Do you often ask yourself, ‘How can I drive more high-intent customers into my dealership?’ Well, considering that 90% of car sales start with online, we reckon that’s a pretty good place to start.
For brick & mortar dealerships, delivering an incredible online experience enables your customer’s to explore your inventory at their own pace and gain confidence in your business. This means that by the time they physically enter your store, they’re well on their way to making a purchase.
But how can you tailor your online presence to ensure you’re delivering an incredible digital experience? If you missed our recent presentation at the Automotive Marketing Event in Rotterdam, our Head of Sales Europe, Amaury Gavaudan, identified three digital techniques that will help engage your audience, build trust and amplify your automotive sales.
Technique #1: Optimised website
Your website is basically your physical showroom, just online. How your cars are displayed and how easy it is to navigate your inventory will make or break the customer’s experience. If the experience feels jarring and too difficult to find what they’re looking for, you may just see them (virtually) walking out the door.
Site performance is a must for a quality experience. Fast loading speeds, sensical page setups, working links and, of course, high-quality imagery on every vehicle, is crucial.
Just like you would deliver an impressive experience to customers who visit your physical showroom - vehicles polished to perfection, attentive and knowledgeable salesmen - the same sort of experience is expected in your digital showroom (aka your website).
Technique #2: Impeccable imagery
When researching a used car online, it’s important for consumers to get an accurate view of the vehicle's reality: are there any bumps and scratches? What is the tire tread like? How worn is the interior? All fair questions when buying a used car. The best way to communicate these specificities is through imagery.
In order to understand what impeccable automotive imagery looks like, we need to first identify what an SPR without impeccable imagery looks like. Picture this: inconsistent photography angles, pixelated or low resolution images, missing images, images with the vehicle half-cropped out… to deliver consumer’s an enjoyable digital experience, this is exactly what we want to avoid.
Impeccable automotive imagery, on the other hand, is easy to identify: consistently cropped, angled and sized to perfection, in high resolution, with perfect lighting and beautiful backgrounds.
AI-powered solutions, like CarCutter, exist to help you easily achieve this level of image quality. With the literal click of a button, you can transform photos taken on your lot, in the snow, in front of the dumpster into professional, sophisticated, hyper-realistic 3D showrooms aka impeccable imagery.
Technique #3: Strong & consistent branding
Sure, impeccable imagery is great. But impeccably branded imagery is even better. Imagery with strong & consistent branding elements - such as logo overlays, CTAs, licence plate inlays, and even branded backgrounds - will have a bigger impact on your business, generating stronger brand recall and higher brand awareness.
This becomes even more important when you think about how customers shop online. It’s not uncommon for customers to be exposed to your products from a variety of digital placements - from your website to third-party listings, social media, display ads, retargeting ads and Google VLAs - all before they physically enter your store.
This is called a cross-channel digital merchandising strategy and it’s important that at every touchpoint, your business is being effectively represented. This ensures that, not only are you achieving brand consistency, but you’re showing off your brand in an elevated, sophisticated way.
When advertising used-cars online, high-quality, branded imagery plays a huge role in the wider digital experience. From showcasing your inventory in the best light, to building trust by representing vehicles accurately, dents and all, dealerships shouldn’t underestimate the value of investing in an image enhancement solution. If you want to discover the power of CarCutter and its impact on your vehicle inventory photography processes, visit www.carcutter.com.
