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Dynamic vehicle comments

mattwatson81

Getting Refreshed
Apr 10, 2009
334
10
First Name
Matt
What does everyone think about these? We are getting ready to launch dynamic vehicle comments as a free new feature for all of our customers and I would love to hear what everyone thinks about them. What you like, don't like, and what could be better.

I know vAuto and Firstlook offer some dynamic vehicle comment features. I'm not sure if any other vendors do.

Does anyone know if anyone offers comments that are truly dynamic and can change automatically? As in they could include incentives and change the incentives automatically? Or advertise JUST ARRIVED for a few days and then automatically remove it? Or advertise price changes when you lower the price?

Thanks for your feedback!
 
Matt - is this just an advertisement for your new product? If you've already built it and are going to launch it, why do you care what anyone thinks of it beyond your own customers?

No this isn't an advertisement... sorry if it seems that way. I'm curious what others think about dynamic vehicle comments. What they like and don't like regardless of what solution they use.
 
No this isn't an advertisement... sorry if it seems that way. I'm curious what others think about dynamic vehicle comments. What they like and don't like regardless of what solution they use.

Then you didn't need to start it as an announcement for your product Matt. You could have just asked the question.

But I'll bite since I have some experience with this....

We use a lot of your competitors' softwares and have been able to create a few different variants for our different locations. One of our highline stores uses a fantastic comment generator that gets better all the time, but it doesn't provide the meat a customer is looking for on those cars. So, we've combined that technology with human input and have found that to work much better.

Another one of our stores works with the person who takes pictures of their cars and generates every comment manually. The picture taker figures out the story he wants to tell, and takes additional photos that help him with his story. For example, he might be blown away with the layout of the steering wheel controls and will take some macro (close-ups) to go along with his first feelings of seeing how functional those controls were. He sells the steering wheel instead of talking about all the features that car has.

In my opinion the dynamic stuff is not on par with a good salesman yet, but I would take it over not having any comments at all.

Comments help differentiate your car, but bland/general comments don't.
 
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"Why Look Any where Else? This is the finest 3 owner sled this side of the Mississippi river and my boss wants it gone, so stop your shopping and buy this wicked ride now!"
 
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Then you didn't need to start it as an announcement for your product Matt. You could have just asked the question.

But I'll bite since I have some experience with this....

We use a lot of your competitors' softwares and have been able to create a few different variants for our different locations. One of our highline stores uses a fantastic comment generator that gets better all the time, but it doesn't provide the meat a customer is looking for on those cars. So, we've combined that technology with human input and have found that to work much better.

Another one of our stores works with the person who takes pictures of their cars and generates every comment manually. The picture taker figures out the story he wants to tell, and takes additional photos that help him with his story. For example, he might be blown away with the layout of the steering wheel controls and will take some macro (close-ups) to go along with his first feelings of seeing how functional those controls were. He sells the steering wheel instead of talking about all the features that car has.

In my opinion the dynamic stuff is not on par with a good salesman yet, but I would take it over not having any comments at all.

Comments help differentiate your car, but bland/general comments don't.

Dynamic comments might be the most helpful on new cars since nobody ever does comments on those. Can advertise incentives, optional equipment and etc.

I think the key is a blend of user inputted comments and the dynamic ability as well. Doing things like "Just Arrived", "Internet Special", "Certified", "Price Reduced", "CARFAX One Owner" and other things can easily be done dynamically but need to blend in to what the users put in.
 
In my opinion the dynamic stuff is not on par with a good salesman yet, but I would take it over not having any comments at all.

I agree with Alex. "Dynamic" content will only take you so far. Garbage in garbage out..so either way you need to review each comment to be sure of accuracy.

I used a hybrid approach with Homenet, but still wrote 80% of the copy/comments for each used vehicle.


@Matt, yeah..you are the master at plugging your company at any given opportunity you can. IMO it gets really old...

@Joe...sign me up for that bag of persuasive copy.
 
I have made it a goal this year to engage in custom, dynamic comments for each used car. While it does save time to paste generic jibberyjoo with the features in the comments field, we want to experiment with this for SEO purposes for our classifieds as well.