By Tracey E. Schelmetic
Dealer websites can be a rather hit-and-miss affair for consumers. Some dealers are attentive to their websites and spend time ensuring they’re functional, updated and customer focused. Other dealer websites suffer from a lack of attention and care. Traditionally, dealers were left to their own devices for the design and maintenance of their website, which is why they became a patchwork of mixed quality. Few dealerships are focusing their efforts on optimizing their web sites for mobile search and voice search, which is increasingly how customers are looking for information.
GM has some new ideas for ensuring its dealer network is prepared to sell in 2019. The company recently engaged automotive digital marketing solutions provider Dealer Inspire, which is owned by Cars.com, to be the website provider for GM’s more than 4,000 U.S.-based Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac dealerships.
The Dealer Inspire platform is built to be customizable, allowing dealership teams to build and update professional quality web pages with no coding experience or complex toolkits necessary. It allows dealers to more easily include shopper personalization that adapts messaging, offers and even appearance of pages to individual users’ shopping intent, history, and current geo-location to increase the chances of closing a sale. Searches are instant across all devices, according to Dealer Inspire, displaying more relevant results in milliseconds with each letter typed or word spoken through voice search. Shoppers can also instantly search by their desired payment, features, and more to quickly make buying decisions online.
Finally, so dealers can better measure their successes (or misses), the DI platform includes a robust set of reporting tools to make it easier to measure return on investment (ROI) on a website and marketing performance.
“Dealer Inspire supports a best-in-class dealer-to-employee ratio to ensure industry-leading service, achieving an average dealer satisfaction score of 9.5 out of 10 in 2019,” according to the company in a statement. “A dedicated team of performance managers partner with dealers to continually increase results through marketing strategy, execution, and transparent reporting.”
