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Craigslist Automotive Advertising

Putting your vehicles online is worthwhile for just about any business and very little risk involved when you post your advertisement on Craigslist. With the exception of job postings and housing postings in specific markets, there’s no money involved when advertising on Craigslist. Whether your products or services are offered through ecommerce websites or physical stores, you could see financial gains through advertising on Craigslist. Since it’s free to advertise your business on Craigslist, there are no worries of not having any sales generated from the advertisement but having being able to sell will give you the 100% profits. Craigslist can also be a good place to test your copywriting. Another advantage of having an advertisement post on Craigslist is that your advertisement will get indexed by major search engines such as Google, making even more opportunities to get customers outside of Craigslist network.

Reaching Potential Customers On Craigslist

About 10 million people from various countries are using Craigslist to search for information and receive approximately 4 billion page views each month. From this statistics it is obvious that your products or services have the opportunity of reaching large potential customers. If you have the ability to write a good persuasive ad copy, the possibility of having your products or services being sold are limitless. However Craigslist can’t guarantee that you will for sure to make a sale but having an intriguing advertisement read by millions of people, you should be able to make at least some sales from your potential customers.

Finding Your Target Audience On Craigslist

The key to having your products or services sold is to make your advertisement aimed at reaching your target audience. As we have already discussed about the number of visitors Craigslist gets it is much more worthwhile to reach a small audience of those with a keen interest in your products or services than to reach a much larger audience of those who are not interested.

Craigslist has specific sections for you to advertise your products or services and this section is broken down into a number of categories. So the key to find your target audience is to place your advertisement in the most appropriate category which is related to your products or services. For instance if you are dealing in computer repairs, it is wise to place your advertisement in the computer section as opposed to the automotive section because for those who are looking for computer help will naturally migrate to the computer section. It may sometimes be appropriate to place an advertisement in more than one category. This is acceptable as long as it does not cross the line to spamming the section.

If any of the categories available are not matching to your products or services, you may suggest the addition of a new category by contacting Craigslist and might willing to accept if they believe that your suggestion warrants the addition.

Spamming On Craigslist

As you have already know that the key to have your product sold is to place your advertisement in an appropriate category, however placing the same advertisement to different geographical regions even though having in the appropriate category is considered spam. Even if you try the system will not approve your advertisement. If Craigslist detects the practice of spamming, all of your postings will be deleted and you could be ban from using Craigslist. Furthermore if the readers see the spamming techniques they will be less inclined to see what you have to offer and have your advertisement reported as spam.

As there are many regions available in Craigslist for you to place your advertisement, it will be better to choose only a few to make things easier for you and recommended to choose a smaller city where your advertisement will not get squash like the bigger city gets.

Email marketing solutions can help your car dealership enhance the number of vehicles that come in for service. Keeping consistent numbers is all well and good, but everyone knows having increasing monthly numbers is better. Email marketing solutions track the campaigns you send out so that you get real time data on the customers who are interested in the promotions you offer them regarding your service centre.

By reminding your customer to bring their cars in for service, you have the opportunity to multiply the amount of vehicles coming in for service. More vehicles for service means higher numbers in sales.

So, how do email marketing solutions help you bring more cars to your service center? Simple, all your customers really need is a reminder: “Hey you know that asset of yours that you paid thousands of dollars for? You need to make sure it’s in tip top shape, and it will only cost you $50.”

Your DMS most likely lists all of your clients’ contact information, such as how many times they have visited, and when their vehicle is due for service. This is vital information for you to use when creating a campaign through automotive email marketing solutions.

You can also use the “number of visits” and the “vehicles due for service” categories, to help you segment your email marketing solutions campaigns into frequent users, sometime users, and seldom users.

Now you are ready to create three different marketing campaigns, for three different target customer groups, while reminding them all how important their investment is to them.

Once you have created your campaigns, the magic happens. Email marketing solutions are equipped to track how many people have opened your email, if they have clicked on the promotions, or if they have sent your email on to friends or family.

