Your DMS and/or CRM are repositories of customers that have already placed their trust in you and from whom you should be able to get more service or sales business in the future. You should be keeping those customers informed of specials on an ongoing basis with regular touches.

Be proactive about telling your prospects why they should buy from you.  Many consumers are researching or thinking about the idea of purchasing a vehicle for three to six months prior to pulling the trigger; 78% of them don’t know where they will buy within 3 months of their purchase(1) .  You need to use that time to influence their decision and regularly remind them of your brand.

Shoppers have fundamentally changed how they consume advertising because they have fundamentally changed where they consume media. The online communities where consumers spend an ever increasing amount of time is where you need to deliver your advertising. Consumers are doing their research in these discovery platforms, such as Google, craigslist, YouTube, Facebook Marketplace, letgo and OfferUp, mostly on their mobile devices. They are also spending large amounts of time in online channels like Facebook and Instagram. You must get your advertising on those platforms and ensure your site is mobile friendly to deliver your values and branding to those consumers.

If you’re interested in growing your business, you’re likely already asking yourself how you can market better tomorrow than you did today. Whether you’re having a good month/quarter/year or a bad one, you should be looking at what you can do better. Today, we’re seeing the most success for dealers that are following these five key strategies. If you follow these and learn to reach your audience where they are, you will succeed.

It is no secret that Google.com dominates the search engine market share. Regularly hovering around 85% to 89% of all monthly searches performed in the U.S., having a solid Google Ads campaign setup is crucial to your online advertising success.

You already know that having transparency and visibility into what’s happening with your marketing is extremely important. With so many different avenues and vendors available it can be tough to know where to spend your marketing dollars, how much and if it’s being effective. PDFs and paper reports are great but what if you want to check how your latest campaign is performing after just a few days or a week? Often times quarterly or monthly check-ins aren’t enough, in this day and age real-time has become the standard.

Website visitors who are retargeted with ads after the visit are 70% more likely to convert, compared to those that aren’t. Your website is your online storefront and a crucial part of your dealership. As much as we all want to keep traffic there until they decide to make a purchase, that’s just not reality. The good news is there’s something you can do to stay top of mind during the purchase cycle and it’s easier than you think!

With more activity happening online than ever, it’s no surprise that research on vehicles ahead of a purchase is through the roof. Casting a wide net is great for exposure purposes but having a targeted strategy behind it is even better. Are you currently doing both?

Years ago, craigslist made a change to its posting system that shook up the landscape of the "cars & trucks - by dealer" section. They started charging $5 for every vehicle ad that you wanted to put up. While this news was originally frowned upon by many dealers, they quickly came to realize there was a very positive side effect: gone were the days of dealers spamming the same vehicles hundreds of times a week. The "cars & trucks - by dealer" section was transformed over the next 30 days, as spam posts were moved down the list, to the more user friendly ad space it is today.