5 Must haves for your Auto Dealership Business

The economic environment for auto dealers today is a complicated ecosystem. With a surfeit of dealers, manufacturers and models vying for customer attention in a market dominated by online researching, reviewing and selling, auto dealers need to be up to date with technology solutions and provide innovative services in order to keep up and gain market share. Here are 5 must haves for your auto dealership business.

Use a DMS

There are several digital marketing solutions available in the market which can supercharge your dealership’s marketing efforts. Consider for instance, a solution like TapAuto. It gives you the ability to manage all digital marketing related efforts from one place. With TapAuto, you can receive leads through email, text messages, phone calls and credit applications. You can also monitor your social media campaigns, including monitoring for QR code scanning by shoppers and social sharing of vehicle profiles. The solution comes with customizable dealer and agency dashboards to provide a single view into how tactics are performing for various campaign tools.

Live chat on your website

Live chat software is proven to be highly effective at reeling in prospects at higher rates when compared to other forms of campaigns. It is advised that you have an employee always available to monitor the chat desk during working hours to reach out to people. In fact, given the fact that many queries related to car purchases and dealerships happen outside office hours, it would even make sense to have a person man the chat desk for a couple of hours beyond. Live chat communications help to clarify prospect questions rapidly, providing for a better customer experience.

A dealer blog

A blog is something that most dealers conceive of as being relevant only for technology and gadgets, and not so much for car dealerships. However, the fact of the matter is that customers and prospects are constantly seeking expert advice related to autos. The primary areas where people seek advice are reviews for new cars and specific technical aspects of servicing autos. There is a wealth of information available on the internet related to these areas. However, if you can get your most experienced technicians to post advice on a blog related, it can work out extraordinarily well to pull in prospects.

PPC services

Pay Per Click advertising is one of the most effective ways to reach out to customers in the local area. It is extremely recommended that you invest a significant amount of time and effort into ensuring that you have a powerful PPC strategy in place. Your PPC strategy should encompass all activities including used vehicles, new vehicles, certified and pre owned, servicing, parts and financing. Each of these areas demands a differentiated approach to PPC advertising in terms of keywords needed, campaign style and the exact ad messaging required. PPC can utilize various types of targeting, including city, DMA, zip code and radius based targeting.

Given that digital marketing requires an extremely sophisticated approach, we recommend that you contract with a leading digital marketing agency to aid you in setting up and managing your PPC campaigns.

Customer support services

Traditionally, customer support services happen in conventional areas such as emergency repairs, valuations for used vehicles, multipoint checkups as per Blue book standards and parts for DIY jobs. However, a value added approach is called for to better differentiate your dealership amidst the competition. Some novel elements of a value added approach could be:

• Remote mileage tracking via device and prior consent, which would enable dealers to alert users to services coming up
• Dedicated support for installation of consumer devices and gadgets used in autos like GPS units and DVD players
• Support for theft prevention and handling