We are a fairly new dealership right now, 10 cars max, and looking to get more exposure. I want to use Cars, Autotrader, Dupont, whatever, but need the good and bad on them all. I don't know what to think, since I have used cars.com to sell a car for my personal use, but I got a ton of crap. Any suggestions and maybe pricing would be a HUGE help before I call them and give them money. PLEASE HELP
Looking to Advertise with someone, have quesiton
- Thread starter Matt Leavitt
- Start date
1. Make sure your inventory photos are amazing. Don't pay to show someone sub-par photos.
2. Make sure your vehicle pricing is in line. You will get ridiculously low offers on over-priced vehicles and you will miss out on offers if you're higher than competition (enter: vAuto)
3. Read these forums. You can search for each of those classifieds by name and find a boatload of information.
They're also all making changes recently. I would start them 1 at a time and have a proper tracking system in place.
2. Make sure your vehicle pricing is in line. You will get ridiculously low offers on over-priced vehicles and you will miss out on offers if you're higher than competition (enter: vAuto)
3. Read these forums. You can search for each of those classifieds by name and find a boatload of information.
They're also all making changes recently. I would start them 1 at a time and have a proper tracking system in place.
Is there sites better at doing cars then others? and do some sites do month to month, or is it contract per ie 6 months or a year at a time
Is there sites better at doing cars then others? and do some sites do month to month, or is it contract per ie 6 months or a year at a time
- Dec 30, 2009
- 1,883
- 480
- First Name
- Yago
right now we have a few Cadillac's, higher end Chevy and ford SUV's, a few late model trucks. But we plan on going with all sorts, all used and such. But no limit on what we do. We have been moving some cars but would love to move ALOT more
Matt
I am a small independent dealer as well. My best ROI is CarGurus.
I have learned a lot here on Dealer Refresh. One of the biggest things that I have learned is that there are a lot of tools out there designed to help you generate and track ROI. Some are free (Google Analytics), and some are expensive.
There are tools that will help you price your inventory, and tools to help you sell your inventory.
Here is the trick to all of this. You have to be careful not to throw away all of your profit on tools and leads. If you have 10 units and do a bang up good job and sell 10 units per month, then you probably have around $20,000 gross after policy work. So now you pay Cars.com or AutoTrader $1000, Pay vAuto $1500, pay your DMS provider $250, pay your CRM $300-$500, pay pay pay...and now you have nothing left.
I learned this the hard way Matt, but thanks to some members here...I did learn it. Focus on your own website first and foremost. You are much better off spending more money on your own website.
I am a small independent dealer as well. My best ROI is CarGurus.
I have learned a lot here on Dealer Refresh. One of the biggest things that I have learned is that there are a lot of tools out there designed to help you generate and track ROI. Some are free (Google Analytics), and some are expensive.
There are tools that will help you price your inventory, and tools to help you sell your inventory.
Here is the trick to all of this. You have to be careful not to throw away all of your profit on tools and leads. If you have 10 units and do a bang up good job and sell 10 units per month, then you probably have around $20,000 gross after policy work. So now you pay Cars.com or AutoTrader $1000, Pay vAuto $1500, pay your DMS provider $250, pay your CRM $300-$500, pay pay pay...and now you have nothing left.
I learned this the hard way Matt, but thanks to some members here...I did learn it. Focus on your own website first and foremost. You are much better off spending more money on your own website.
- Nov 4, 2012
- 461
- 104
- First Name
- Jessica
@Tallcool1 It's incredible to hear all the great things you've learned here.
I want to echo what you and @craigh have already said. Work on making sure your website is top notch. This is your 24/7 salesperson, your digital brick and mortar. You MUST make sure that it represents the best at all times. You can spend an ass ton of money for third party listings, but if you don't have your site up to par....then you're wasting your money.
Get completely kick ass photos of the cars.
Get even better videos of the cars.
Crawl. Walk. Run.
I want to echo what you and @craigh have already said. Work on making sure your website is top notch. This is your 24/7 salesperson, your digital brick and mortar. You MUST make sure that it represents the best at all times. You can spend an ass ton of money for third party listings, but if you don't have your site up to par....then you're wasting your money.
Get completely kick ass photos of the cars.
Get even better videos of the cars.
Crawl. Walk. Run.
This a million times. It's common to go apeshit and throw money towards any third party vendor that offers you X amount of leads and X million unique visitors per month shopping right through your digital door, etc. In the end you could have cash flow issues.
Source : Small dealer my marketing firm picked up a while back, within our second month they were selling 60% of their inventory (mind you it was like 20-25 cars total on their lot). Then they decided to throw money at ATC's premium package, cars.com, cargurus, the whole nine yards. Ended up selling the same amount in that month, and had to drop us and their third party sites for 2 months because they 1) Didn't have enough cash flow to pay their bills, let alone themselves, 2) Didn't have enough capital to go to the auction and buy cars to make up for their sold inventory, and 3) Decided to pay their sales tax quarterly, which really screwed them up in the end.
The result? A terrible Q3 and they took out a loan.
For now, as a starter, i'd get a basic website going, get your business listed on Google+, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, DealerRater, etc so you'll have some solid citation links and a local presence. Try the classifieds way first (Craigslist, $5 per ad, can't really beat that), then slowly focus on increasing your budget for networks like Cars and ATC.
Also, stay in these forums! I've been lurking here for so many years, and just started posting. So much information here to help your dealership out, and it's a network of auto pros like yourself to share ideas and strategies needed to keep up with the next-gen of dealer marketing.
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This, this, this. Get the free stuff, then the cheap stuff. And it doesn't get much cheaper than $5 a car on Craigslist.
If you wanted to get real fancy, go to the App Store and try Burner for cheap call tracking. (Burner is not my first choice for the application since it won't tie into a CRM or let you use more than one cell phone, but it's cheap, it counts calls, and we're in bootstrap mode here.)