In automotive business attracting customers is the biggest barrier to success. The traditional customer-acquisition process is frustrating for dealers and hard on prospects and customers.
When you market your dealership using the traditional lead-generation and customer-attraction methods, your job becomes a seemingly endless task of chasing down leads, making countless cold calls, pushing for appointments, and forcing outcomes.
The usual outcome of this hustle is that you end up burned out, with a reputation for being a product pusher, running a business that is stressful for you and your customers. There is an alternative, though. Here are three basic tweaks you can make to market smarter and start attracting more customer traffic today.
- Identify your reason.
Stop talking about your inventory, and start talking about the specific reasons a customer should choose to do business with you over your competitors. Highlight the powerful benefits that come with purchasing a vehicle at your dealership. Focus on the benefits not the features.
What problems can you help your customers solve that your competition can't or won't? What unique experience comes along with buying a car from you? What do you have that no one else does? Tell the people exactly how and why you will make their lives much better, and back it up by delivering what you promised.
- Create an irresistible offer.
While all of your competitors are screaming about prices or payments, service or selection, you must create a truly compelling, irresistible offer. Focus on the value-added services your store provides. Tell about a unique warranty or satisfaction guarantee you offer. Explain the maintenance package that comes with a car from your dealership. Do you give free car washes to your customers on Thursdays?
This is not about pulling silly marketing stunts like putting pink gorillas on your roof. This is about offering truly unique and valuable experiences and benefits to your customers, which effectively removes you from the commodity-pricing game.
- Stop competing on price.
We're seeing that most dealership marketing features are price-related such as discounts, low payments, rebates, or special incentives. Unfortunately, price-related offers do little in the way of attracting customers.
That's because when you're competing on price, there can only be one dealership in a specified region with the lowest price. If you can't be that dealership, then you won't attract these price-shopping customers. And do you really want to be the dealership with the lowest price, tumbling down the low-price slide at full tilt until you hit the bottom with a zero profit margin?
Fortunately there is another way round. The No Low Price method is the answer to this chilling scenario. The No Low Price method requires using offers that address specific problems customers have, and presenting solutions to them. Dealers have found that switching from a price-related offer to a solutions-related offer in their current advertising will yield a noticeable result.
The conclusion is that price is not the only competitive variable available to dealers now. All indications point to the No Low Price method as a powerful tool available to dealers for years to come, which can help dealerships stop fighting with other dealers over the same few customers.
Ultimately, the problem that most car dealers encounter is that they all advertise the same way. If your advertising looks the same, people assume that everything else you do is the same too.
If you don't give your potential customers a compelling reason to choose you or provide unique offers that resonate with and motivate them, you give them no choice but to choose a dealership based on price. Be more than that, and you'll get more for it.