The data gets even more in depth than that. You can know exactly who opened the email you sent, who clicked on each link within the email, on what day, and at what time. These insights can help you further segment your email marketing solutions campaign. As an example, let’s say that you are tracking those that “frequently” bring their cars in to your service center: 50% are clicking on their “$10 off preferred customer” promotion on the weekends; and the other 50% are opening and clicking on their emails from Monday to Friday.

You now have two more customer groups to better target your audience: weekend readers and weekday readers. You can then split your future email marketing campaigns into 2, so that your emails arrive into your customers’ inboxes exactly when they’re most likely to read it.

You will also be able to grow your list with a “forward to friends” button that is available on most email marketing solutions. For those customers that are constantly forwarding your email (we love these guys) you can show your appreciation by segmenting yet again.

You can offer them a special promotion for forwarding your email. This will keep them in the business of continuing to spread the good word about your service center.

It’s really easy to take “tracked” information and turn it into another campaign. Email marketing solutions are very user-friendly, so the tracking feature of most email marketing solutions gives you the option to export the data found within any given field.

Email marketing solutions will bring more people to your automotive dealership service center by providing you with the information you need to segment and target your customers. Catering to your audience’s exact needs will bring more of them to your service center and provide you with a better opportunity to grow your sales per month.

The following is a great article by Grant Cardone that holds a lot of truth for automotive marketers and car dealers.

Economies do not exist until somebody BUYS something! And economies cease to exist when a sale is not made.  Management then decides “customers aren’t buying anything so let’s just cut heads, slash budgets, hunker down and shrink our way to  greatness!”

Prospecting, Interviewing customers to properly identify problems and opportunities and then collaborating with  them to find appropriate solutions seems to be a skill set lost to an entire generation.   How did this happen?

Two major shifts drove this change. In the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, virtually every company had a sales force that were required and depended on things like; prospecting- the creation of customers, product knowledge, application knowledge and selling skills.  Great companies were built on great sales teams who were responsible for creating opportunities not for just selling them. The sales team was the engine, leading the  charge, driving the revenues of the company!  In the 90’s sales teams were deemed to expensive to maintain, inefficient, difficult to manage and the responsibility for driving revenues shifted to the marketing department.  The theory was that the company could create demand for products and services through advertising, promotion and gimmicks then the company could merely harvest the flood of incoming  orders with call centers or order desks. The second major shift currently taking place is from traditional marketing to internet marketing.

But, what happens when customers stop looking and searching the net and the phone stops ringing?  Because selling is a lost art the solutions are limited to- increase the advertising, make even bigger claims of the importance of customer satisfaction, lower prices (again) and increase gimmicks like no money down, rebates, zero percent interest and free trips.  Companies started spending more money on ad campaigns and google search then the entire sales force makes in salaries and commissions.  While these marketing shifts created breakthroughs in the ability to reach greater numbers of potential customers, the fact is it failed!  You don’t have to look far to see the corpses of companies who relied on marketing and disregarded the sales team;  Circuit City, Heard Automotive, Dilliards, Sears, Washington Mutual, Wachovia and Merrill Lynch.   These companies failed because of their dependence upon their marketing campaigns and their inability to sell their products!  Marketing without a trained sales team is a “one  way” vehicle, causing the company to only activate at the point of marketing and then become passive at the point of creating an opportunity or even closing on those created.

These marketing methods virtually eliminated management’s expectation of the sales team and their abilities. This is a critical problem in a recession, maybe event the cause of it, whereby the customers stop looking for new products and services, and therefore are immune to the wiles of marketing and promotion. The consumers’ focus in now also on cutting expenses and unless your product or service can help them save money without any investment, they simply won’t pay attention. Search engine optimization is useless when potential customers stop searching.

Companies must return to the creation of true sales skills and sales teams because without them nothing happens!  Management, marketing and customer satisfaction does not sell product.  Sales people sell products and you must have effectively trained salespeople that can (1) generate a prospect and (2) know how to determine what is needed, (3) how your product or service can satisfy that need and (4) how to justify a purchase decision. The lost art of real salesmanship must be restored in order to create the revenue a company desires.

A well trained sales team, not management, not the internet, not customer satisfaction and not marketing is the only thing that can cost effectively create customers in this economy.  Economies exist only when someone finds a prospect and then sells that prospect a product or service at which point they exchange money with your company.  Sales people drive entire economies and without them we have no economy.

