Speed to market and effective online merchandising are essential keys to the profitable growth of any dealership. Most dealerships don’t recognize the impact that inefficiencies in one or both areas have on their ability to turn a profit.
Utilizing cutting edge techniques for online merchandising leads to increased margins, but you have to know what to use and how to use it.
The Current Market
By understanding current industry insights and trends, you can make informed decisions to streamline your dealership processes without sacrificing quality.
This includes using vehicle merchandising as an opportunity to differentiate your dealership from your competition. Descriptions, custom photos, and overlays are all ways to draw car shoppers to your inventory, while having little impact on your daily workflow.
In fact, vehicles with custom images receive 349% more VDP views per listing than those with a stock photo.
Looking Towards the Future
Successful car dealers keep an eye on the future and using trends to help decipher where the industry is going next. With the growing influence of social media and interactive content, car shoppers are coming to expect more from dealers while spending less time in market for a vehicle.
Leveraging social media is a great way to engage shoppers on platforms they use daily. You can even cater your social pages to deliver personalized content and vehicle listings to users with pre-determined criteria.
Interactive media, like vehicle videos or 360* photos, appeal to tech-savvy shoppers. Taking advantage of customer personas allows you to market your inventory to customers with highest likelihood of engaging with your listings.
Track Merchandising Numbers
Vehicle merchandising should make you money. To ensure the efforts you spend merchandising a vehicle are paying off, keep reports of your vehicles SRP and VDP engagement. Vehicle search relevancy increases when they are fully merchandised – and you should notice the increase in traffic when a listing is complete.
Many successful dealerships go one step further and track the clicks on a vehicle’s images and videos as well,