Used Car Dealers

Recently while making my sales calls i have had the chance to talk to many owners of used car lots and general managers of new car dealerships and they all have the same thing to say. Business has been picking up for them, they are pretty happy with the way there sales are rebounding but they are having trouble moving new cars. Fortunatly for them and there sales staffs they are moving a lot of used cars. Check out all of our dealer supplies at www.promoteyourdealership.com

Promote is now faster

For your shopping convienience we have moved our site www.promoteyourdealership.com to a new server which will allow the pages on our site to load much quicker. Hope you enjoy the upgrade.

Installation season

I personally had the chance to get out in the ole bucket truck yesterday and hang some streamers and flags, and i got to tell you i loved ever minute of it. There is just something really special about going to a car lot with weathered flags that looks like a run down dealership, then when my job is finished it looks like a brand new dealership. We started installing at 7:30am and didn't return back to our office until 9:30pm, it was a long day but a very satisfying one. If you are interested in seeing our auto dealer supplies visit our website at www.promoteyourdealership.com .

Auto dealer supplies

Spring is the time to spruce up your dealership. Visit us at www.promoteyourdealership.com to find promotional items like balloons, window stickers, banners, streamers, and much more.

Auto Dealer Supplies

Visit www.promoteyourdealership.com for great deals on auto dealer supplies. Right now we have 60' streamers , and custom banners on sale. Leave a response to this post and I will send you a 5% off coupon for your next order of auto dealer supplies

Ford

I was watching the news and heard that Ford is considering selling Volvo to the Chinese. What does everybody think, is this a good or bad decision by Ford?

Spring Time

Spring can't come soon enough, it has been a miserable winter here in Pittsburgh. I don't think i can remember a colder winter. It appears spring is here now though it has been in the mid 50's all week long. Hopefully the warm weather will get people out to do some car shopping. Don't forget now is the time to spruce up your lot with auto dealer supplies from www.promoteyourdealership.com

Auto Dealer Supplies

Take a walk out in your car lot and try to view it from a customers view. Are your cars clearly labeled, are you streamers in flags in good shape, are the bathrooms clean in your showroom? These are a few of the things that can set you apart from your competition. When you are at the same lot everyday its easy for you to overlook or not even notice things like, poorly labeled cars, a dirty showroom, or tattered flags but trust me your customers notice all of these things and will have much more confidence in buying a car from a company that takes pride in the way there business looks. If you notice you need new flags, banners, adhesive stickers, or any other auto dealer supplies visit our retail store at www.promoteyourdealership.com and we will make sure your dealership always looks good.

What Time Of Year To Decorate

I was just talking to my boss about what time of year we sell our most auto dealer supplies, and i was suprised to see the results were June, October, and January. Does anybody reading this know why these are our best sales months? If you leave a comment about this post saying where you are from and what time of year you purchase most of your auto dealer supplies, and why you do it at that time of year i will send you a 10% off coupon for your next purchase at www.promoteyourdealership.com

New vs Used Car Sales

Yesterday i stopped to see the general manager of one of our local auto dealers here in Pittsburgh that carries Caddilac, Buick, and Pontiac. I was making a sales call to him seeing if he wanted us to come out and replace the streamers and flags he had bought from us last year. Once we finalized what he needed me to supply him with i asked him how are sales going this year. His answer suprised me when he said they have been very good through January and Febuary, he did mention they were not moving many new cars but selling a ton of used ones. From what i have been reading in the papers and seeing on the news i was suprised to hear he was selling any cars at all. I am glad that our local dealers seem to be doing better than the media would Lead us to believe. How about the dealers reading this around the country, how are your sales, and are you moving mostly new or used cars? Please leave a comment and let us know.

