I was recently told by a source at a marketing firm specializing in automotive internet marketing that car dealers are normally 2-3 years behind the internet trends. I didn’t believe her, but here is a breakdown of her points:
1) When other industries were getting into eCommerce, dealers were still putting up single page advertisements as their websites with no inventory, just an address, a phone number, and a bunch of promises.
2) When most companies were switching from direct sales to internet sales, car dealers were starting to get leads. Until a couple of years ago, these leads were normally handed to a salesperson on the floor who was supposed to call, give as little information as possible, and get them to the dealership.
3) Now, as the blog-for-marketing trend is leveling out at its peak after 4 years of growth, car dealers are starting to ask, “What are blogs and how can I sell more cars with them?”
4) Again, now as YouTube and other video sites are so slammed with traffic and have been used for marketing for 2 years, dealers are starting to ask, “What is YouTube and can I sell more cars with it?”
I still didn’t believe her. She took me to a couple of well respected articles from the last couple of weeks, How to Sell Cars to the YouTube Generation, Automotive Blog Marketing, and Do Videos Really Help Sell More Cars. Then, she asked me how many dealer blogs I had seen that were made by the dealership.
After much thought, I could think of two. Considering blogging and car dealers are two of my bread and butter money-sources, it should been much higher.
What is it about the car business? I thought about it for a while and came up with two possibilities:
1) Dealers are trying as hard as they can to cling on the remnants of the “automotive glory quarter century” of 1970-1995, the days that they could easily make $3000-$5000 on the front end of a car deal.
2) The Internet scares them. With so much information and car buying tips out on the internet, they want to keep as much of a distance from it as possible.
3) Dealership decision makers are often too busy with today to mess with tomorrow. Since blogs and videos have a long-term effect that doesn’t usually yield immediate results, mixed with the pressures in a fickle industry that does not remember how good you were last month, you can see why they are reluctant.
Car dealers, please take these words to heart — the Internet is here. Either become knowledgeable about it and let it help your business or hire someone who already knows.
Auto Dealers Internet Marketing
maybe it’s not the dealers so much as it is the industry service providers. most “internet” companies servicing dealers today are a hybrid of technology and marketing, which makes for mediocracy at both levels in many cases. the dealers that lead their technology partners to bend the technology around their marketing needs fare better than the dealers bending their marketing objectives around the mediocre technology. great post and thanks for the link. ~Ryan Gerardi