doing so can help you generate more positive reviews and turn those reviews into a viable auto dealer marketing tool to build your brand and boost sales.
Make It Personal
Consumers that had a negative experience with your dealership are more prone to leaving reviews. But if you ask your happy customers to leave a review, you may be surprised how many come through for you.
The key to these requests is personalization. Your customers are much more likely to respond to a review generation request when you make it personal to them because they’re already receiving so much spam.
An always-on, customizable, personalized review solicitation solution makes it easy for your customers to leave positive feedback. By sending a text (on of your customers’ preferred way to communicate) either from your phone or automatically, right after a sales or service transaction, you can increase the overall volume of positive customer reviews.
Integrate Your SEO and Review Generation Services
Did you know that 59% of shoppers believe reputation is the single most important factor when choosing a dealership? Having a coordinated digital strategy can unify your online presence, communicate the same coordinated messages across your digital channels, and build your brand reputation.
When actual customers share reviews that reflect the same messaging as your automotive SEO, it reinforces your customer service commitment online and delivers valuable content that attracts additional shoppers.
This type of coordinate car dealer SEO and Review Generation effort also involves monitoring all relevant digital properties and thoughtfully responding to all reviews in lockstep with auto SEO service best practices. It’s a smart way to turn every customer interaction into a powerful selling tool.
Start with the Right Team
Just as there are real people at the other end of every dealership transaction, it takes real people to manage your dealership’s reputation. To implement a successful review generation strategy and generate more positive review, you have to have a dedicated team that knows the automotive industry.
Take the time to find a team that can deliver real results by creating a customized review and review response strategy that is informed by proven best practices. And, make sure that team is made up of knowledgeable, industry-savvy marketers, not just review generation experts.
Every customer has an opinion, and the overwhelming majority of those opinions are positive for most dealerships. If you can harness the power of those opinions by prioritizing review generation, making review solicitation personal, integrating your digital strategy, and partnering with the right team, you can generate more positive review and drive business.
Collaborative digital marketing expertise from Dealer.com puts Southern California Hyundai dealer on a path for growth.
Determined to resolve its competitive challenges, Downey Hyundai partnered with Dealer.com, adding Advertising, Premium SEO, Content and Creative, and Accelerate My Deal services, all to support their Dealer.com website.
In the ensuing months, the dealership has seen increases in organic traffic, quality visits, leads, and more. Downey’s managers attribute the success to Dealer.com’s team-centered approach, where cross-functional experts work together on the dealership’s behalf, with a collaborative commitment to invest in the dealership’s success first.
With so many shoppers starting the car buying process online, you understand the importance of using SEO to drive traffic to your site. But what if you could use SEO to do even more? In this guide, you’ll learn smart strategies for using SEO to overcome common dealership challenges.
As consumers spend more time and complete more activities online, the world of automotive retail is changing. Dealerships are adjusting their digital marketing strategies to incorporate new technologies, tools and tactics that attract today’s online car shoppers. And, as with anything new, dealers have questions.
In this eBook, 4 Questions to Improve Your Dealership’s Digital Marketing, you’ll find answers to key questions that can drive your digital marketing strategy. You’ll discover:
How to define your marketing priorities for the digital-first era
How to identify the most productive, efficient ways of finding new leads
How to overcome challenges and implement your revamped digital marketing strategy
Lead the way into a new world of automotive marketing with innovative digital marketing solutions that attract customers and help you close more deals. A guide to evaluating your digital marketing strategy to attract customers and close more deals.
It has been a whirlwind year for the automotive industry. In order to keep pace with change, consumers are adopting new ways of navigating the vehicle ownership cycle while keeping themselves and their families safe. Whether they’re in the market for a new vehicle or responding to automotive service marketing, your customers are completing more steps online. Is your digital marketing strategy prepared to handle this change, and is your team skilled enough to draw more shoppers to your Digital Storefront?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a powerful tool to overcome some of your most persistent headaches. With 88% of shoppers starting the car buying process online, there is great potential to reach your target audience while they navigate search engine rankings. But it takes active management of this powerful digital marketing channel in order to make it successful. In other words, a “set it and forget it” approach won’t be enough to keep you on the first page of search results or satisfy the claim of a dealership customer retention plan.
Managing SEO can take a significant investment in time, effort and expertise to achieve its full potential and maximize returns for your dealership. Fortunately, Dealer.com employs a 100+ member team of trained automotive SEO and content experts who adapt to changing trends and best practices, so you don’t have to.
