No matter how robust your dealership marketing is, you’re ultimately going to need a sales team to help close the deal and facilitate conversions. Not all sales reps are created equal, of course—so how can you identify the real stars? In this post, Get My Auto will highlight six of the most important traits of skilled used car sales professionals.

Are You an Effective Used Car Sales Rep?

1. Great reps understand that all buyers are different. Your buyers will arrive at the dealership with different needs, varied pain points, diverse goals, and myriad budgets.The way you win over one buyer won’t necessarily work with the next. It’s always important to tailor and personalize your sales techniques, and to respect the diversity of your clientele.
2. They also understand that the people in your dealership want to buy a car. In today’s world, most people truly need cars—and they may as well buy them from your dealership. If someone comes down to your showroom to shop, it’s because they fundamentally want to make a purchase. Your job is simply to help them get to a yes.
3. They recognize the importance of online research. Today’s used car consumers do plenty of online research before they ever visit a dealership—so most will probably know what kind of car they want and how much they can expect to pay for it. Sales reps need to acknowledge that today’s buyers tend to be very well-informed.
4. Effective sales reps are always honest. If you don’t know the answer to a question, be willing to admit it. And if you know your buyer is going to have to wait for half an hour while you talk to the finance team, don’t tell them it will just be 10 minutes. The minute you lie to a buyer, you lose their trust—plain and simple.
5. Good reps are ready to be tested. Some buyers may ask you questions that seem pretty random—and that’s because what they’re really doing is testing you. Make sure you know your inventory inside and out—and again, if you don’t know an answer, be honest about it, then ask someone who does know the answer.
6. Good reps build relationships. There are plenty of dealerships where your buyer can find a cheap, used Honda Accord—so why should they buy from you? Because you take the time to establish trust and to foster goodwill. Because you take seriously the relationship you have with each buyer. That, ultimately, is the sign of a smart used car sales rep.

As you consider ways to step up your sales game, keep these hallmarks in mind. To learn more about empowering your sales staff with a robust marketing strategy, reach out to the experts at Get My Auto today.

Facebook can be an invaluable platform for connecting with buyers and establishing your dealership’s credibility. Of course, it can also be a time-waster and a money sink. It all comes down to how well you use Facebook—what you do on the platform to generate results.

So what should your used car dealership be doing with its Facebook budget? What should your social profile look like? Here’s a guide from the automotive marketing experts at Get My Auto—six things we recommend every used car dealer do on Facebook.

They make it easy for buyers to contact them.

We’ll start with an easy one: Your dealership’s Facebook page should make it easy for interested buyers to pick up the phone and call you. Make sure your profile clearly lists your phone number as well as your hours of operation. Also include direct links to your dealership website.

They provide helpful content.

There are some who say that organic Facebook reach is dead, but we disagree. Your dealership can still earn the trust of its buyers by sharing valuable articles—vehicle buying guides, vehicle maintenance tips, information about vehicle financing, etc.

They run paid ads.

With that said, organic reach is no longer enough to make your dealership website effective. Using the Facebook Ads platform is an important way to reach buyers and send them to your dealership to view your inventory.

They use Facebook Ads’ targeting features.

What’s more, dealers should be using the advanced targeting features that Facebook Ads provides, which will enable you to provide the right message for the right buyers. Yo u can target your ads to people in a specific geography, a particular price range, even fans of particular makes and models. It’s a great way to ensure that no ad dollar is wasted.

They ask for reviews.

Online reviews are critical to your dealership’s reputation—and Facebook is one of the most influential ad platforms there is. Make sure you’re actively seeking reviews from your buyers, both here as well as on Google.

They engage with their followers.

Finally, don’t forget the “social” part of social media. In addition to sharing information and running ads, use Facebook to provide customer service—answering any questions and addressing any concerns brought up by your followers. Have a member of your team who’s tasked with checking in on Facebook engagement, at least once a day or so.

