The ‘Secret Formula’ to Increasing Dealership Walk-Ins in 2024

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So you want to move past leads, appointments, and everything in between and jump right into actual walk-ins to your dealership?

As much as I’d like to tell you this is an easy task, it isn’t. There are a lot of moving parts to it and nearly perfecting every one of them dictates how well this works out for you.

So, let’s jump past the introductions and get right into it.

Step: 1 Define Your Unique Selling Point

Before you start planning your marketing campaign for the upcoming weeks or months, you need to figure out what sets you apart from your direct competitors.

To do this, you need to ask yourself this question: What is my dealership the best at?

  • Do you have the largest inventory?
  • Do you finance everyone?
  • Do you have the smoothest financing process?
  • Do you work with most lenders?
  • Do you trade in with ANY vehicle?
  • Do you have the best prices?

This should be a very easy question to answer on your part. And if you really can’t tell, give a couple of your past customers a call and ask them why they chose YOU over other dealerships, their answer might surprise you.

There are a ton of unique selling points that can set you apart, choose the one that defines your business and market the hell out of it.

Step 2: Know Your Customers

Who is your ideal customer?

Is it people who struggle with financing? Buyers who demand affordable luxury? Or people who like to pay cash?

Of course, there are a ton more options to go here, and your inventory may just play a role in this.

If you have more pickup trucks in your inventory, then your ideal customer just changed from people to businesses.

Start by targeting local businesses that may have a need for a rugged pickup truck. Are there any farmers in your area? What about construction companies? Any plumbers?

If you can’t directly target them with Facebook or Google ads, then jumping onto your local Facebook groups might just be the perfect solution.

This is just one example, and the sooner you realize who your ideal customer is, the sooner you’ll be able to focus your marketing efforts and generate leads that turn into walk-ins.

Step 3: Fix Your Prices

Even if your focus isn’t on having the best prices in town, price will always be a factor.

Check your direct competitors’ inventory and see what their pricing looks like. Try to adjust yours as much as you can while still keeping your business profitable, and you might just see a difference.

Also, if you have vehicles listed without the price, stop doing that.

Yes, that might generate a few online leads who will want to find out the price, but that comes at the expense of a lot of foot traffic who thought the price may be too high and decided not to bother.

Step 4: Step Up Your Phone Game

The way you reach out to your leads can make or break your marketing.

Most of the dealers we work with say that this is one of the biggest problems they face: converting leads into walk-ins.

It’s always one of the following problems:

  • Leads don’t answer the phone
  • Leads aren’t interested anymore
  • Dealer doesn’t have time to call them all

To solve this problem, we introduced our BDC department whose sole purpose is to get your leads to show up at your dealership.

Whether they’ve shown interest in one of your vehicles, in your financing offers, or even in selling you their vehicles, we make sure they show up at your door.

(This is starting to sound like a sales letter, but hear us out, you got nothing to lose.)

For every dealer who uses our BDC services, we do the following:

  • We call, text, and email every single lead that comes in, the moment it comes in.
  • We contact your leads an average of 8 times.
  • We prioritize scheduling appointments at your dealership.

Step 5: Work On Your Reputation

One of the most important aspects of your online presence is your reputation and how potential customers see your dealership.

Recent studies have shown that over 72% become more comfortable using a local business after they’ve read positive reviews about it. Similarly, nearly 70% of consumers are directly influenced by online reviews.

This means that before anyone may show up at your dealership, they need to be able to trust you more than they trust your direct competitors.

And the best way to get more reviews? Simply ask for them.

Every time you sell a car, ask the buyer to leave you a review on your Facebook or Google page. Most happy customers will be “happy” to do it.

Finally, now that you have a few reviews at your disposal, you need to display them everywhere you can, especially on your website.

Ask your website provider to pull your reviews from Facebook and Google pages and display them on your homepage. That’s where most of your website visitors land and it would be a wonderful way to greet them.

When you create a website with ADD, not only do you get all reviews displayed on your homepage automatically, but your customers will receive an email after they’ve bought from you asking them to leave you a review.

And from our end, we make sure we display only the best reviews on your website.

So, what are you waiting for? Head on to Auto Dealers Digital or give us a call at (650) 264-7556 to get a free demo.

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