I know you probably don’t do true ecommerce BUT, the way a typical dealership website is (and should be) designed, is to enable visitors to find, identify, research and engage with individual units – just like ecommerce. This is exactly why you should heed most of the advice within this article.
In general terms, automotive dealers are further advanced when it comes to marketing – digital or otherwise. I’ll let you debate the reasons for that! I had been preaching the importance of not relying on OEM or website stock descriptions for a variety of reasons (check out the article and that pretty much lays out why) when one day I went on the road to one of my many fellow Online Strategy Consultants on the automotive side of Trader (I was the only one on the non-automotive side nationally) to watch what they did on a typical day.
In the room was myself, my fellow OSC, Trader sales rep, 3 people from the marketing management team, a sales manager and two people whose primary job was to write descriptions for their inventory. Yep – two. This auto group totally understood how important it was to properly merchandise each and every piece of inventory to give them a competitive advantage over the next dealership.
Now I would never promote the fact that 50-60k worth of resources be spent this way – there are more cost-effective and outright effect ways to spend that sort of money BUT the premise of the story really drives home the fact that this IS an important activity.
The days of “12/40, 350hp, 13spd, extra clean, low KM” or “a/c, pw, pl, v6, fully loaded” cutting it as a proper description are gone.
Your website is your 24/7 salesperson. This is your way to control the sales pitch on each and every unit.
Ask yourself, if you went up to someone checking over your late model ATV sitting in the showroom, would you walk up to the person and say “4×4, auto, 850cc, lots of power”? No. You’d start a conversation and ask what they thought they were looking for or how do they see this machine fitting what they need.
As an experienced salesperson, you probably already know the questions the typical prospective customer is going to ask. Answer those questions in a conversational manner.
I realize that not everyone has the gift/ability/time to spend 20 minutes per unit coming up with a good ‘story’. Think about what you’d say to a prospective customer to sell/educate them and just try. If it’s personal and isn’t simply regurgitating specs, you’re more than half way to being better than your competition and differentiating yourself as a dealer who cares about the product you represent.