These days, virtually every business has a presence on social media. Your dealership is no doubt among them. But simply having a social media presence isn’t enough. You’ve got to use that social media presence strategically in order for it to yield a return on investment. The question is how.

The Get My Auto team has put together a quick checklist—10 things every used car dealership should do to ensure a robust social media presence.

10 Steps to Improve Your Social Media Presence

1. Set the right goals. You can’t assess your social media’s effectiveness if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve. Use the SMART approach—meaning goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive.
2. Know your audience. This is where buyer personas come in handy. Always know who you’re talking to, and where you’ll find them (e.g., which social networks—for most dealerships, this means Facebook and Instagram).
3. Be human and relatable. Social media works best when you cultivate a strong, human connection. Don’t be afraid to use humor or to post candid, behind-the-scenes photos of your team—all of which can be humanizing.
4. Take questions. Don’t forget the social in social media. Monitor your accounts and interact with your followers, especially the ones who have questions or inquiries. Remember that this is a good opportunity to show some real customer service.
5. Be regular with your postings. Consistency is one of the keys to a successful social media strategy. Creating an editorial calendar can help you stick to schedule and not miss any posting days.
6. Automate, but don’t automate everything. Automating some of your social media posts can make life a lot easier for your dealership’s marketing team—but remember: You can’t automate everything. Remember what we said about being human, and about the importance of showing real customer service to your social media followers.
7. Educate and inform. People don’t like signing into social media just to see ads and promotions. You can definitely plug your dealership, but remember that your job is to educate and inform your followers, first and foremost.
8. Optimize your social media accounts. Facebook bios, Twitter by-lines—each social network allows you to fill in some “about me” info. Use this space to include some target keywords and to emphasize the things that make your dealership unique.
9. Include plenty of visual content. Videos, infographics, and images tend to get the best results—so go visual whenever you can!
10. Don’t lean on organic alone. Organic reach is important for any social media campaign—but it’s ultimately not enough. Make sure you pair it with some paid ads, especially within Facebook.

We live in an era of easy, convenient digital communication. Nevertheless, there are really only a handful of ways in which consumers will contact your used car dealership—and picking up the phone to call you is at the very top of the list.

Indeed, recent studies find that phone calls to the dealership still eclipse digital outreach by a large amount. Critically, this does not mean that digital marketing is somehow irrelevant; far from it. What it does mean is that, even if a potential customer finds your dealership through Craigslist, Facebook, or Google, they’re still more likely to call you than to reach out through email, text, or a social messaging platform.

To put it differently, phone calls are actually part of your digital marketing process—potentially the last step in the long journey toward an appointment. It’s important for your used car dealership to treat phone calls appropriately, then; they’re the fruit of your marketing efforts, and they bring you tantalizingly close to finalizing the sale.

Making the Most of Phone Calls to Your Dealership

With that said, what should your dealership be doing to make each call count—and to raise the odds of a call landing you with an appointment? Here are a few quick tips we can recommend.

1. Make call management your top priority. Again, calls are the fruit of all your marketing efforts, and they mean that you’re closer than ever to a sale. Treat inbound calls with all due gravity and importance.
2. Have a structured process in place. Have a paradigm for where inbound calls go—how they are channeled, and how the value proposition is built over the course of each call. Successful dealerships won’t ever leave their call management to chance!
3. Use data and analytics. Keep track of the types of leads you get (sales, service, parts, etc.) and measure the kinds of calls that tend to get the best results. Use that information to continually fine-tune your approach to call management.
4. Make sure your sales reps are consistent. Even the best sales pros can fall into a lull where they simply answer the phone without any passion or sense of direction. Make sure everyone has a basic script that keeps the process consistent and effective.
5. Align your digital marketing. Finally, make sure your digital marketing initiatives all have clear calls to action, encouraging potential customers to reach out by phone—and ensure that these incoming calls are all channeled through your call tracking system.

