Posts Tagged ‘website development’
The auto dealer industry is extremely competitive, making it difficult to stand out.
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
Imagine that you’re moving your company to a new office space. You have the opportunity to let it say everything about you that you want your customers, business associates, and vendors to know. You spend time with an expert contractor coordinating improvements. You work on room designs with a space planning specialist. You use your IT guru to ensure your computers, phones, etc. will operate effortlessly. You do this because when it’s finished you’ll have work space that not only helps your company’s productivity, but also defines your brand for every visitor to see.
Now, replace this office space design process with your website development process. These days, there’s not much difference. You’re just replacing tangible brick and mortar with virtual space. But if you consider which of these walls and roofs more people visit, you’ve figured out the true value of your website.
So back up for a moment and ask yourself, “How much am I willing to pay for experts who know how to turn a cookie-cutter office space into my company’s brand?” Chances are good you’re willing to pay more than a few dollars. So, why, when your website is your opportunity to show your unique brand, would you settle for one that has nothing unique?
Interesting paradox, huh? Websites are much less expensive to build than they were just a few short years ago, but if you want to make yours stand out, to represent your brand and do a big part your selling for you, you’re going to have to pay for some real experts. Not just programmers who know html, php and css, but designers and brand strategists who know how to represent your best assets online. And writers who know how to take the hundreds of keywords necessary to help your site show up well in search results, and incorporate them into enticing content that flows seamlessly.
Websites like this are not just necessary for e-commerce businesses, they’re imperative for any business that wants to take advantage of the wonderful benefits the web has to offer your brand. It’s a new way of thinking, isn’t it?
Poor WordPress. 
It’s spent the last few years trying so hard to be understood. It started out as a blogger’s website format, but then people like Matt Cutts from Google embraced it and told the world how it could be so much more than just a blogging platform. It quickly became the Google-Darling, offering high search results. And yet, when you mention it to classic web developers they would laugh it off as a baby’s tool.
Who’s laughing now? Certainly not WordPress. But lets back up for a second.
Like it or not, your website will be judged by end-users on how it looks and works. The best content in the world cannot make up for an amateurish, cluttered, or garish site design. You’ve almost certainly visited poorly designed websites. Maybe they have lots of flashing text in colors that are hard to read, or maybe they are so cluttered you can’t find anything. Good website themes need a harmonious combination of graphics, text, and “free space” so that the eye is naturally drawn to your content. A good website theme is visually attractive, yet not distracting. It should reflect your tastes without overpowering the content. That’s what WordPress can offer.
But why does Google like WordPress so much when it comes to search?
Because of its origin. It was built for bloggers who wanted to freely share their thoughts and ideas in the online world. It was built for people who wanted to regularly offer up relevant, fresh information. Google search engines want to find the freshest most relevant information online today, so the format of WordPress is a natural for Google.
And the open-source format of WordPress has allowed thousands of developers to improve the product even more via plug-ins and enhancements that have taken the initial blogger’s site concept to new heights. Best of all, through these enhancements, the timely and relevant information that search engines love are even more findable on WordPress sites. (Check out our site to see what we mean)
We believe this will be the year when WordPress makes sense as a strong format for most small, many medium, and even a few mega-businesses. As long as the developers continue to embrace it and contribute to its usability, it will continue to become the modern-day website format of the decade.
Sounds like a crazy question until you look at the way Facebook, YouTube, Flicker and simple templated blogs can easily duplicate a website’s content these days. Besides, websites can be frustrating to maintain, challenging to keep current, and expensive to upgrade, right? Plus, with more people using Twitter and Facebook as search engines, who needs to pull up first in Google anymore? Remember the announcement a few months ago that Facebook surpassed Google in weekly internet traffic? Makes you think you might not need a website as much as you used to.
Wrong.
There’s no question that a company’s website is still it’s most powerful marketing tool. You own it, you control 100% of it’s content, you manage its destiny. Your Facebook page? Well, ask Mr. Zuckerberg what he’s thinking of next and that’s what your Facebook page will look, feel and behave like next month. Your YouTube channel? Have you ever gotten into its content management system? Nope. And it’s the same with most of the other marketing tools we mentioned. Today you need a great website more than ever.
In fact, there is even more opportunity for today’s corporate websites to drive business straight to your doorstep. But you still have to start by focusing on your brand. Forrester Research says 67% of today’s customers create their initial opinion of a company via their corporate website. This is the classic branding part of marketing, where you build trust with your consumer. But a well-designed website can also take your potential customer into the actual sales process at the right place and right time. A website that’s been designed to offer both a brand and retail message has proven to be stickier, with more time spent browsing through pages, clicking additional links and converting to leads or online sales. Look at Home Depot, Wahoos Fish Taco and Morgan Stanley for a few good examples. They have places within their sites where their call-to-action request is not only appropriate, but expected.
So then, what do you do with your other marketing tools like Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and Flickr? Simple. Use them to create conversations. Get people (aka customers and potential customers) talking to you, about you, and for you. Sure, you can include calls-to-action when appropriate. But mix them up. Remember, people don’t want to be sold – but they love to buy from companies they trust. Build your website with this in mind and you’ll be on the right path to online marketing success.