Want to know more about Dealer.com SEO, why it matters to your dealership, and ways in which it can be used? Keep reading for one example of how a common dealership sales challenge could be addressed with SEO, leading to more sales with minimal effort and investment.
The Challenge:Win over shoppers who are looking at competitive models.
The Strategy: Create a model comparison page to showcase your inventory.
Create your unique content: Show your models side-by-side with your competitors’ models and review why your inventory is superior. For instance, talk about performance, efficiency, features, technologies, and price.
Build your metadata: Create a title and description for the page that really grabs their attention. Include the make and model of both vehicles and make it evident that you’re comparing them. The description should tease that your page will show a better one.
Interlink: Now that you’ve made the case for the model you sell, send them to your inventory pages to start the buying process.
Evaluate: Monitor the traffic to your page to learn if adjustments to the comparisons should be made.
Relying on a team of automotive SEO experts to maintain a more proactive, vigilant SEO strategy can give you the edge over your competition. Contact us today and let us help you identify opportunities to help you move more metal through the art and science of SEO.
Today’s environment is challenging. The 2020 Cox Automotive COVID-19 Consumer Impact Study reported we’re dealing with tight inventories as well as fewer in-market shoppers — 20 percent of consumers were in-market to purchase a vehicle in March, while early August reported 15 percent in-market. To combat numbers like that, you need your digital marketing on-point and working for you.
Fully optimized digital marketing will drive in-market opportunities to your website and generate sales and service leads for your dealership. Let’s talk through the digital marketing hurdles you must face head on right now — and how to clear them for your dealership.
Hurdle 1: Expertise
Digital marketing is comprised of vast, highly specialized skill sets, and with 49 percent of businesses increasing digital marketing efforts in the wake of 2020, you need experience and expertise stay competitive.1
It takes a lot of time to read all the marketing blogs, evaluate social media platforms, and anticipate and prepare for algorithm changes. Not to mention, studying your analytics to inform changes to strategy amidst shifting priorities and challenges. You may be able to check some digital to-dos off your list, but if it’s not your primary job, can you give it the time and attention it needs? Look for a partner that specializes in core digital marketing fundamentals, with deep knowledge of the automotive industry, to help you stay ahead of emerging trends and ever-changing best practices.
Hurdle 2: Resources
We are all trying to do more with less today. This year has forced you to create necessary efficiencies at your dealership, and an unintended consequence might be fewer digital marketing resources. This comes at a time when you need your sales and service messages to stay relevant in a highly competitive search environment while also creating new messaging to ensure shoppers understand the new digital sales and service processes you’ve put in place in order to help them, and your employees, stay safe.
The good news? You don’t have to do it all yourself, nor do you have to invest in costly agencies. Look for a digital marketing company that puts a team behind your dealership to work with you and expertly execute your digital marketing strategy.
Hurdle 3: Multiple Vendor Relationships
Digital marketing efforts should be connected. If you’re working with several vendors, you may not reap the benefits of a single, cohesive strategy to tie your digital plan together. There may be other pitfalls too, like an unclear ROI for your marketing dollars and differing KPIs that make performance difficult to judge.
Instead of juggling multiple technology vendor and marketing agency relationships, look for a solution that brings it all under one roof, with one point of contact. You need a single solution accountable to you as a true partner in your success. With a vendor like that, you get time back that was spent communicating across disparate providers and better results because you are more effective when discussing goals and strategy with one person, one time versus multiple people multiple times where important nuances may be missed.
Hurdle 4: Specialized Skill Sets
There are several disciplines within digital marketing that work together to create successful, polished campaigns. Most marketing professionals only specialize in one or two disciplines, like copywriting or SEO. It’s understandable the array of skill sets needed to write and design your creative, optimize your SEO, manage social media, create a competitive advantage with your online reputation, or even develop video content may be difficult to find in one person or even across your dealership.
Put a team behind your digital marketing with all of those skills for a cross-coordinated effort. At Dealer.com, you have one point of contact, your performance manager, whose job is to help you obtain your goals. They do that through coordination with accomplished, specialized automotive marketers with the know-how to help you attract high-quality, in-market shoppers through optimized organic search visibility and a consistent look and feel across all digital channels.
Your digital marketing success starts with the right team. Let’s talk about stellar results for your dealership. Visit dealer.com/a-team.