Your dealership website plays a key role in the sales process. Today, most buyers do online research before they commit to a particular make, model, or dealership. What you need, then, is a website that can be easily found by local search users. What’s more, you need a website that will address buyer queries and coax them to take the next step in their journey—calling you to speak with a sales rep and set up an appointment.

So does your website measure up? Does it do what it’s supposed to do? Here’s a checklist you can use to figure it out—10 hallmarks of a truly effective dealership website.

Checklist: 10 Signs of a Good Dealership Website

A good dealership website:

1. Has NAP information on every page. NAP refers to the name, address, and phone number of your dealership. For local SEO success, it’s critical to have this information posted consistently on every page of your website.
2. Is optimized for mobile users. Does your site have responsive design? Is it easy to navigate across all browser and device types? Mobile readiness is one of the most critical factors in any good website.
3. Informs the readers. Your site shouldn’t just be one big ad. It should also educate and empower. One way to make this happen is through a regularly updated dealership blog.
4. Has clear calls to action. Every page of your dealership website should have a clear call to action, encouraging your user to take the next steps in the buying process.
5. Includes both external and internal links. For SEO purposes, make sure you link to relevant pages within your site, and also to authoritative third-party resources. (Of course, you never want to link to your competition.)
6. Has full meta data. Again, for SEO, you want to have meta titles and meta descriptions that are optimized with the appropriate keywords. Don’t neglect these key pieces of online real estate!
7. Offers readability. Make sure your website content is formatted with section subheadings, bullet points, and plenty of white space, making reading a breeze.
8. Has robust and varied content. In addition to written content, pictures, infographics, and video content can help keep your readers engaged.
9. Focuses on benefits. Why should buyers pick your dealership over other dealerships in your area? That’s a key question for your site to address. Make sure you offer a clear value proposition.
10. Is aimed at conversions. Ultimately, a good dealership website is built to get people calling or visiting your dealership. And if your site isn’t generating those conversions, it’s time to give it an update.

Social media platforms provide invaluable marketing opportunities for local businesses—including your used car dealership. However, all of these platforms come with their own sets of rules. Take Instagram. It can be a powerful platform for promoting your used cars, but only if you leverage it correctly.

Participate in the Instagram Community

One way to grow your dealership’s presence on Instagram is to participate—not merely posting your own images and videos, but interacting with other content, as well. Some steps you might take:

• Follow influencers—vehicle manufacturers, car magazines and blogs, and local businesses in your community.
• Like and comment on some of the content they share.
• Also be sure you respond to comments and questions your followers leave on your own Instagram posts.

The bottom line? You’ve got to spend engagement in order to gain engagement.

Be Consistent and On-Topic

Another key element of Instagram marketing is maintaining a consistent brand identity.

Simply put, you sell cars—so posting memes or celebrity gossip, just to appear trendy, isn’t going to help your brand. Stick to the things that make sense coming from a used car dealership—images of your inventory, vehicle maintenance tips, images and testimonials from your happy customers, etc.

Remember that everything you post is a reflection of your business and needs to align with your vision and your value proposition.

Promote Local Events

To engage buyers in your community, use Instagram to promote community events. These might include:

• Fundraising events from local non-profits you support.
• Special events or family days at your dealership.
• Major sales events.
• Local events or festivals that your dealership is sponsoring.

Create some local buzz by posting local content.

Include Local Hashtags

Speaking of keeping things local, make sure you spend some time researching hashtags that are relevant to your community—and use them to label your content whenever appropriate.

This might be something as simple as #OrangeCountyCars, or even just something like #HuntingtonBeach. These local hashtags can really help your content be discovered by nearby buyers—and those, of course, are exactly the people you want to reach.

Buy Some Ads

If you’re just getting started on Instagram, it’s usually best to develop an organic content strategy and build a small following before you take out any paid ads. Sooner or later, though, you’ll need to pay in order to target potential buyers and grow your content reach.

Your website will likely create the first impression that most buyers have of your dealership—so obviously, you want to make that impression positive. One way to do that is to ensure that your dealership website offers real value. It shouldn’t just be an online placeholder; it should be a hub of information, helping consumers get a better sense of how you can help them, and why they should choose your dealership over the competition.

