Digital Retailing, Attribution, Trade Tools, 3rd Party Listings – the list of opportunities that dealers have today go on and on. Throw in Traditional ads, digital ads, SEO, SEM, social media, commercials; and you have endless tools for reaching your potential customers. All of these are all important, but ultimately they all lead consumers to your website. Think about what you do when you want to know more about a company… you go to the internet. You end up on their website, looking through all their information and content to help make a decision on whether it’s worth your time to continue researching this company. Well, guess what? Car buyers do this too!
Websites are an extremely important asset to your dealership, and how you optimize them can greatly affect sales each month. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking in our blog about how you can fine-tune your website in each of these areas to get the most out of your site.
The average person spends 15 hours shopping for a car and 9 of those hours are spent online. Your potential customers are spending more than half of the car buying process on the internet; on dealership websites, on your website. Their experience on your website directly affects whether they will buy a vehicle from you or not. According to a study by Cox Automotive, almost half of all car buyers visited the website of the dealership where they purchased their vehicle.
Your website is the face of your dealership and an invaluable sales resource, which means it should be top-notch quality. A dealership website should look good, perform well, and ultimately drive consumers to the actual dealership, but most aren’t hitting these standards. Cox’s study states that only 47% of car buyers would give a score of 8 to 10 to dealerships’ websites (scale of 1-10). That means that more than half of people purchasing cars are unsatisfied with the website experience they had with car dealerships.
DOM360 works with every major dealership website platform and we have a ton of respect and admiration for these frameworks. The challenge we see is that dealers think the website is solved once they get a great template and base content, but each platform needs its own optimization and consistent management that most providers just can’t keep up with. Many of the nuances these platforms need are not part of the base website packages. From slides and specials to inventory optimization, all of these components need constant monitoring and management to get the most out of a dealerships most important digital asset.
Want to hit that 10 out of 10 score for your website? Let DOM360 help make your website rise above the rest. For more information on how we can help you click here or contact us at 864-451-5979 or jennifer@dom360.com.