1Digital Marketing Institute Whitepaper: Digital Paves the Way in Response to Covid-19
Coming through recent events feels a bit like we’ve time traveled. We stayed in our homes, like safe little time capsules, and emerged to a new world. In some ways, this world aligns with what we expected for the future, such as more shopping being done online – even in the automotive space. But in other ways it’s been more jarring, like the experience of social distancing, so re-opening dealerships will not be business as usual.
Let’s look at a couple ways that adjustments to business practices and consumer behavior will impact SEO strategies for sales and particularly service. We’re calling this shift “dealer home services,” as it encompasses everything your business can do away from the dealership, and in your customers’ homes.
The traditional need for being visible with phrases around vehicle models, car repair, parts, and the like remains, and now there’s a growing trend for phrases associated with buying online and shopping from home. Using Google Trends, we’re seeing an indication of increased search volume for “buy car online”.
While there are low points as we would expect through stay-at-home orders, the data through 5/16 shows a clear increase above previous highs over the past 12 months. Your SEO strategy should include tactics for capturing this traffic. Does your dealership website have a page that outlines how a customer can buy from you remotely? Do you communicate options for the customer to test drive and accept delivery of the vehicle? If not, that’s a great place to start to target these terms.
As you change your business practices, consider the content you are making to solve today’s challenges and how best to leverage online. There are countless sources for great content. For example, if you’re making a walkaround video for a potential customer, consider posting that to your blog and adding a link to the Vehicle Details Page. And while you’re there, create a second video with more general information about the model to place on your model landing page and your YouTube channel. Content is still a driving force of performance in SEO.
What people expect from fixed ops departments is changing. From experience, there’s pent-up demand for service – we have two cars waiting for oil changes and summer tires. A focus on service department marketing is critical, with additional landing page attention on how you protect both your customers and employees. On your service page, create an FAQ (marked up with schema, of course) to answer questions like: Do you offer contactless service? How often is your waiting area cleaned? How close are the seats? What about your loaner cars, are they sanitized? When you’re done with a customer’s car, do you disinfect it?
Consider what else should be communicated on your service page. Will you pick up a customer’s vehicle and deliver it? Are there services you can do remotely? Expect search volume for these kinds of terms to increase over time and optimizing your service pages for them will help capture that traffic and drive conversions.
Adjustments to your landing pages are important, but you also need to inform potential customers that are still on the search results page, before they even click on your link. Consider what space in your meta titles and descriptions you can allocate to messaging cleanliness and other precautionary measures or benefits of using your service department. Placing these terms in the title and descriptions of your service pages means Google’s users see them in the search results and will feel more confident doing business with you. When you make this change, monitor performance to understand impact of both rankings and click-throughs.
While we’re on the topic of the search results page, your Google My Business is also key to communicating to your audience. Leverage your business’ description to highlight the changes you’ve made to the benefit of your community (employees, customers). Also use Google Posts for the same.
Ensure you’ve created a separate Google My Business for your service center with accurate hours and connected it to your main GMB. Like your main, update the description and publish Posts. Focus on how your business is different today.
This is also a good time to update the photos on your GMBs. Show how clean your facility is, the space for customers to spread out from one another, and any hand sanitizer stations.
While your goal to sell cars and service your customers hasn’t changed, the market has. Things like transparent pricing on your service pages still positively impact conversions, but now you need to incorporate elements of safety. That’s a lot to cover in your service section, and while SEO is critical, make sure you have a thoughtful layout with engaging imagery to keep your visitors from bouncing.
Putting this all together, your brand is evolving. Adapt to the new market through updated business practices and take advantage of this through proper optimizations and page design. You’ll be rewarded when newly captured dealer home services traffic converts into new customers.
Of course, none of this is new. It’s been coming for years.
In today’s uncertain environment, it is more important than ever for dealers to be transparent and up to date in all they are doing as a business to support their customers, their employees, and their communities. Whether you have mandated store closures in heavily impacted areas in the country, you are located in an area where the concern is growing, or in a location where it’s business as usual, you need to be digitally present. It is critical that you are communicating with your customers on a regular basis and nurturing that relationship to keep you top of mind for when customers are ready to shop.
Be Relevant
More time at home means more time on smartphones and computers for shoppers, thinking about their future purchases. It is imperative to keep your digital storefront as relevant and current as possible. Relevancy can be created through on-line messaging and creative, SEO content attracting organic traffic, and a strong presence through frequent updates on your social properties. According to data released in March 2020, there has been a +53% increase in Facebook platform browsing and +32% increase in Instagram. In addition, interactions with Facebook posts (likes, shares, comments) are up 3X over the past 60 days.