How to get your site found

so you have a website that is great, it has all the information any customer could want and is easily navigated but nobody is visiting it, why is this happening? Well this is a problem that many websites have, usually the answer is your site is very hard to find. A good way to test how easily found your site is, is to go to google and type in a keyword that you believe somebody would type in to find your site (example: Chevy Silverato Pittsburgh) if you type a couple different sets of keywords like the example above in and your site does not show up on the first page of google searches for any of them you have found your problem, customers are unable to find your site. So how do you fix this? Well there are many ways to help the way your site ranks with search engines like google. The quickest and easiest way to get your site found is to use google adwords, adwords allows you to pay google to get your keywords to the top of the search page in return you pay them for each click that comes from your key words . The other ways to help move your site up the google rankings are free but very time consuming. Search engines take a combination of your sites content, backlinks going to your site, traffic on your site, how often your content is changed, and your title bar into determining your ranking among search engines. I will disguss more in my next post how to improve all the above mentioned things

Your Website

As i discussed in the last post more and more consumers are going online to get information and prices on cars. So what does this mean for auto dealers, well it means you need to have a strong online presence so potential customers can find your site. In my opinion there are 3 major objectives to using your website as a selling tool. Number one consumers need to be able to find your site, number 2 your site needs to be user friendly, and number 3 your site needs to have good content. All three of these objectives are equally important and should not be over looked. Think about it you could have the most customer friendly site in the world with all the content anybody could want to read but if potential customers cant find your website it does you no good. On the same token you can have a site that's easy to find and has great content but if it is to hard for potential customers to navigate they will leave your site frustrated and search for a car somewhere else.

In the rest of this post we will discuss how to make objective number 2 and 3 strong points of your site, objective number 1 is a long process and will be the entire body of my next post. Lets start with making your site user friendly. The first thing you need to do is define your target market, who are you selling cars t0? If you are selling Cadillac your age group of buyers is probably around ages 40 and up, if your selling Mitsubishi your age group of buyers may be from ages 16-35. Why is it important to define the age group of people using your site to make decisions in making your website user friendly you may ask. Well the reason is younger people tend to be more computer savvy than older people, so if you are expecting mostly people ages 16 - 35 to be visiting your site you will be able to add more features to the navigation than you would be able to if you were expecting people 40 and older to be using your site. When catering to an older audience try to avoid using features like drop down menus where consumers will have to know to open something up to see all there options. Do your best to give the consumers as much information on a page without making it cluttered so that consumers don,t have to click through a lot of pages. And where there are links to other pages of your website, make it very clear that's where they need to click to continue.

Once you have your navigation is set up and your site is running you need to get a group of people together to test your site that had no part in building it, grab a couple of guys from your service department, a couple of sales people, and some potential customers if possible and ask them to find certain information on your site. It doesn't matter what you ask them to find pick a few products or certain information about a car. Then watch them try to find it, if they can easily find the information then your navigation is user friendly, if you notice people are unable to quickly find the information you asked them to find your navigation may need some work. There is also a great piece of software out there that is easy to install on your website and is affordable that allows you to monitor and interact with people on you site. Monitoring people on your site is priceless for seeing where there are problems with your navigation, when you notice multiple customers getting to a certain page and then leaving you can assume that they are not finding what they are looking for and that is what is causing them to leave. The software i mentioned is called chat and you can get it at www.liveperson.net it costs $99.00 a month. We will discuss this software more when we discuss your sites content.

How do you make sure your site has good content? Content is something that will always be changing on your site as you add new products, or your running some sort of promotions. Your website should be used as a selling tool you want to have any promotions, sales, or programs you are offering listed and explained on your home page, this should be information that separates you from your competition. Also on your home page you should have a mission statement of what your dealership stands for. Your home page will be the page that changes the most and is your most important page because most visitors to your site will start on that page. As far as content for the rest of your site it is important that you have as much information about your products listed as possible. People search websites to find all the details and features of a product before they buy so you need to make sure you have all the details regarding you products listed and make sure to explain why all the features of your products are valuable. Some of the most important content your page needs to have is ways to contact your dealership, your phone number and email address should be prominently displayed and once again i would advise everybody to add a live chat feature to there site. Having live chat allows customers to immediately ask someone at your company questions without ever leaving there computer or your website. The live chat feature will stop many customers from leaving your website when they struggle to find information, instead of leaving they ask the sales person manning your live chat and often times those conversations turn into sales. Also if you notice customers using your live chat asking you the same questions its a sign that whatever they are asking is something that needs to be added to your content. Please leave comments on other ways auto dealers can make there websites more productive.

