The Best Car Dealership Marketing Strategy
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Are you in the marketing department of, or the owner of a car dealership, and wish you could increase footfall with people ready to buy your cars? Read on to benefit from a proven strategy to increase footfall, test drives, and sales.
This is a follow on blog from the original, which you find by clicking here
Gift marketing strategy
Often you have to read all the way to the end to find out what the strategy is, but instead I want to give you it straight away. The gift marketing strategy is what we use with our car dealership clients to generate trackable calls to action. For the full blog on gift marketing click here.
Why should you give a gift?
Firstly, with marketing, as a rule, you need to give someone a reason to respond in order for them to respond. If you have received marketing such as a flyer with information about how long the company has been going, a list of services, and a picture of their shop, you likely didn't respond. They didn't give you anything to respond to - it was just a host of irrelevant info. The slightly more educated marketer knows marketing needs a call to action, and the usual option is a discount. But if you send out a flyer to 20,000 houses and put on their a discount, your margins can actually justify it will look like a joke: '0.3% discount with this flyer'! Typically if a discount isn't 20% or more, it's not going to be considered - but in your industry, such margins are fantasy! This is why a gift works so much better.
What sort of gifts work well?
Think of a gift which is relevant to your target audience, and then make it easily accessible. For instance, at Mr Flyer we do regular flyer distributions for various Mazda dealerships, so for their target audience we chose a £10 M&S voucher. If you were promoting a little Citroen C1 with free insurance for 18 year olds may be an iTunes voucher would be more appropriate.
How to implement the gift strategy
The gift works best when it's to get them in the door, not when it's associated with a sale's completion. For instance, a £10 M&S voucher with a test drive is much better than a voucher upon sales completion (even if the voucher was a high value). By doing it with a test drive you get to qualify people when they phone to book, which helps sift out time-wasters, and you can see a trackable return from your marketing campaign (learn more about tracking response rates by clicking here). A word of caution - don't make the gift too good. An estate agent client recently put a £20 House of Fraser voucher with any house valuation on their flyer, and after we distributed it they got loads of valuations but zero converted into listings; all because the gift enticed time wasters.
For more info, or for a FREE consultation to establish the best campaign for you and your business please get in touch today.
