Can you really grow your leads by 30-40% or more? We’ll show you the path to getting more dealership leads for good and for real. No special formulas, no inside special innovations, no tricks, and no deception. Read on and you’ll see how to get more dealership leads all through some simple math.
Getting More Dealership Leads
All digital marketing lead generation follows the same principle: someone submits a form with their contact information. Working backward from that prospect submitting their information, the question is “what would compel or motivate someone to do that?”
There are limited number of reasons why someone would provide their information. The primary ones are a desire to:
- View/access page content or information
- Obtain valued content
- Get help or assistance
- Receive sales information (including purchase)
There are 2 sides to lead generation. If you want leads now (and do not have a list), you must use digital advertising and have compelling enough reason for visitors to provide their information.
On the other hand, if you want to invest and play the long game which delivers an ongoing source of leads, you’ll want to utilize a variety of techniques both outside your website and on your website to draw traffic to you. This is called “inbound” or attraction marketing.
Formula For More Leads
The “How” Matters Most
We would contend that it is much more important HOW things are done than what is done. Whether it is Google PPC campaigns, Facebook ads, blog posts or SEO, how it is executed matters. The challenge is that knowing if your digital marketing agency is doing a helpful job is often very difficult. It takes work to monitor and communicate with the agency. It also takes time to figure out what is working and then to fine-tune it to improve the results. If you aren’t investing in this part of the process, it could cost you 20-30% of the leads they could be getting you.
1. Understand Your Buyers
Knowing your buyers improves the process of lead generation tremendously. Once you know your buyers, you will clearly see that buying is a process, not an act. Prospects not only shop, they also research. Before they researching, they must develop a desire or interest. Understanding these stages educates how we message.
To obtain more leads means that we move beyond an expectation that everyone who crosses our path is ready to buy now. If your dealership is only willing to engage with those who are ready to buy right now, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. This is a misguided approach to marketing in general, but even more so when discussing digital marketing.
Another thing to consider is that potential customers rarely label themselves as shoppers. Often this is done intentionally to avoid a hard sales approach. Meanwhile, sales people want to address sales issues shoppers have so they can bring them closer to a sale.
With this disconnect, many sales people and shoppers disregard each other after a sufficient amount of frustrating interactions, whether it be over the phone or via email. It’s not the contact that is the problem, but the mismatch of need and desire. Often it results in shoppers doing their own research and souring on your dealership in the meantime. This is why you must provide a path for non sales ready prospects to follow. Developing this path provides your dealership the opportunity to connect and relationship build with prospects.
Remember, a binary approach to leads (buy now or bye bye) lacks the required subtlety required to turn a prospect into a customer.
2. What Type of Lead?
The terms lead generation, lead conversation, prospect, lead, etc. are often used interchangeably. However, what is most critical is to understand is that not all leads are not sales-ready leads. Sales people like to talk about lead quality, but often, the issue is not one of quality but of stage.
For most people, lead generation is associated with SQL (sales qualified leads) or “buyer leads”. With that mindset, anyone who passes your way must be ready to buy from you. The theory goes that you just need contact information, and then sales will close the deal. If you just the lead the right offer they will buy – or if you press them they will purchase. Unfortunately, this premise is more faulty now more than ever before.
Most dealerships have not modernized their thinking to understand that most digital marketing leads are NOT sales ready. In fact, by NOT providing various options on your website, other than “buy now,” you are failing to obtain maximum value from your marketing efforts. Once you comprehend this, then your focus needs to be placed on treating leads in an appropriate manner to deliver maximum benefit to the prospect and your organization. By delivering value to a prospect based upon where they are in their buying process, you are actually benefiting your dealership. This is because you are building trust and a rapport. The investment in this approach and process has been proven in numerous studies to close sales faster and build brand loyalty with customers.
Remember, just because someone is shopping does not mean they are ready to purchase… especially from you.
3. Reach Your Prospects with the Right Message and Medium
Once you understand that not everyone you engage with is ready to buy now and that they are at different stages of a journey, you can develop processes, messaging and content to appeal to different categories of shoppers. When you cater your content in this way and present it in the right medium (website, emails, social media, etc.), you have blazed a path to successful optimization of lead conversion. By tuning the message to the medium, different conversion methods can be leveraged.
Popular paid channels are:
- Directory listings (e.g. RVUSA.com, TrailersUSA, etc.)
- Pay Per Click offerings (e.g. Facebook, Google, etc.)
- Social inventory listings (e.g. Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, etc.)
Popular unpaid channels:
- Blog content development
- SEO landing pages
- Organic social postings
- Gated content (content that requires contact submission to receive)
Each channel has its own ability to be leveraged with the buyer’s stage in mind. For example, Google PPC is easily tuned based upon the search terms paid for.
Go Forth and Market
Sometimes it is easy to confuse faulty marketing tactics for fools gold. When it comes to lead generation, we can say that these are 3 golden pieces of information:
- Understand Your Buyers
- Differentiate Types of Leads
- Reach Your Prospects with the Right Message and Medium.
There are many other aspects to successful lead generation, but if you adhere to these three concepts, you will be light years ahead of your competition. Most importantly, they are the foundation for a strategy of successful marketing for years to come.
NEED SOME HELP GETTING MORE DEALERSHIP LEADS?
We can assist in ensuring you have a lasting process around your lead acquisition process. This can include a process for a steady pipeline. Give us a call at 800.709.3240 or CLICK HERE to contact us.