Online Marketing in a Slow Economy

As the economy continues to tighten consumers are getting more and more nervous about buying big ticket items such as cars. Consumers are doing more research on cars, and checking alternative places online to buy cars at discount prices such as e-bay. So how can dealers capatalize on the fact that consumers are getting more thrifty. Well first of all more and more dealers are and should be selling cars on e-bay. E-bay is a great place for dealers to sell used cars that are unique such as trucks that have been lifted, sports cars that have been tricked out, and specialty work trucks. Putting these types of vehicles online allows you to expose them to a lot of people searching the internet for that specific type of car, where if you just leave them on your lot the market for those specialty vehicles is very limited. Dealers should also look into listing there new and used cars on sites like www.cars.com. The more of these types of sites you can get your inventory listed on the better, especially if you feel you have really good prices compared to your competition. Having your inventory on these sites allows potential customers to compare your prices to other local dealers. And even if you dont have the best price potential customers will normally call at least a couple of the dealers that are listing the type of car they are interested in to see which dealer is willing to give them the best deal once you have them on the phone you get the chance to give them your best sales pitch. Tommorrow I will discuss the importance of your dealerships web site.

Chevrolet Marketing Campaign

I have been noticing the Chevrolet commercials on TV for about a month where Howie Long and other Chevrolet spokes persons go directly after the competitions products rather than spending time showing off there own. In the truck commercials Howie Long attacks the features on the competitors trucks such as Fords man step, Toyotas poor gas mileage, and Dodges heated steering wheel, basically calling the competitions trucks unmanly. I only bring this up because i was at a party this weekend and one of the people there was talking about these commercials and saying how they thougth Chevrolet should be ashamed of themselves for putting these commercials on the air. I am curious what do all the auto dealers reading this bog think, is Chevrolets marketing tactic a good one, or is it going to backfire on them.

Please visit our retail store for great deals on auto dealer supplies www.promoteyourdealership.com

Streamers vs pennants

I am often asked by auto dealers what products they should buy to be installed in a windy area. There are two products i would highly recommend they are crazy flags, and streamers. We install these products in western PA and have been very satisfied with the results. Crazy flags are nice because they are designed to rotate 360 degrees in the wind so instead of tearing in the wind they rotate with it. Streamers are colorful and make your dealership very attractive to passing traffic. Streamers are one of our most popular products they can be found under the sku# AS0006M at our website www.promoteyourdealership.com . From experience with replacing streamers in our local area i can tell you that dealers usually get between 6 months to two years out of there streamers.

Why streamers rather than pennants is a question i get a lot. Well it really depends on what you are using them for. Pennants are great for sales or short term promotions, they are colorful and cost less then streamers but are not designed to be used for more than a month after this they will fall apart quickly. If you want a product you can install that will look good for a year you want to go with streamers.

GM and Chrysler

GM and Chrysler are urging there dealers to buy more cars even though there lots are full right now and they are having trouble moving the inventory they have. They are pushing the dealers to take these cars because they can recognize them as revenue as soon as they leave the plant, it does not matter to the manufacturer's revenue if the car actually lands up being bought by an end consumer or not. The manufacturers are pushing there dealers so hard to buy right now because they only have to march 31 to prove to the government they can be viable companies. If they fail to do this they may be forced to pay back the billions of dollars in bail out money they received late in 2008. If this happens GM and Chrysler will almost certainly be forced into bankruptcy.
so what are the auto dealers around the country suppose to do, do you risk your dealerships financial well being by bringing in additional inventory that is moving very slowly to help out the manufacturer. Or do you continue to order cars as you need them and risk the manufacturer going out of business. These are questions i pose to you readers of my blog.

Welcome to the official blog of Promote Your Dealership

Hi Everybody,

I run an e-commerce store that sells promotional products to auto dealers around the country ( check the store out at www.promoteyourdealership.com ). Over the years i have taken many phone calls about the products we sell and the conversation always seems to turn to the state of the economy and the state of the auto industry. this blog will be dedicated to discussing the state of the auto industry and will also contain coupon codes and product reviews of the products sold on our website.