I would like to sell a few more cars locally. There’s a benefit in this, as you would like to think that as time passed, repeat and referral business would be easier to service and it would be nice to be building a reputation in the local area, where perhaps sometime in the future I might have more than just an industrial unit to sell cars from. There’s a snag though. Local advertising is a waste of money.
I am now into a second run of local advertising. I put the failure of the first run, circa £1200 spend – two enquiries,one test drive and one sale (actually a number of weeks after the run ended, so I can only assume it was used as a filler advert) down to the fact that local people have an adversity to dealing with someone who advertised with a mobile phone number and no premises address. This doesn’t seem to affect Autotrader enquirers, but there you go. So, with some new enthusiasm and some different ‘local’ cars to advertise three weeks ago I began a new run of ads. Landline number, business address and website. Even a ‘Car Of The Week’ hero car at the top of the advert. The result so far… Ziltch, Nada, Zero, Sweet Football Association. I’m prompted to post on the blog as they are now chasing me for a cheque.
If I were to use the same amount of budget on the Autotrader Online adverts I upload, I would be able to advertise fifteen cars for two weeks each. I know from analysis that this would generate a significant number of enquiries and definitely result in test drives and sales. If I spent the money on Ebay, I’d be able to advertise twenty cars for two weeks. Soon that will be (evidently) one hundred cars for a £150 spend per week. You can see how much more cost efficient Autotrader and Ebay are to local advertising in newspapers. Add in that I even get e-mails and calls via the website on cars that haven’t been advertised and local newspapers are even less effective per £1.
So, do you think that they are doing anything to alleviate this problem and come up with something competitive to keep the business?Er, no. Why’s that? I have a feeling it’s because unlike myself and a minority who analyse it, larger dealer managers just place the full page ads every week and therefore keep a nice revenue heading towards the newspapers. By right, newspaper advertising should be a fraction of what it costs now, and I’d lay odds on 90% of car dealers don’t monitor ad spend let alone divert a good proportion to maximise online presence. Having said that, even when they do push online ads, they get ripped of by Ad Agencies and ‘Search Engine Otimisation’ and ‘Pay Per Click’ specialists who produce and gear up the dealer websites to suit themselves. I checked out a big dealer group’s Ad Agency created website recently and they have one page ranked by Google!I have about fifty and another friend over two hundred. Pleased to say that he and I are not in competition! Of course the dealer groups are up there at the top of the listings, because they pay a fortune to the agencies for pay per click links. Other elementary mistakes are also ‘planted’ in the websites to prevent them ranking, therefore ‘proving’ how effective PPC is…I have to assume that this tactic is calculated as it would be inept for a professional web designer to duplicate copy to the extent that search engine robots would discount it when indexing.
So the future is online. I suppose eventually local people will use the Internet more than local papers anyway, so it’s only a matter of time before my local enquiries increase. Patience is a virtue.