Grant Cardone, Author of Sell to Survive

Auto Dealers are having trouble with sales in this economy. Many dealerships are closing their doors. But it’s not all doom and gloom. There are some savvy Internet sales managers taking advantage of the downtime to create Video SEO campaigns that they hope will pay off big when the economy rebounds. Early indications show that they are on to something.

One example of an automotive dealer that is excelling with the use of Internet video is Mtn View Auto Group in Chattanooga Tennessee. The Auto Group is currently running video marketing campaigns for both their Ford and Chevrolet stores. Mtn. View has embraced Internet Video Marketing and they are dominating the local car market Online. By utilizing as many as 10 different video sharing sites, and embedding their videos on a separate blog, tried-tested-marketing-strategies Don is able to make sure that their videos are getting maximum exposure, and targeting their local auto enthusiasts and car buyers through as many channels as possible. Running a variety of campaigns allows them to provide more content to their viewers, and highlight specific vehicles that need to be moved off the lot.

Don’s team runs separate campaigns to target different vehicle buyers - one campaign spotlights used vehicles, another campaign focuses on trade-ins and yet a third is composed of new vehicle walk-around’s. By using separate campaigns, they have been able to target specific vehicle niches, and the buyers associated with those markets. www.tube-pros-espects.com Their videos show up in the search results for keywords related to that subject - I.E. someone searches for the term “Chattanooga Corvette” they will find Don Erwin’s video of a 2009 Corvette Z06 in the top 3 results - which means that the viewer of the video fits their target audience from a needs standpoint, as well as geographically, and in most cases this means that they are in the buying phase and looking for the local dealer.

Not only does this strategy lead to ranking for highly targeted search terms, but it drives more traffic to their website, and takes up more positions in the Search Engine Results Pages (Serp’s). The benefits of owning more spots in the SERP’s is that you create a larger online presence, you have more control over what is being said about you online, and you are able to push your competition down in the results.

By strategically targeting customers through online video, Mtn. View Auto Group has increased their overall Internet sales, gained a larger share of the online market, and reached more customers than ever before. As they continue to work with online video, they are honing their processes and improving their effectiveness, and their reach begins to grow as well. They are gaining valuable knowledge and experience, not to mention market share, and when video marketing online begins to hit it’s prime, they will be well positioned to dominate, and take their sales to a new level.

While there aren’t a lot of businesses that are embracing Internet Video Marketing with the same vigor as Mtn. View Auto, this model can be adapted for almost any business, and now is the time to get in, while errors will be forgiven, there are fewer competitors, and the market is not yet saturated.

Any predictions about the full scope of online video in the future are pure speculation at this point, but the potential implications for business are huge, and when Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 Billion in October of 2006, it was a pretty good indication that the world’s leading search engine has plans to make it big. Bundle that with the introduction of Universal Search, and it’s easy to see that online video marketing has a bright future.

There is a huge opportunity for those businesses that are early adopters of this increasingly powerful advertising medium. Starting an Internet Video Marketing campaign now will pay off big dividends down the line. Get in now or get left behind! See some sample websites using video at http://www.mainlinehonda.com or http://www.cmcbenz.com

As the internet has grown so have the ways in which to promote your dealership online. You want to make your website stand out and rank high in search engines. One of the most dynamic ways to promote your online business or website is through the practice of link building. Website promotion is critical on the web and a thorough understanding of how to make the biggest impact possible is crucial to the success of your dealership website.

Link building is related to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Website Spiders crawl the looking for inventory, data, information, specials, and keywords.  Search Engines like Google are looking for good unique content, and also websites that drive traffic to your dealership site or blog. The more links, and the more valuable links from important and highly creditble websites, the better the SEO rating for your site.

Link building is a fairly simple manner of getting your dealership’s name out there on the web, with links back to your important pages. There are many paid services who will submit your website’s URL to many different web directories or sites, but you must be careful not to spam Google or you could suffer some dire consequences

Contact us for more information or to learn how many links your dealership currently has, and how you can increase your dealerships Automotive SEO rankings.