So, you opened a car dealership and are starting to bring in some sales. What’s next?
To make sure you’re running things properly and are capable of competing with the competition around you, there are some strategies you need to follow.
These strategies will help you kickstart your used car dealership by solving many problems ranging from marketing, sales, inventory problems and more.
So without any further ado, let’s get right into it!
1- Invest In A Website That Sells
Your website is the first impression people will have of you online.
Below are examples of some of the things your website should have to sell itself:
- Mobile-friendly
- Fast-loading
- Nice looking inventory and vehicle detail pages
- Live chat tools
- Exit/open banners
- Customer Reviews
To learn more about how you can improve your website, we talked about it in this article!
2- Optimize For Local SEO
Do you know how many people go to Google every day and search for “used cars near me”?
According to Ahrefs, there are 503,000 monthly searches for that exact keyword alone. Other variations such as “dealerships near me” and “used cars for sale near me” bring in another 325,000 and 154,000 monthly searches respectively.
To appear higher on the search results pages, one of the things you can do is optimize your dealership’s Google Business Profile account.
Our Local Dominance feature not only creates and optimizes a Google Business Profile for you, but also lists your vehicles on more than 100 online directories so that you increase your chances of appearing on the first page of Google.
3- Be On Classifieds
For the used car industry, classifieds work. As simple as that.
If you ask your peers, you may find 1 in every 10 or 20 dealers who isn’t listing their vehicles on online classifieds.
Classifieds such as Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Car Gurus, Auto Trader, Cars.com and more, are imperative if you want to get your share of ready-to-buy shoppers.
People who go on these classifieds are usually ready to buy and are on the last stages of the buying journey.
Listing and renewing all of your listings on numerous classifieds can be a lot of work to do, this is why companies such as Auto Dealers Digital offer a tool that allows you to automatically distribute all of your vehicles to all the classifieds that you’re interested in. Even on Facebook Marketplace.
To learn more about how we post for you on these platforms, click here or sign up for a free marketing strategy!
4- Be Active On Social Media
It’s true social media marketing may not bring you great leads, but it’s still important.
Here’s why!
Whenever someone finds your website online and is interested in one of your vehicles, they want to see some proof that you’re trustworthy.
How do they verify?
By visiting your social media accounts. To show that you’re an active dealership, you need to be posting there periodically. Posting once a day can be a great way to start, especially if you still don’t have a large following.
More than that, you need to ask all of your past customers to leave you a review on Facebook, Google, or Twitter.
Potential customers will read those reviews and will feel encouraged to do business with you. Of course, if those reviews are positive, and appear to be honest.
Read more on how we can automate your social media presence.
5- Brush Up On Sales Strategies
Becoming a good salesperson often requires training, experience, and some failures and successes to fully grasp the skill.
These are some tips you need to follow in order to become a successful salesperson:
- Remember names
- Be professional
- Listen more than you talk
- Be patient
- Know your cars
To learn how you can improve as a car salesperson, and know the 3 things you should NEVER do as a car salesperson, take a look at one of our highest-performing articles here!
6- Improve On Your Inventory Strategies
Although the used car shortage has been haunting the used car business, it showed some signs of relief last year and is continuing to improve in 2022.
Sourcing used vehicles from auctions isn’t as good an option as it was before the pandemic. This is due to prices being sky-high and how fierce the competition is.
To combat this, many used car dealers are turning to 1 of 2 solutions.
One, they’re contacting their previous buyers and asking if they’re looking to change their vehicle.
Those buyers are already familiar with them and thus are encouraged to do business with that dealer once more. Many dealers are reporting good results when trying this strategy, and that the trade-ins they’re getting are still very profitable considering today’s high prices.
The second solution is to turn to private car owners who are looking to sell their vehicles.
How does this work?
Instead of launching an ad campaign targeting car buyers, these dealers target people looking to sell their vehicles and are offering to buy them in cash, right then and there.
One dealer who tried one of these campaigns saw the following results:
- 452 leads
- $2.21 cost per lead
- Bought 19 cars and sold 14 of them
To see what these ads look like, click here!
More and more dealerships are opening their doors every day, making the competition even harder. This is why it’s crucial you always went the extra mile to close as many deals as you can.
There are more things you can do to kickstart your used car dealership career, but we believe these are the most important ones you should start with.
If you have any ideas or questions you’d like answered, feel free to reach out to our marketing advisors team at (650) 264-7556 for a free consultation to see what we can do for your dealership.