However, a powerful website is one investment that will differentiate your car dealership from all your competitors.

Over the years, we’ve worked with a number of car dealerships and have found that 5 key elements make all the difference.

1. Remarkable Design

As they say, it’s all in the details.

Leaving dirty cars on your lot sends the wrong message to potential customers.

It’s the same with websites. A mediocre website will literally scare customers away.

Many of your competitors have mediocre websites. You don’t have to.

We’ve been developing car dealership websites for years and have a staff of industry leading designers. We know exactly what it takes to make your website stand out.

Take a look at the website we recently built for Palm Springs Motors.

Now compare it to the competition.

Which car dealership do you think customers flock to?

2. Your Inventory, Online

The way people buy cars has completely changed.

The first stop in a car buyer’s journey used to be the car dealership.

Now, every customer starts his search online. They’ll first research the cars they are considering, and then search for dealerships in the area.

If your inventory is not accessible through your website, you are losing sales. Many customers won’t even contact a car dealership if they can’t see what cars they have on the lot.

We’ve developed amazing systems that allow you to easily upload information and images of your inventory.

And best of all, it’s search engine optimized so you attract the RIGHT customer looking for the EXACT car you have.

3. Mobile Friendly

Another shift in consumer purchasing behavior is mobile computing.

Many customers now do much of their car purchasing research from a smartphone or tablet, such as an iPad.

Therefore, it is imperative that your website be mobile friendly.

Many websites are not mobile friendly. They are difficult, if not impossible to navigate by touch screen.

If a potential customer visits a car dealership’s website from their phone and can’t navigate, they will lose that customer.

Don’t let the same thing happen to you.

4. Easy Contact

How easy is it for your customer to contact you?

When a customer is ready to purchase from you, they’ll want to contact you at that moment.

But if it’s difficult from them to find your phone number or email address on your website, you may lose that customer.

When we deal with car dealerships, we make it imperative that any customer can quickly and easily contact you from any page on the website, without any hesitation.

5. Map & Directions

Lastly, you want to make it easy for your customer to find you.

Simply including your address may not be enough. Many customers now want to be able to SEE where your car dealership is located.

That’s why it’s important to include a map with your location.

On the car dealership websites we build, we always include an interactive map that allows customers to get directions from their location.

Do you want to stand out from your competition and increase your sales?

Then it’s time to make an investment in your car dealership and improve your website.

Image Credit:  Some rights reserved by cjalallian

On Feb. 2, the four Tweet Race teams will leave New York, L.A., Chicago and Tampa in specially outfitted Mercedes-Benz vehicles, and head to Superbowl XLV in Dallas. They’ll be directed and fueled by people’s tweets along with help from team coaches who have large numbers of Twitter followers. Fellow tweeters are invited to join a team and help tweet to them with race clues and tips.  V.I.P. trips for two to numerous MB sponsored events can be won by these tweet helpers, along with other prizes. Winning is more than just getting there first. It’s also the largest number of active Twitter helpers and a few other social media measurements. Oh, and the winning team? They each get a 2012 C-Class Coupe.

The team coaches aren’t just people with a large number of Twitter followers either, they’re celebrities from various industries. Musicians, athletes and TV stars. If their team wins, $25k goes to their favorite charity.

So, while the main media platforms (Twitter and Facebook) are free, let’s add up what this whole campaign will probably cost MB USA. Celebrity involvement, an easy $400k. Putting four MB’s into the race, at least $200k. Two winning C-Class coupes, $80k. Winning coaches charity of choice donation, $25k. Cost of coming up with the idea, developing and managing the entire campaign, probably $1 million. Paid online advertising banners to help promote the campaign, around $500k.  Total cost of this FREE Media campaign that will probably involve 8 million active participants for 7 days, about $2.25 Million. Will it ultimately do better for Mercedes-Benz than their $6 million dollar Super Bowl ad planned for 4th quarter of this year’s game that has an anticipated 150 million viewers? Time will tell, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point is that marketers should start thinking differently about how they will be paying for online campaigns in this new world of free media. Historically, an ad campaign followed its own 80/20 rule. 80% of the campaign costs would go toward buying the media (TV, radio, print, outdoor, etc) and 20% would go toward developing and producing the creative. Although that 20% could be more or less, depending on the agency and the production value, the idea is that the majority of the expense would pay for the media.

In the new world of social media, that 80% is either substantially lower or gone completely. It’s obvious how advantageous this can be for smart marketers, but the challenge of creating a campaign using social media that draws interest and interaction takes a whole new level of brain power and creativity, a skill that a lot of agencies today don’t have, be they digital or traditional. Brain power and creativity that can succeed in taking a non-intrusive form of communication and make the right people want to view it, hear it and get involved with it is the greatest challenge in this new day. And that has a few Clio award-winning creatives asking for early retirement.

Although this post is not meant to be a self-promotion for Brandtailers, it is interesting to understand why we have more easily adapted and succeeded in this new world.  Over our twenty plus years in business we’ve had more clients with small budgets than not. We’ve rarely had the luxury of letting the media weight do the job. For us, it’s always been the need to flex our creative idea muscles to help make something come alive and work without a lot of media support. It’s kind of like we’ve been training for the Olympics for a long time and it’s finally here.

But back to the purpose of this post: Let’s all help each other understand the new opportunities as well as the realities of what is truly needed in today’s marketing. Big media budgets may still be around for the recovering 10% of advertisers, but the other 90% is demanding success without major media dollars. Is it possible? We think so. We’ve been doing it for a long time. Our mantra has always been, “It’s the idea, stupid.” Feel free to use it.

I’ve never understood this strategy. According to sales reports, neither have most consumers. I think this is just one great example of incomplete thinking in the marketing process. Could a funny industry-degrading ad get attention? You bet. Could it win creative awards? Of course (that’s just a question of money). But does it really change the opinion of the consumer when the “alternative” solution is presented? RARELY.

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Photo by Jordan Small

I had the most fascinating meeting yesterday. It was with four men in the auto industry. One of them, an existing client, is more savvy than the other three. The other three were what I would have considered typical dinosaurs in the business. I know this because I had met with the same three men a year earlier. At the time I shared our agency’s belief that traditional advertising was becoming more and more ineffective, and that the poor quality of creative messages being delivered by most of the auto industry were only making things worse.

I made suggestions to move them toward more trust-based communications with car buyers, and noted that putting a little respect back into the selling process wouldn’t be a bad idea either. But my message fell on deaf ears. It was obvious to them that I didn’t know what I was talking about. They said this economic crisis was just causing a temporary hiccup in the automotive world. Things would get better, as they always did.

That was a year ago.

Fast forward 12 months, one humongous recession, a national Cash for Clunkers campaign, and a few million less car sales. I was invited back to “re-address” the situation. This time they listened, better yet, embraced what they heard. With God as my witness, I said the exact same things I had before. The only difference was a little more focus on TRUST. I referred to Chris Brogan and Julien Smith‘s book, Trust Agents, and walked them through how changes in media, marketing and creative will only succeed in today’s world if they have this foundation of truth, transparency and trust. They ate it up.

What’s the takeaway here? Some dinosaurs can evolve without becoming extinct. Make TRUST the goal of every marketing program and you might speed up the evolution process.