Ever since getting out of the retail side of automotive and getting into helping dealers become more effective with their digital marketing, if there’s one thing I’ve come to learn, it’s that dealers love traffic. The more traffic to the website, the more eyeballs on the website, the better.
There’s a good reason for that because, obviously, we want to try and turn some of those eyeballs into appointments. But as much as I talk about BDC and appointment coordinators engaging with a prospect properly once a lead has been submitted, there’s another area where we may not be engaging as effectively as possible with the consumer, and that is on the website.
What I wanted to talk about today is an article that I saw on Automotive News not too long ago, and what it was talking about was the fact that dealership websites today are not tailoring to the consumer shoppers. In other words, when a dealership website is built, typically, what you’re going to see front and center is year, make, and model, or when a consumer goes to a dealership’s website to search, the only thing that they can search for or search by is year, make, and model, and maybe an overall generalized price.
Why aren’t we allowing consumers to shop by certain features that the vehicles have, or why are we not allowing more consumers to shop by price range in terms of leasing and financing? I asked because if you look at most consumer websites today, that’s how most consumers are shopping. You go on Amazon. It’s not always about, “Hey, here’s this one product, and it’s this price.” It’s, “Hey, I have this issue. I’m looking for a product that’s going to solve this issue, and here’s how much money I have to spend.
Well, let’s put the features more in front than a year, make, and model of a vehicle. Obviously, we want to merchandise properly. That makes complete sense, but instead of saying, “Hey, here’s a brand new Toyota Highlander Limited,” why aren’t we saying, “Hey, this is a brand new Toyota Highlander Limited. It’s got Bluetooth. It’s got Apple CarPlay. It’s got a leather interior. It’s got third-row seating. It’s got dual-zone AC and climate control. It’s got front and rear collision sensing, and it’s also got lane departure?” Features that consumers are looking for in a vehicle.
If these are options that your website provider provides… If these types of search functions are available through your website provider, maybe it’s time to start looking into putting those a little bit more front and center than just making consumers search by year, make, and model, or if they’re not available on your website provider, perhaps it’s time to look into third-party vendors that allow you to organize your inventory in such a way that makes it easier for a consumer to search that way,
Everybody is talking about traffic, but the one thing that we’re not talking about is once the traffic arrives at the website, how are we keeping those people on the website? We need to find ways to engage a prospect on the website a lot more effectively and be able to answer their questions and provide them with solutions to their issues if we want to build that trust and we want to be able to get them to submit their information quicker.