Car Sales Leads: How Your Dealership Can Get More Prospects?

87% of car buyers and 90% of service clients use digital channels to choose a car dealership according to Digital Air Strike study 2017.

This is in comparison to the same study from 2015, where 75% of car buyers and only 68% of service clients utilized digital channels when choosing a dealership.

In this article, you will see some effective, tried-and-tested ideas for lead generation in a dealership. What could you do to increase the visibility of your dealership online and acquire more clients?

1. Facebook Lead Ads for car dealerships

With Facebook lead ads, car dealers can reach potential clients who are actively looking for a car dealer within the Facebook ecosystem. It's a great way to boost your automotive lead generation!

Dealerships are increasingly using it to gather information about the current needs of their potential clients by asking open and close-ended questions to later follow up with an offer by phone or email.

It is important to ensure the frictionless transfer of lead information to the right dealer to ensure a fast connection with a lead.

Fiat Turkey has used lead ads to increase the number of leads and assign them to a respective dealer.

They created an API integration to transfer lead information to achieve this goal. But this is also possible with popular CRM systems – Facebook lead ads are integrated with Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, Base etc.

Asking for a phone number in the lead form with the message: “We will call you back with an offer” is not viable in each case. If a potential client is ready to talk to a car dealer – they will reach out to them through a website after carefully researching online, directly by calling or using a Callpage callback window (if a dealership has one installed). You should assume that still there are people who are rather skeptical about leaving their contact details – name, surname and a phone number in Facebook lead forms.

You may want to ask your leads a few exploratory questions using open and close-ended questions through a Facebook lead ad. This way, you can provide your dealers with more context to tailor an offer to the needs of a client before a call or a test drive.

In my own experience, I have seen lead ads bring unexpectedly good results if prepared properly. It is important to set an acceptable threshold for a maximum cost of lead acquisition to later monitor and optimize ads to not exceed that maximum cost.

Virginia Rutter, Facebook Ads Specialist

In lead ad forms, dealers can ask for the following:

• Email address
• Phone Number
• Postcode
• What model is of interest for you?
• When are you planning to switch to a new car?
• Are you going to rent or buy a car?

READ ALSO: How To Sell More Cars at a Dealership? 12 Easy Tips

2. Optimize a landing page for SEO

Dealers invest in paid ads to drive traffic to their page.

If you want to have a longer lasting effect on traffic and steadily fuel your pipeline with new sales leads, consider search engine optimization to drive organic traffic instead of relying extensively on paid sources.

How can you start optimizing landing pages in a few simple steps?

In the beginning, identify keywords that drive traffic to that web page. For this, use Google Search Console, Semrush, Sistrix, Searchmetrics or Ahrefs.

With Semrush you will have such data:

There are 40 keywords – we can see that some keywords repeat, for example, audi, r8, used, new. We could try to count each word and build phrases and expressions to use during the optimization process.

It comes with no surprise that the words “audi” and “r8” appear the most often. Having knowledge about the frequency we can build the following phrases:

• New Audi R8 For Sale
• New Audi R8 Price
• How Much Cost New Audi R8

What should you do with the following keywords? You should use the following phrases in the page content by adding more text or modifying the existent.

Optimization of H1 (header 1).

In this case with the image data, this is important to modify the name of the image and add an alt tag. For example,

Optimization of H2 (header 2)

Before:

After: 

In this case with the image data, this is important to modify the name of the image and add an alt tag. For example,

Alt=”New Audi R8 For Sale”
IMG=”new-audi-r8-for-sale.jpg”

When creating a new URL you should also remember to change the URL redirecting the old one with a permanent 301 redirect to the new one.

Łukasz Żelezny, SEO consultant

https://zelezny.uk

3. Install a callback

So you have traffic on your webpage generated with organic search and paid advertisement. Does it really convert at the rate you would expect?

Don’t lose valuable contacts once they’ve landed on your webpage – you have invested in these activities and are expecting a high ROI.

Once leads reach your page, they are going to look for a contact page, fill in the contact form and wait for a dealer to call back. In many cases, dealers don’t call back as fast as leads would expect.

That frees up some time for your lead to look for other dealerships and competitive offers.

Your competitors can also react faster to inquiries – can bring down their lead response time down to 5 minutes, or even under 30 seconds.

If you want to engage with your leads when they are most likely to buy, you should consider installing a callback feature on your webpage.

CallPage for Car dealers can instantaneously notice the increase in the number of calls right away, even during the first minute after the widget has been installed.

Apart from that, a callback widget engages contacts way more often than a traditional contact form and connects leads with a dealer in less than 30 seconds.

It helps decrease lead response time which proves to be critical in closing more deals.

A majority of purchases go to the first vendor that responds, according to HBS study and InsideSales.

An HBR Study has proved leads get cold fast – if a dealer contacts leads after five minutes, his odds of converting them into buyers drop by 400%.

I prefer to take up a wider perspective on marketing in the automotive field. A buyer journey of an ordinary consumer is complex and there are a lot of factors influencing it. Car dealerships use a marketing mix and retargeting to warm up a lead. It is important to cooperate with influencers and journalists that prepare car reviews and tests as their opinion may significantly affect a buyer’s decision. Marketing specialists in car dealerships should create buyer personas and look for peculiar characteristics. A majority of dealerships in Poland call too late or don’t call at all according to the report on lead response time. It doesn’t have a good effect on closing a deal, and such an unprofessional approach of a dealer can discourage a buyer in general.

Krystian Pomorski, PR & Marketing Manager, Proautomotive

READ ALSO: Top 7 Cold Calling Scripts for Car Sales