Car dealerships can see quite a few ups and downs with their foot traffic. That could have a domino effect on their sales. If you’ve found yourself in this position, you could find that the less active periods aren’t enough to keep you profitable.
That could be despite how profitable some of your more sales-friendly periods are. You can get around this in multiple ways. Growing your car dealership could be one of the more recommended.
Doing so should make sure that, even during periods of lower turnover, your dealership stays profitable. You mightn’t know how to grow your car dealership, however. The methods you’ve tried so far mightn’t have been as successful as you’d like.
While patience and persistence will be vital to this, you could take advantage of a few particular strategies. They should help you grow your car dealership which will, in turn, impact your overall turnover.
If you’re ready to expand, then it’s time to consider a few specific strategies.
How To Grow Your Car Dealership
Know Your Buyers
If you want to grow your car dealership, the first thing you’ll need to do is understand who typically buys from it. You’ll often find that you’ll have a core demographic that comes in. While there’ll be exceptions to this, these will be your primary buyers.
You’ll need to know how to advertise to them and bring them into your dealership. Part of that involves knowing your market. That encompasses the number of potential buyers near you, your competition, and much more.
If you don’t know this, then you’ll need to start researching. You’ll often find that there’ll be potential roadblocks and hurdles to growing or expanding your dealership. Knowing the market can help you avoid this.
Once you know this, you’ll need to get more specific about your buyer personas. You can tell much of this based on the people who come into your dealership and speak with you. Are they typically parents? White-collar?
Knowing the answers to these can heavily affect your efforts and business operations. Without this, you might not be able to make key business decisions going forward.
Prioritize Customer Loyalty
A lot of effort goes into persuading a customer to come to your car dealership. It takes even more to sell to them. Once you get the sale, however, it can be more than worth it. That shouldn’t mean that your work stops there.
Instead, you should capitalize on the work you’ve put in. You should keep these customers engaged with your company. There are multiple benefits to this. The largest of these is that it’ll keep your dealership in their mind anytime they need anything automotive-related.
That’ll increase the revenue that you earn per customer. As a result, the time and effort you put into originally earning their custom will reap further rewards. You might expect that this will take a lot of effort.
It shouldn’t, as this could be rather minimal. You can do this in various ways, such as:
- Handing out Harley Do It Yourself shop manuals or similar manufacturer books with each purchase. These could increase goodwill with customers and improve your reputation with them.
- Signing them up for newsletters, which you can then use to keep them up-to-date with your sales and offers.
- Giving them coupons or vouchers will encourage them to come back and use these for discounts.
You can take advantage of multiple other ways to engage with and encourage customers to come back. These will increase customer loyalty quite significantly.
Take Advantage Of Marketing
Every company should know the importance of marketing. Your car dealership is no different. If people don’t know about your business and what it’s selling, then you shouldn’t expect to sell much. You can advertise your dealership in quite a few ways.
Much of this will depend on your buyer personas, among other things. That’s what makes market research vital to your business. Once you have this, you can determine what marketing strategies are most likely to help to grow your car dealership.
If most potential customers congregate on Facebook, for example, then marketing on LinkedIn mightn’t be recommended. The same can be said for offline and more traditional advertising techniques.
Having billboards and similar ads located near your car dealership can boost sales quite significantly. You should also look into local search engine optimization. Implementing this will increase your search rankings for phrases related to your dealership.
When potential customers are looking to buy a new car, you’ll want to be the first dealership that comes up online. Failing to invest in this could mean losing a significant amount of revenue. That could make proper advertising one of the first things you look at when figuring out how to grow your car dealership.
Look After Customers
Once you have a potential customer, you’ll want to make sure that they buy from you. That doesn’t mean putting a hard sell on, however. Instead, you’ll want to make sure that they have as positive an experience as possible.
Doing so will not only make them more likely to buy from you but will also encourage customer loyalty. People prefer the companies that treat them well. As obvious as this is, many dealerships overlook it.
Avoid this by looking after your customers.
How To Grow Your Car Dealership: Wrapping Up
Once you know how to grow your car dealership, you shouldn’t have a problem expanding and increasing your turnover. You’ll need to make sure that you do so in a sustainable way. While that could involve adapting strategies to your particular needs, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Before you start with these, it’s worth having goals with your expansion efforts. Increasing revenue might be a bit vague. Instead, choosing something like ‘increasing sales by 10% in six months could be a more appropriate goal.
Though these may seem similar, one is much more actionable and easier to measure your activities again. Combining that with the above will help you grow your car dealership. While you’ll need to spend time on this, alongside some money, that investment will reap multiple rewards.
