What’s in your dealership’s inventory today? Chances are you are short on new cars, but perhaps you played your cards right and you have a hefty used inventory that’s helping you get through this supply chain shortage. Are you properly leveraging your used inventory though? Are you still trying to sell certified pre-owned vehicles, and if so, are you selling enough? Perhaps it’s time you get your certified pre-owned inventory to work for you with some expertly written and placed content.
Why Aren’t You Selling Certified Pre-Owned Now?
Have you been ignoring the certified pre-owned side of your dealership? Maybe selling certified pre-owned just hasn’t worked in the past. People don’t come to you for certified pre-owned, and it just wasn’t worth the time investment to certify those cars when they could just be getting sold. It’s easy to fall into the mindset that this certified pre-owned problem is even more true since COVID than it was before, but therein lies the rub. People are looking for new cars, and more often than not, they are not always going to find what they are looking for. What’s the next best thing? A certified pre-owned vehicle.
It’s a seller’s market right now though, you might argue. You can sell anything you get your hands on, why invest the time in certified pre-owned? The supply chain shortage isn’t going to last forever, and once it ends the dealerships that neglected their customer base are in for a reckoning. When it becomes a buyer’s market again, you can be sure customers, maybe even the pens you sold cars to during the shortage, might drive the extra mile to avoid your dealership.
A certified pre-owned vehicle can provide a better ownership experience, and a better ownership experience reflects not just on the brand, but on the dealership, it came from. Don’t just give your customers a great car-buying experience, give them a great car-owning experience.
How To Get More Used Inventory at Your Dealership
A Need For Certified Pre-Owned Education
You know your certified pre-owned programs backward and forward, but the average customer doesn’t. Many that are used to buying new, or even those that are used to buying used, simply don’t know about the warranty protection and peace of mind that a certified pre-owned vehicle can provide.
The OEMs honestly don’t do a good job of educating your customers about their certified pre-owned programs. In other words, it falls on you to provide that education. Yes, that means having sales personnel that are knowledgeable of the program and ready to get people to buy into it, but it also means putting your marketing to work in educating your customers before they ever talk to a salesperson. When they already know the benefits, they will have an easier time understanding where the price comes from.
How to Build a Marketing Strategy Around Certified Pre-Owned
So you need a marketing strategy and content for the certified pre-owned side of your business. Posting on social, running paid search and display ads, and even a press release strategy is all well and good, but they won’t get you anywhere if you don’t have a firm content strategy on your website. That’s going to begin with landing pages and blogs.
Certified Pre-Owned Landing Pages
A landing page is a wonderful way to build awareness of your certified pre-owned programs. It can generate traffic from your local area, but organic traffic may not be where this particular page shines. A good and engaging landing page that outlines not only how your certified pre-owned program works, but also why your customers should be interested in the program can be a perfect resource to direct people to from other pages such as used pages and even blog pages.
In short, building a certified pre-owned landing page is not going to be enough. Instead, it should be considered a step on the car-buying journey for your customers. It’s an important step, but you also need to build the other steps. Even linking new model pages to your certified pre-owned page is a good idea, especially in cases where the current market means you won’t always have that model in stock to sell anyway. Don’t waste that traffic. Instead, try to send that traffic elsewhere where it might still generate a lead or at the very least build awareness of your other offerings.
Certified Pre-Owned Blogs
Using blogs to market your certified pre-owned program is a great way to build awareness. You can answer questions that people might be having about certified pre-owned, and you can employ a similar strategy to our landing page strategy example. Writing a blog for your service center? Why not plug your certified pre-owned inventory and link a landing page while you’re there?
Blogs are big traffic generators, and not only can they directly lead traffic to your other pages, but they can also do so indirectly with a little thing called link juice. You’ve heard it said that a rising tide lifts all boats, the same is true for a stellar blog, and the pages that benefit the most are the ones that it’s linked to with that link juice. Don’t take this moment to get clever and link everything to everything with a hundred links on every post. That’s called link stuffing, and it will ensure that your posts never rank. Instead, you want sensible and thoughtful links that build back to the content that is most important to your current strategy.
Read More: Top Blogging Tips for Car Dealers
The Importance of Language
Do you generally say certified pre-owned or CPO? We know you say CPO. All car dealers do. It’s easier and everyone knows what you are talking about. Everyone except your customers. This is why the language in your content and even the language your salespeople use is important. Don’t confuse your customers by shortening it to CPO. Use the language your customers expect.
Part of marketing is meeting a customer where they are. Where they are might not be considering a certified pre-owned vehicle yet. If what they want is a new vehicle then your sales process should adapt to that. A certified pre-owned car can be the next best thing, and for some OEMs, the warranty protections are even better than what’s provided on a new vehicle. Push that narrative on both your sales floor and in your marketing,. Don’t forget that the certified pre-owned customer of today, may not be the same certified pre-owned customer form 2 years ago.
In the past, your certified pre-owned option occupied that middle ground. Perfect for the new car buyer who finds their budget doesn’t stretch as far as they wanted it to and perfect for that higher budget used car buyer that isn’t quite ready to consider buying new. Now the narrative is different.
How Phantom Builds a Certified Pre-Owned Content Strategy
Want to know how Phantom Copy builds a strategy to help you get more certified pre-owned sales? We just outlined our whole process above. It’s a lot of work, isn’t it? It can also be a lot of work to accomplish only to have it fail due to poor execution. Why not let us do it for you? Yes, we have a marketplace where you can buy pre-written content, but we can also build a recurring custom content package for you. Is it time to try something new? A new direction for your marketing and your content? Trust in Phantom to get that done.