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Marketing as a Sales Strategy: Moving Towards Customers

Even when the industry goes through a slump in sales, dealers know that there are always customers. But the question is… how to attract them? The right marketing strategy can help the dealership obtain new prospects and customers.

What goals should be included in the dealer’s marketing strategy?

  1. Foster contact with current customers
  2. Generate more interactions with potential customers
  3. Provide better communication channels for offers, promotions and services
  4. Stand out from the competition

This article analyzes some best practices that can help the dealer achieve these goals by focusing on generating more contacts with new prospects and improving the sales success rate.

Have an online presence

It’s a proven fact that, rather than visiting the dealership, customers prefer to go online from their computers or mobile devices to get product information, find out if the parts they need are in stock, and book service appointments.

Does your dealership have a modern, easy-to-use, and mobile-friendly website? If the answer is no, why?

9 out of 10 customers visit the dealer’s or manufacturer’s website before making a purchase decision.

Not having a modern, responsive-design website means that the dealership is lagging behind the competition. With a tool like Dealer Web Manager, the dealership can have a professional and self-managed website without hiring costly programmers or designers. In just a few steps you can create an online catalog, publish offers and news, promote events, create contact forms, and add and modify banners. The cost of a quality website is minimal when considering the opportunities that a proper space on the web ensures.

Use a CRM

Any interaction between the sales staff and a prospect is an information-rich opportunity. Using a CRM helps the dealer maintain an updated and detailed database of prospects: their purchase history, family structure, hobbies, vehicle use, and more.

Each piece of information can turn into a strategy for the sales advisor. Sometimes customers don’t know what they want or need, and the sales advisor can lend a hand in showing them which alternative is better.

Implementing a CRM offers the dealer many benefits:

  • Knowing every prospect, and details of each interaction
  • Having key details that will get you closer to your customers, e.g. birthdays to congratulate them
  • Design specific and personalized campaigns based on customer and prospect segmentation
  • Detect if a potential buyer has been a customer in the past, know how many vehicles they’ve bought, and what kind of experience they had with each
  • The Service Advisor can also take advantage of the CRM to identify needs and design proactive measures: e.g. recommend a brake pad change if the customer hasn’t changed them in a while
  • Track the customer’s actions after the sale. If customers don’t return to the workshop after purchasing a vehicle, you can create campaigns focused on recovering them.

Make the most of email marketing

The strategies mentioned above allow the dealer to position its business above the competition: attract more prospects, create detailed follow-ups, and increase the success rate for closing sales.

You can boost these benefits even more with a CRM database and an email marketing tool, with which you can send newsletters to different prospect or customer segments. For example, you can send specific messages to prospects who are looking for off-road vehicles, or those who need a service for their vehicles, and at the same time inform all of them about new offers.

Extra tip: Build a strong social media presence

Social media is integrated with most mobiles devices, and prospects are in close touch with them. In the latest surveys we have detected that most users participate in 3 to 4 social networks.

The dealership needs to be present on the social media sites potential customers spend time.

Building a social media presence has a low cost, doesn’t take much time, and brings many benefits. They can be used to promote vehicles or services, communicate the arrival of new models, share tips on vehicle care, etc.

Conclusion

Each and every one of these strategies has two key goals. On the one hand, to detect prospect habits and patterns. We can measure this with the CRM and learn what kind of information has the most impact.

On the other hand, these strategies boost the possibilities to obtain new prospects, who will not only contact the dealer through visits to the store, phone, or email, but also through the website, email marketing campaigns, and social media.