5 Tips to Increase Auto Buyer Engagement with Content
With 90% of auto buyers employing the Internet to do pre-buying auto research, you have the potential to engage them with targeted content. Research shows that 67% of your potential buyers will actually visit your dealership website to get to know you, prior to visiting your showroom. You need to make sure what they find makes them want to get to know you offline. By focusing on the five tips below, your content can make the difference between potential buyers choosing your dealership, or the one across town.
Focus Content For Your Customer’s Perspective
If your website content is all about your dealership and you see the words “us,” “your dealership name,” “we,” throughout your content, then you need to rethink your content strategy. Flip the focus and talk instead about why customers buy from you and the benefits they receive from you that they won’t find elsewhere. Aside from a more engaging website, think of the organic search terms you can incorporate into creating a more customer-focused experience.
Claim Your Expertise
Where does your dealership excel? This could be a specialty in hard-to-finance customers, a stellar service department, a soft-sell practice, the biggest inventory selection, or a number of other things. By claiming your expertise within your website content, you can become more credible to your potential customers. You’ll position your dealership in people’s minds and set expectations that support the reasons they choose to buy from you. Buying a car is an emotional decision that needs to be justified with logic—all the reasons why they’ve made a good choice—not just in their car selection, but in who they buy the car from. Help them out.
Validate Your Promises
Just because you’ve claimed your expertise in the tip above, people won’t believe you if all you’ve given them are unsubstantiated claims. Prove what you say is true. Back your expertise up with customer testimonials, statistics from customer surveys, manufacturer’s awards, community participation, etc.
Be Consistent
Research shows that thirty percent of people who responded to dealership action and visited a showroom did so based upon receiving an email from the dealership. If you want your emails to generate that kind of response, then you need to be consistent in how you communicate. If your website promises easy quotes, then don’t send an email telling the buyer they have to show up in person to get one.
Consistency can up your credibility with your car buyers by proving your dealership is authentic. Every piece of content on your website either serves to reinforce expectations or break implied promises. If you want to be known as the friendly dealership, putting a lengthy contact form in front of leads dispels that claim. The way that each page of your website impacts your website visitors needs to be consistent.
With that in mind, choose the fields on your contact form carefully. They also speak volumes about who you are. For example, if everyone else is asking for complete addresses and you ask for zip code and have a dropdown question that allows them to indicate why they’re looking for a car, you’ll get information that will actually help you engage your leads in conversation.
Tune For Frequency
Frequency relates to both your digital communications strategy and how often you update your website. We’re living in a fast-paced world. Information changes rapidly. If your website looks the same (except for your inventory updates) then your potential buyers may think you’ve got nothing to offer beyond the cars on your lot. One of the things the constant flow of information from the Internet tells people is that something new is coming every minute. Staying the same tells those same people that your dealership may not have the expertise to be a trusted advisor who keeps up with a quickly shifting industry.
From another viewpoint, you don’t want to overwhelm in-market leads by bombarding them with email communications. However, if you have compelling insights or information they will find useful during the buying process, or they’ve asked you questions, then it can prove a persuasive tool for shifting the lead from an online relationship to a showroom visit. Just be sure that if you promise a response in six hours, that’s exactly what you do.
