Comments(0) Here is a list of classified sites online that allow you to list vehicles for sale for no charge. These classified sites will only be valuable to you if they can deliver a large volume of shoppers to your listings. The best way to evaluate the ROI, where your investment is the time it takes to list a car on the site, is to give it a try.
Comments(0) A small-time dealer website host, VehicleHost, is openly advertising for most of their competitors. This can be extremely bad for two reasons, and both are because of search engine technology.
Any website, person or document that you mention online can be found in nanoseconds. Lots of web browsers and browser plugins are capable of conducting this research for the user and hiding it behind a single click. The definition of shopping is to find and compare products in anticipation of a purchase. Calling out the competition by name is an open invitation for shoppers to buy someone else’s product. And remember, a superior product by itself doesn’t always win you the sale. You need a better website and a sales staff with better answers to the questions answered on all the competitors’ websites. In this case, Vehicle Host is listing competitor prices to show they are cheaper. Providing this data makes them a liar (or at least a provider of false information) the minute any of the competing prices change.
Because all information online is so easily searchable, you are making it easier for these companies to find your website. I stumbled upon the VehicleHost website while researching one of the competitors on their list. Most companies (including the ones I work for) won’t respond to negative marketing like this, but why take the chance that someone might?
Comments(0) Exploring the gray matter of auto marketing
Wrap your brain around this term: neurological marketing.
Auto marketers study consumers’ brain waves so as to make TV commercials more effective. It’s not science fiction. It’s here.
Read the full story at AutoWeek.com. More and more marketing studies involve brain scanning to determine effectiveness.
The key to engaging a customer with an advertisement is to play on their emotions. The article mentions the VW commercials that start with a casual conversation in the car and usually end with a nice T-bone crash. Volkswagen wants you to put yourself in that car so you too can fear for your life.
Buy a Jetta! You won’t die!
Comments(0) I have started adding entires to a glossary of terms that relate to the topics discussed here on the blog. While adding a few terms, I decided to search for a similar resource online. There’s plenty of marketing glossaries availabile, but none tuned to automobile marketing specifically.
Comments(0) If your business has a website, be sure you understand who is in charge of maintaining your domain name registration. Anyone can find out who owns a domain by conducting a whois query on the address. Most web hosts will register and maintain a .com or other top level domain name for your website, and some will charge hundreds of dollars to gain or regain ownership of your own domain.
This website is hosted by Wordpress. A whois query for wordpress.org looks like this, and reveals that Matt Mullenweg is the owner of the wordpress.org domain name. The registration and expiration dates are listed in the report as well as the name of the company that can help renew an expiring domain.
Comments(0) Too many car dealer websites have little content other than vehicle listings. In order to engage a shopper, you have to provide them with information they are interested in and a compelling reason to come back to your website in the future. Here are ideas for great website content, and some reasons why these are good ideas.
A driving directions page that only offfers satellite mapping services pinpoints your business on the map, but does little else to help someone who needs directions. Serve that new customer thoroughly–you can go much farther to help someone find your business than pass the responsibility off to a third party robot atlas. Provide turn by turn directions from the highway, and use landmarks to describe your exact location. A web page that is strongly associated with a single physical address with lots of supporting content will help your site rank well for “used [car] in [zip code or city]” searches.
Target your audience explicitly. Shoppers are typically more comfortable doing business close to home. Use the names of surrounding cities and towns on pages other than your driving directions page to identify yourself as local. A brilliant “meet the staff” page can assemble decades of experience in previous jobs (and locations). The majority of car buying searches consist of a vehicle and a location. Defining the geographical reach of your business in text will help search engines link those searchers to you.
I’d really like to see this classic motorcycle collection in person. You can pick me up at the airport? It’s right next to the miniature golf course? Well yes, I would enjoy some free coffee.
Comments(0) There are several different streams of revenue and exposure available to automotive businesses online.
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