But what are some of the ways in which your used car website can offer value? Here are five quick points to consider.

Showcase Your Inventory

Of course, one of the best ways to help your consumers is to allow them to do some of their shopping online, browsing through some of the vehicles you currently have on your lot or in your showroom. Even if you can’t list every single car on your lot, you can certainly highlight some of the ones you know will be popular, or the ones you’re most eager to sell. Of course, photos and full lists of features help!

Highlight Your Authority

Another way to offer value through your website is to start a blog, and to offer your readers regular insights into the world of used cars. These posts should be informational, not overly salesy; consider topics like vehicle maintenance, vehicle financing, the pros and cons of hybrid cars, etc. Use your website to educate, and to demonstrate your own knowledge of the automotive world.

List Current Sal es and Promotions

Your dealership website should be a place where consumers can quickly find information about any current upcoming sales events. As an added bonus, you can create some promos or discounts that are exclusive for those who visit your site—allowing them to feel like their interest in your business has paid off.

Feature Your Contact Information

Another way to provide value is to make it easy for those who visit your site to contact your dealership. That means including your NAP information—name, address, and phone number—on every page of the website.

Answer Questions

Finally, consider an FAQ page for your dealership—an easy way to address the common inquiries that your sales team receives. Not only does this further educate your buyers, but it makes it clear that you listen to them and want to help them; their inquiries don’t fall on deaf ears!

Are your marketing efforts reaping rewards? Have you seen a strong ROI from your marketing dollars? If you’re not satisfied with your dealership’s consumer outreach, now’s the time to change it—and we can show you how. In this post, we’ll offer five steps you can take to revise, fine-tune, and ultimately transform your marketing approach.

Improving Your Dealership Marketing Strategy

Get your whole team involved.

If you’re going to go back to the drawing board, and dream up a whole new dealer marketing strategy, a good place to start is with simply assembling the right people. Get sales reps involved, and also customer service associates. They may be able to identify some gaps in your marketing approach that you haven’t even considered, based on their customer interactions. Always aim for a plurality of perspectives.

Research the competition.

How do other local dealerships market themselves? Where do they seem to be spending their ad dollars? What works and doesn’t work about their marketing approach? Spend some time reviewing your competitors’ blogs, social media presence, website content, and more, gleaning inspiration for your own marketing efforts.

Consult with your analytics.

There’s a saying in the marketing world—that marketing without data is like flying blind. Hopefully, you have some numbers you can look at—Facebook insights, Google Analytics—to get some sense of how your digital marketing dollars have been allocated historically, and what results you have to show for it. This can be a helpful way of determining which parts of your existing strategy work and which don’t.

Set the right priorities.

Your budget is doubtless going to be limited, so make sure that you focus on the marketing efforts that are most essential—and most beneficial—for dealership success. The areas of focus that Get My Auto recommends include:

• A good dealership website, made to convert
• Facebook, both organic and paid
• Craigslist ads

In addition, there can sometimes be value to Instagram and email marketing, but only after you’ve made a strong investment in those top three.

Construct buyer personas.

Finally, remember that your marketing outreach always needs to be targeted toward your buyers—which means knowing who those buyers are. That’s why it’s wise to invest in buyer personas, compiling some basic demographic data to sketch out who those buyers are and what they are looking for in their next used vehicle.

There are various strategies for bringing traffic to your dealership website, including both paid and earned traffic. When we talk about paid traffic, we’re talking about PPC ads—an important part of your dealership marketing approach, but not what we’re focusing on today.

This post is all about earned, or organic traffic—the people you attract to your website through a focus on content marketing and SEO. It requires discipline and commitment to generate organic traffic, yet with a little patience and the right strategy, this can be a great way to boost your dealership website.

Boosting Organic Traffic to Your Dealership Website

So how, specifically, can you generate organic traffic for your used car website? Here are our top 10 recommendations.

