Without Traffic Everything Fails
You can have the best trained certified staff, excellent process, the ideal inventory and all the lenders in the world, a high converting website and barely move metal because you rely solely on antiquated media to drive prospects to your dealership and online property.
On the other side of the coin you could be using an old (insert website vendor name) site, not really work your leads that hard, rely on customers to secure their own financing and move more cars than those in the first example because you make it easy for people to find you and your staff online.
The key difference is you have traffic and understand that without traffic EVERYTHING fails.
Online traffic comes in many forms and using only one method to generate it is limiting, like buying the back page of the phone book as your only advertising source. Just as you use many methods to deliver your message using antiquated methods of advertising, (print, radio, television, billboards, grocery store benches, you get the picture) you should explore all methods of generating online traffic.
It is not just about dealership website traffic, that is just one aspect of online traffic, even though in my opinion you should take care of home first and all online traffic generation sources should point back to your main website.
You must have a dealership website where all online roads end, even without all of the other necessities. A high dollar ILM/CRM, 200 tracking numbers, process training, email templates, phone scripts, online sales training, a huge properly priced inventory and the best converting website in the world are worthless without traffic.
There are many ways to generate online traffic for car dealerships:
Highest cost online traffic generation sources:
- Type in Traffic – Radio, television and print website mentions. Targeted customers are not using these methods to find cars on the web, however you can and should use these methods to brand your stores web address if you are still relying heavily on these mediums.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) / Pay Per Click (PPC) – While the cost of using this form of traffic generation is dropping in today’s economy it still is one of the most expensive ways to drive traffic to your stores website. While cost per click can be reduced with proper keyword research the offset to obtain these lower click cost is finding the proper long tails to target. You either have to find someone who will invest the time in your market to find these gems, cheap clicks, or use broad matching, expensive clicks, one offsets the other in the near term. Over the long term having a huge keyword base to work from with proper A/B testing, which generates more traffic and higher conversions at lower cost, improves ROI. Often used as a band aid for a poorly search engine optimized site or instant traffic for a fresh website.
- High Cost Used Car Classified Providers – They can and will provide more than one type of online traffic. Leads and phone calls directly from the source and referral traffic to your website. You may even experience walk in traffic from these sources, rarely properly tracked. Unless you have a large inventory or the right cars your ROI will probably be dismal.
- Purchased leads – While they do not normally generate traffic to your website without follow up they do provide instant online traffic. The leads are generated on another online property so they qualify as online traffic. ROI fluctuates from provider to provider and your process is critical in making the most of them.
referral traffic- Website traffic from other website via a link from one site to another.
Medium Cost Online Traffic Sources
Almost all of these traffic sources can be executed in house if you have the right people in place. For dealers to try to execute these strategies in house they need to be prepared. A person who is paid only on sales, theirs or a departments, it places too many hats on their head and to hire someone who will perform these services properly from the store will require the dealer to write bigger checks as salary than most are comfortable with. Where as having someone manage it for them is cheaper and more cost effective.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is free traffic from the search engines if your site has intelligent design, regularly updated content and a proper linking strategy on site and off. A good SEO will continually study their art. With the search engines continually changing algorithms and ranking criteria it is an ongoing process. While winning some basic terms such as your store name and brand and market area is a good start it is just the beginning of a well optimized site.
- Dealer Micro Sites and Landing Pages – Having other properties to generate leads and referral traffic to your main website can effectively lead to huge online presence and make it impossible for online shoppers to not find you via the search engines. You can promote them just as you would a main online property and therein lie many points of debate on top of fair cost, value and diluted branding issues. They have huge value if executed properly.
- Intelligent Email Marketing – Reworking your database of leads and customers is a great traffic generation tool and does not really require outside vendors to execute, but does require software applications, usually leased, and can also open up legal issues if not properly executed. The legal aspects and bad publicity that a poor email campaign can generate is an area that is not well documented in the auto industry. I get spammed from vendors who sell these solutions to car dealers. Mass email marketing via rented lists is not intelligent email marketing if you do not understand the ramifications. Today I was approached from a vendor who offers these services and was interested in digging deeper into their product for my clients until they claimed 100% delivery rate. When you hear this from a vendor, compliance is not a concern and they are lying.
- Banner advertising buys – Almost all classified providers, local papers with websites, television stations, radio stations and local interest sites offer banner advertising at varying rates. The click through on banner advertising can vary from nil to around 5% depending on how targeted the traffic is. A banner on a car portal that caters to people looking for cars will be higher than people reading the obituary on your local papers website, which provides long term branding. You have to determine the real mission of the banner, the cost of the creative, market prices and the CPM (Cost Per 1,000 impressions) to make a judgment call on the value.
Free or extremely low cost online traffic sources
All of these items listed below can deliver traffic and SEO benefit to your main website. Some require a lot of work to effectively use them and there are companies and individuals that can help you start leveraging them versus managing it in house.
- Directories – Some are very low cost and most are free. You have local directories, search engine directories, local search directories, yellow page directories, car dealer directories and general web directories. Directory submissions to the major search engine directories is crucial.
- Free Classified Vendors – Many of your inventory solution providers post to various free classified sites like vast.com. Many have applications that allow posting to places like craigslist.org and backpage.com but it is very time consuming. I just started a service that gets car dealer inventory on craigslist and the traffic stats that have been seen so far exceed traffic from major classified vendors in leads and refferal traffic.
- Blogging – There are many free services that will allow you to set up a blog. Blogger and Wordpress are two. You can set up a self hosted blog for less than $100 a year and you set your own terms of service. A much better option than using free blogs for car dealers. If any of your employees or vendors blog get them to link to you.
- User Generated Content – You can get traffic from hundreds of sites that allow you to create pages on them. They also provide huge SEO benefit. I love Squidoo.com
- Social Networking Sites – Does your dealership have a facebook group, do your sales people connect with customers on linkedin and plaxo, do you have a myspace page, have you checked out vox (blog and social network)? You could also start your own dealership social network for your customers and dealership personel to interact, I have not seen a good example of this yet.
- Social Media – Using it to promote a dealership website may do more harm than good but they are great for landuring links to your main online marketing properties. (A story for another day) Subscribe to my blog to make sure you do not miss it.
- Forums – Visit and contribute to forums where your customers go. Local forums, brand forums, enthusist forums, if you are daring create your own. Also local forums may be good place to buy cheap banner advertising. Make sure you make use of your forum signature with links to your website.
- Links from suppliers – Most OEM’s and inventory providers have portal sites that will link back to you but think beyond that. Does your dent repair vendor, cleaning company, Chamber of Commerce, local BBB, Radio Station or anyone you do business have a website? This will provide traffic and SEO benefit.
- More than one store – If you have more than one store you should have a group portal and create an intelligent linking scheme among all of the stores websites.
- Free or Cheap OEM Sites – Most OEMs give dealers free sites or very low cost sites for their dealers. I have not found one yet that will not allow you to point your own domain to it. For example if you are a Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep 5 Star Dealer you actually get four free sites from Chrysler that you can point domains to. Don’t ignore these free or low cost properties and brand them fully with custom top level domains, content and links back to your other site(s).
Having the tools in place for when the traffic arrives is noble. Having the traffic then deciding which tools you need is better. It is a matter of prioritizing your online marketing efforts then tweaking and adjusting to acheive maximum ROI. The return on investment for a whiz bang website, high end crm and process are ZERO if you have no traffic
Paul Rushing
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