Here’s How Dealerships Can Score More Service Leads Online
Beating the looming inflation and keeping one's revenue stream steady can be done by harnessing the potential and power of one's service lane! That's right, in this market and time, SERVICE IS KING!
The automobile sales and services industry has gone through significant changes over the past few years. The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated the rate at which these changes have occurred. Out of all the changes in the automobile industry, the most significant one is a shift to digital retailing. Today’s customer expectations have shifted and they are looking to conduct all their research, communication, and purchases through digital means. Most consumers also trust the overall online buying process provided by popular eCommerce platforms. And they are looking for the same service and experience in automotive during viewing/buying vehicles, selecting PPM plans, service plans, OEM programs, and more.
2023 is no more than a couple of months away so dealerships should mainly focus on closing the year with as much of a boost in overall sales as possible. Historically, November and December have also been the months during which consumers tend to spend more. To get the most out of the peak season, dealerships should strategize and implement their plans accordingly. In this article, we will take a closer look at what dealerships can do to acquire more service leads.
Here’s how dealerships can score more service leads online.
1) Automate Your Email Outreach to Target & Connect with Your Service Customers
Automated email outreach helps keep a dealership’s service leads flowing and on track to convert. Dealerships can make the most out of their email automation campaigns by creating data-driven and rich email content and delivering it across various vehicle maintenance cycles. Dealerships are also advised to use service bundles, discounts or offers, dynamic designs, interactive landing pages, personalized triggers, and customized content to convert more service leads.
2) Use Facebook & LinkedIn to Establish & Showcase Your Dealership’s Brand & Offerings
Facebook enables dealerships to directly reach and connect with a large portion of their customer base. To make the most out of Facebook marketing for dealerships, one should focus on creating quality content, targeting the right type of audience, using proper CTAs, and providing lead-converting landing pages.
LinkedIn is known for its cutting-edge tools that enable all types of businesses to stamp their authority in the domains. Dealerships can make use of specialized tools like the Sale Navigator, LinkedIn Search, and more to reach customers and inform them about various products, services, offers, updates, etc.
3) Promote Various Product & Service Bundles Using Discounts & Offers
One of the best ways of improving sales is by providing more for less. This means that dealerships should provide their customers with relevant products and service offers whenever they can. A great way of retaining more service customers is creating product and service bundles and providing them with lucrative discounts and offers across dealership websites, email blasts, social channels, and paid search ads.
Pro Tip: Use customizable CI-Compliant Offer Templates to automate the quicker distribution and sale of your dealership products and services.
4) Strategically Use Your Website to Harness More Service Leads
The best way to harness service leads through a dealership website would be to take one’s customers through an interactive, educational, and fun journey while they are on it. Auto dealers can create simple yet engaging web designs, provide informational content, and use various media forms like images and videos to improve their customer journey on their website.
Pro Tip: Use relevant and powerful CTAs (Call To Action) across your website so your customers can easily connect with you.
5) Create Engaging & Well-Written Content
Because of today’s cutthroat competition in the auto sales and service industry, dealerships need to put in more effort to stand out, especially in the digital world. To attract more service traffic and leads, dealers should create content that informs, engages, and inspires their customers. Educational, relevant, and useful content builds more trust in your customers and pushes them to buy their products and services from your dealership.
6) Paid Search Advertising Can Boost Your Service Lead Numbers
Paid search ads help dealers reach broader audiences, target customers with a lot more ease, boost their brand image, and showcase their products and services. To make the most out of paid ads, dealerships should conduct good keyword research, test different types of ads, and track their campaign’s progress.
Pro Tip: Google Search Ads can earn dealerships a lot of traffic and leads as most people use Google to run their search queries.
7) Focus on Leveraging Local SEO Marketing
Without an exclusive focus on local SEO, dealerships could lose out on a huge chunk of traffic in their local area of business. Local SEO can be done by using Google My Business, providing one’s correct contact information across all platforms, creating SEO-optimized content for local audiences, adding local area pages to one’s website, engaging more on social media, building a strong link structure, and engaging within one’s local community.
Pro Tip: List your dealership and your products and services across all the relevant local directories as this can bring in more leads with minimal effort.
8) Always Create SEO-Optimized Content
What most dealers fail to realize is that all their advertising and marketing efforts can go to waste if they do not optimize for SEO at every level. Today’s digital world contains an overload of information. SEO-optimized content enables dealers to not only attract a higher volume of traffic to their business and website but also provides them with the best quality of traffic that has the biggest potential of converting into service leads.
9) Create More Video Content
Research shows that YouTube is quickly taking over as the preferred search option over Google for consumers across almost every industry. Today’s vehicle owners are looking for all types of new car options, service inquiries, offer news, service deals, and more on video-based platforms like YouTube. Research also shows that video content also engages customers over any other type of content even on one’s social media channels.
10) Artificial Intelligence & Other Technological Tools
AI can help dealerships sell more cars, products, and services in numerous ways. In today’s business world, AI is all about finding and creating better solutions after considering all possible factors involved. Dealerships can use Bigdata, machine learning, data science, AI chatbots, and more to target the best customers and serve them their service products in the best possible way.
What’s Next for Your Dealership?
Today’s consumers are already used to making most of their purchases online. The COVID-19 pandemic has only made automobile service providers realize that unlike in previous years, they would also have to start broadening, boosting, and maintaining their dealership’s online presence. If not, they would most definitely start losing out on business from their service customers and eventually, their position in the service market.
Most eCommerce platforms have set the bar in terms of providing a great consumer buying experience. The best features mostly include extensive product browsing, educational information, discounts & offers, high-quality products, pick-up & delivery, and more. If dealerships could provide even half of these through their websites to their service customers, they would definitely start seeing more customers and sales coming through.
The time is now and this has simply got to be the new goal for all dealerships moving forward: utilizing and maximizing all their main digital resources to sell more cars, sell more aftersales products/services, retain more customers, and ultimately – earn more gross profits.
Thus, to compete and succeed in the next year (2023) and the foreseeable future, dealerships should start investing in providing digital retailing to all their service customers and vehicle owners today!
DataClover Can Help Your Dealership Score More Service Leads
DataClover has been operating in the automotive space since 2016 and has effectively provided its award-winning technological solutions to more than 35+ automobile brands and 200+ dealerships in the United States.
Using pioneering and revolutionary digital technology, we have been able to successfully boost and transform dealerships so they can leverage all their digital resources to acquire more service customers, sell more products, and earn more gross profits. Across the country, our dealership partners witness serious growth spikes in no more than two weeks of using our digital products.
There’s no logical reason why your dealership shouldn’t be using the latest and smartest digital products in the market right now. This is mainly because the automobile industry as a whole is anyway moving towards a digital future if it isn’t already here today. Thus, dealerships are advised to start using the best digital products so they can capitalize on the service business market and position themselves better for the future.
For more information about DataClover’s automotive dealership solutions:
Give us a call: 1-855-653-2568
Shoot us an email: sales@dataclover.com
Visit our website: www.dataclover.com
A Blog by DataClover
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DataClover not only designs pioneering software-based products to help auto & car dealerships succeed but also creates educational and up-to-date content to inform all members of the automobile industry.