1. Make sure your page is mobile optimized. Google actively penalizes sites that are not mobile-ready—and besides, most consumers will be researching your dealership from their mobile devices anyway. Make the mobile version of your site the primary version of your site.
2. Make your site fast. If it takes more than two or three seconds to load, you’re going to lose traffic. AMP technology can help you ensure optimal site performance.
3. Make your site secure. Buyers want to see that their personal information is safe and sound when they visit your website—and Google wants to see this, too. Use SSL/https to keep your site secure.
4. Optimize for local keywords. Sprinkle your content with terms like [City] used cars, [city] used car dealership, etc.
   Include plenty of photos and videos. Engaging content keeps people on your site for longer periods of time—an important SEO ranking factor. And thankfully, it’s easy to take plenty of pictures of your good-looking cars and trucks!
5. Get referenced in local directories. Citations from local Chambers of Commerce and other professional directories can significantly boost your rankings.
6. Write blogs. Regular content updates are key for maintaining your Google rankings. Write informative blog posts that educate your buyers about used car shopping, used car financing, used car maintenance, etc.
7. Offer resources. In addition to blog posts, we recommend including some evergreen pages that your buyers can consult—information on some of the specific financing options you offer, warranty packages, etc.
8. Be active on social media. Post regular content updates and ensure that your social media bios are all completely optimized.
9. Get online reviews. Actively seek feedback and star ratings on Facebook, Google, and other online review platforms. Ask your satisfied buyers or recurring customers to spend a moment reviewing your dealership!

Get Traffic for Your Dealership Website

There are plenty of ways to generate traffic for your used car dealership website—and getting earned traffic is a good start. Use these tips to guide you—and for additional help with dealership marketing, contact the Get My Auto team today!

Any business that can’t easily be found on the Web might as well be invisible; in fact, it might as well not exist at all. That’s a bold statement, but in today’s world, it’s really true. Consumers use the Web to locate the best nearby businesses—and if yours isn’t there to be discovered, you’re going to lose out on more and more customers.

But what can you do if your independent used car dealership has an online visibility problem? Here are five steps you can take right now to make your dealership truly discoverable.

Start a Google My Business Page

Google My Business is a free marketing tool that Google offers to companies of all kinds. You can sign up for a page and provide Google with important information about your dealership—like hours of operation, contact information, location, and more—that it will in turn supply to search engine users. This is a huge asset for your local SEO efforts—and again, it’s free, so you have nothing to lose!

Get Online Reviews

Online reviews are critical for building search engine visibility. The question is, how can you get them? Some basic tips:

– Email your best customers and ask them to leave you some feedback. Make sure you include the link to your – Google reviews, making it easy on them.
– Include your review link on your dealership website, too.
–  Consider adding your Google reviews link to invoices/receipts, as well.

Invest in AdWords

While organic search engine reach is critical, it works best when it’s augmented by paid ads. This allows you to truly canvas the Google search engine results page (SERP) and make your brand as visible as possible. Use AdWords in conjunction with your organic SEO efforts.

Post to Craigslist

Craigslist is the independent auto dealer’s secret weapon. Your listings will inevitably result in a big increase in website traffic, which can in turn improve your rankings overall. Just make sure you properly optimize your Craigslist posts. The Craigslist Wizard app, available from Get My Auto, can be a big help here!

Do Content Marketing

A final way to make your dealership more visible on the Web is to produce more branded content. A blog could be a good start. Write some posts that help, inform, and guide auto consumers, and optimize them for Google’s algorithms. It won’t have an effect overnight, but as you build thought leadership, you’ll also boost brand awareness. Content marketing is a great long-term plan.

Get Help Marketing Your Dealership

Of course, making independent auto dealerships more competitive on the Web is a huge part of what we do here at Get My Auto. We’d love to talk with you more about boosting your online visibility. Reach out to Get My Auto’s skilled marketing team today, and let’s start a conversation!