Nurture Future Customers
Prior to February 2020, over 60% (or an average of 14 hours) of a shopper’s research time was done via the internet. – and we now anticipate this time spent online will only increase. Your car dealer website, and how a shopper interacts with it, acts as a window into the mind of the shopper and buyer. The ability to understand why and how a consumer considers, selects and buys their next vehicle is measurable and actionable. While in the short-term, the number of people test-driving vehicles will certainly decrease, dealerships should seize the opportunity to provide more quality on-line content around their inventory. This allows potential future buyers to become more familiar with their vehicles. Many dealerships already create model-specific pages, but today is the time to get more granular to include images and videos of specific inventory. Dealers should also create assets, such as banners and landing pages, communicating the solutions they can provide around expanded services, delivery of inventory, and even delivery of vehicles for a test drive.
Be Accessible
With fewer people traveling long distances to purchase new vehicles, the recommendation is to continue to focus on your local market. Leverage Google My Business and keep business information up to date. Note any changes, confirm your phone number is accurate, and articulate precautions your dealership is taking during this time. If you’re open, make sure everyone is aware with home pages slides and banners to communicate your open status. Include photos of your clean and spacious dealership and share them on your social media channels. Leverage Google Posts and blogs as your status changes.
Be Prepared
With immediate vehicle servicing and purchases less possible, shoppers have more time to think about potential future purchases and how to take advantage of significant incentives from OEMs. As the health situation stabilizes, we expect the pent-up demand will drive an influx of transactional shoppers ready to buy in their local markets. Maintaining your digital marketing investments now will allow you to reap the benefits of being top of mind with your customers. Keep your foot on the proverbial gas pedal. When demand returns, you’ll want to be highly visible.
At Dealer.com we are committed to our dealers, our team members, and our community. Our A-team of Managed Services custom content creators are available to help you in any way we can. Wishing you all safety and health during this time.
From the industry’s earliest days, dealerships have had the
same singular goal: sell more cars.
And, while increasing sales is probably still at the top of
your priority list, the goal has shifted in recent years. Now, you want to sell
more cars while maintaining or, better yet, reducing your advertising budget.
Enter digital video advertising.
Digital
Video Advertising is Underpriced
A good advertiser is always on the lookout for under-valued
channels that meet the client’s needs, and digital video platforms do this
while also being seamless and scalable to execute. Those channels deliver
qualified leads because they meet shoppers where they are. Advertise to the
right people, at the right time and in the right place. You can buy an audience’s focused attention
through digital channels for far less than is possible through established
channels like television. Digital video advertising campaigns built using
the Dealer.com platform are achieving $.02 and $.03 cost per 15-second video
view, getting your brand and inventory in front of someone on a channel they’re
already using. And you never pay for shoppers that watch less than 15 seconds.
Shopper Behavior
is Changing
Of course, an advertising channel is only as good as the
audience that’s consuming it. You could have the best marketing message in the
world, but if you advertise it on a channel that encourages skipping or
grabbing snacks during commercial breaks, you’ll be hard-pressed to drive
results.
Fortunately, we know that shoppers are consuming video
content on channels like YouTube and Facebook. In fact, they are using video to
educate themselves at every step of the buyer journey. There are 4 million
in-market auto videos viewed on YouTube every single day. Digital test drives
now outnumber in-dealership test drives two to one. After all, watching
3-minute walkarounds on YouTube requires less time and energy than reading
articles or visiting showrooms. This
combines with the fact that we can target better with in-market audience data
based on past search history, so we know they will actually watch the ads.
A
Content Shortage and the Dealer.com Solution
Okay, so you’re bought into digital video advertising as an
undervalued channel with the power to reach quality audiences that actually see
your videos. But where will you get all that video content?
You guessed it—Dealer.com can
help.
We built an automated video solution that incorporates the
vehicles and offers you want to showcase into existing video templates. You can
even customize them with branded taglines and information. Then, from within
the platform, you can launch your videos at scale across YouTube and
Facebook. And if you decide you want something more personalized, we have
premium custom packages that incorporate footage of your dealership, custom
graphics, custom animations, and more.
The
Time is Now
Like all advertising channels, digital video advertising may
get more expensive as demand grows. Don’t miss your opportunity to get into
digital video at the right time. With Video Advertising from Dealer.com, you
can incorporate this exciting channel seamlessly into your existing advertising
effort to improve results and increase sales.
