When it comes to car buying behavior, what are the latest trends?
According to a recent Cox Automotive car buyer journey study, 60% of car shoppers spend their shopping time online – researching and browsing cars — and more than 78% use third-party websites.
Because of this, people are spending less time at dealerships.
According to Dealercue, those car shopping only visit an average of 1.2 dealerships before they purchase a car, meaning dealerships need to make a huge first impression online if they want to attract and grow their customer base.
Besides creating an informative sales funnel, how can you ultimately build a successful car dealership funnel that grows your conversions?
In this article, we will discuss seven best practices when it comes to marketing for car dealerships and what ClickFunnels tools you can use.
7 Best Practices to Use in Marketing of Car Dealerships
1. Look at Current Data to Create Funnels Catering to Your Audience and Target Audience
Customer data should always play a big role in creating your funnels.
Why? Simply put, it can help you better communicate and engage those visiting your funnel — including both new and returning customers.
Furthermore, through ClickFunnels’ Actionetics tool, you can collect data that in return helps you create better messaging and branding and ultimately instills trust and value to your brand.
Actionetics allows you to organize your audience into segmented lists, build autoresponders, create automated email broadcasts, and more.
Look at behavior patterns from your collected data and see what you can change to help increase positive customer behaviors in your funnel.
The better you can relate to your target audience and their engagement levels, the better chance you’ll have of turning them into a customer.
2. Make Sure Your Funnel is Mobile Friendly
According to a study by Google, 58% of car buyers agreed that smartphones or similar handheld devices were the only devices used to look up car information and research.
So, when optimizing your car dealership funnels, use your automated data tool to see where your current audience is viewing the funnel.
If more individuals are viewing the funnel on their mobile devices, optimize your landing pages for mobile first before optimizing the desktop version.
That way you don’t lose out on potential customers.
Additionally, mobile optimization is easy with ClickFunnels.
For instance, the software allows users to highlight elements of the landing page and make them only visible on the desktop version.
In return, it will increase readability on the device they’re viewing it from.
ClickFunnels also shows mobile previews of funnels, helping you make quick adjustments before setting them live.
Click here to read more about mobile optimizations for your funnels.
3. Add Video Elements
In addition to optimizing your messaging, look to see if you can convert some of your content into a video.
The attention span of your average funnel visitor is short, and long paragraphs of text can bore your audience quickly.
Plus, video content is what car shoppers want. According to a Google study, more than half of auto shoppers watched 30 minutes or more of videos during their car research.
What type of videos should you try to include? In the same Google study, they found that the top three video types for car shoppers include: test drives, walkthroughs, and car features/options.
ClickFunnels makes it easy to insert new videos into your funnels.
Be sure to test the best locations to place your videos within your funnel.
4. Split Test Your Call to Action Messaging
It’s one thing to increase your lead generation for your car dealership, and it’s another to actually complete a sale.
Because your inventory is always changing, the messaging and content of your funnel must change too.
Compile the most recent data from your funnels and split test your call to action.
Try testing different messaging as well as the location of the message to see what your customers engage with more.
It’s easy to split test within your ClickFunnels dashboard.
5. Provide Social Proof
Part of the researching process includes reading customer reviews of not only the cars but of your dealership.
With this in mind, you’ll need to collect and leave an area for customer reviews, or social proof within your sales funnel.
Be sure to encourage customers to leave a review after they have completed your funnel, either through a popup graphic, automated email, or banner.
Through social proof, it can help build trust and confidence with potential customers, making you more of an expert within the car dealership industry.
The key will be to collect as much social proof as you can and display it in a way that is easy for your audience to digest.
6. Take Advantage of Social Media
Social media is a great marketing tool for car dealerships as it can help build trust between your brand and your audience.
Share social proof, video, graphics, etc. on all of your social media channels that will encourage your audience to visit your funnel.
Especially if your audience demographic are avid social media users, it’s important to keep your accounts updated and informative.
Again, this is where your Actionetics account can come in handy. It collects your customer’s previous actions within your funnel, and, most importantly, their interests.
Lastly, you can also create advertisements within your social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter ads.
They not only help increase brand awareness, but can automatically target a specific group of people to your funnels.
7. Be Responsive to Queries
Lastly, you need to be responsive to your audience’s questions and comments in a timely manner.
ClickFunnels integrates with automated systems to help you respond faster to customers and help build positive relationships.
Marketing Your Dealership With ClickFunnels Gets Results
As you can see, there are many ways you can better market your car dealership with the help of ClickFunnels.
Just be sure that as you do, you’re also keeping up with the latest car buying trends.
That way, you’ll stay one step ahead of your competitors and more importantly, appeal to your audience.
ClickFunnels is a great tool to use for your business.
It’s simple for any entrepreneur to build their own sales funnels in just minutes, all without needing to rely on a team of techies.
Everything you need to build and launch your sales funnel is pre-developed and automatically pieced together for your company, so you have a seamless and fast set up.
If you want to give it a try, ClickFunnels offers a 14-day free trial. Test it out and see the growth you have with your customers.
How has using ClickFunnels for car sales helped you? What other lead generation for car dealerships and best digital marketing tips have worked for you? Sound off in the comments below!