3 Easy Ways to Increase Your Customer Traffic

For most dealerships, attracting customers is the biggest barrier to success. The traditional customer-acquisition process is frustrating for dealers and hard on prospects and consumers. When you market your dealership using traditional lead-generation and customer-attraction methods, your job becomes a seemingly endless task of chasing down leads, making countless calls, pushing for appointments, and forcing outcomes. Phew! That's a lot of wasted hustle.

Long story short — you end up burned out, with a reputation for being a product pusher, running a business that is stressful for you and your customers. There is an alternative, though. Here are three basic tweaks you can make to market smarter and start attracting more customer traffic today.

1. What’s Your Reason?

Stop talking about your inventory, and start talking about the specific reasons a customer should choose you over your competitors. Declare to the world, “I am the obvious choice! You’d be crazy to buy a vehicle from anyone else!” Highlight the powerful benefits that come with purchasing a vehicle at your dealership.

What problems can you help your customers solve that your competition can’t or won’t? What unique experience comes along with buying a car from you? What do you have that no one else does? Hint — it’s not customer service or how long you’ve been in business. Tell the people exactly how and why you will make their lives much better, and back it up by delivering what you promised.

2. Create an Irresistible Offer

While all of your competitors are screaming about prices or payments, service or selection, you must create a truly compelling, irresistible offer. Focus on the value-added services your store provides. Tell about a unique warranty or satisfaction guarantee you offer. Explain the maintenance package that comes with a car from your dealership.

Do you give free car washes to your customers on Thursdays? This is not about pulling silly marketing stunts like putting pink gorillas on your roof or featuring talking dogs in your commercials. This is about offering truly unique and valuable experiences and benefits to your customers, which effectively removes you from the commodity-pricing game.

3. Stop Competing on Price

Most dealership marketing features price-related offers such as discounts, low payments, rebates, or special incentives. Unfortunately, price-related offers do little in the way of attracting customers. That’s because when you’re competing on price, there can only be one dealership with the lowest price.

If you can’t be that dealership, then you won’t attract these price-shopping customers. And do you really want to be the dealership with the lowest price, tumbling down the low-price slide at full tilt until you hit the bottom with a zero profit margin? The No Low Price method is the answer to this chilling scenario.

The No Low Price method requires using offers that address specific problems customers have, and presenting solutions to them. Dealers have found that switching from a price-related offer to a solutions-related offer in their current advertising will yield a noticeable result.

The conclusion is that price is not the only competitive advantage available to dealers now. All indications point to the No Low Price method as a powerful tool available to dealers for years to come, which can help dealerships stop fighting with other dealers over the same few customers.

Ultimately, the problem that most car dealers encounter is that they all advertise the same way. If your advertising looks the same, people assume that everything else you do is the same too. If you don’t give customers a compelling reason to choose you or provide unique offers that resonate with and motivate them, you give them no choice but to choose a dealership based on price. Be more than that, and you’ll get more for it. So if you’re not like the stereotypical car dealer, stop advertising like one. Same is lame. Tell the world how you are different.

Jimmy Vee and Travis Miller are the founders of Rich Dealers^®, the nation’s leading experts on attracting customers, and the authors of Gravitational Marketing. Visit www.TrafficScale.com to request a complimentary Traffic Scale Report, which compares the quality of your traffic to other dealerships in your area and helps determine whether or not there's potential business you're missing out on. Use coupon code DMM1506.