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Requirements and Advantages of Developing Mobile Websites For Automotive Dealerships

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Mobile websites provide a whole new dimension to automotive dealerships to consolidate their position among the potential customers. Mobile websites present good opportunities to automotive dealers by increasing their visibility, directly targeting specific customers, and generating quality leads. These websites are optimized for mobile viewing ensuring maximum user-friendliness and satisfaction creating a direct impact on customers. The customers can view the inventory and services offered by automotive dealers, and search for new and used cars on such websites.

Requirements:
The mobile websites need to satisfy various parameters to ensure that it gives quality user experience, is reliable and accessible.

Website Load Time
Faster mobile website load time ensures that the prospective customers will have to wait for less time and can browse more thereby increasing the chances of lead generation. Faster load time adds to the overall user experience and significantly impacts the potential customer. Providing additional bandwidth can help improve the website load time. Providing quick information ensures that customers are retained and does not jump off to other website.

Site Navigation
Simplicity in mobile website navigation is a rewarding experience for the car buyers. Easy navigation helps customers to find information quickly suiting their needs. Optimized website navigation provides customers with specific requirements that they are looking for. Easy navigation to inventory pages, coupons, contact forms, and directions provides a superior user experience. Efficient navigation enhances the usability of the website and allows customers to search the inventory effortlessly similar to automotive dealer’s website. The customers can conduct inventory search in website with specific information like model, make, year, color, price, and trim.

Web Page Layout
A good mobile website page layout helps in effective presentation of the dealer information. Effective information presentation enables customers to use the website easily and quickly. Information about new and used car inventory, services offered by dealers and more can be effectively incorporated in mobile screen space for easy viewing by customers. Web page layout especially designed for such website ensures better presentation of content and thereby increases chances of sales and lead generation.

Advantages:
Automotive dealers can effectively leverage the power of mobile websites to tap the growing market of mobile web users.

Improves Online Web Presence
With faster processors, faster download speeds, and more smartphone subscribers, the number of mobile web users is rapidly growing. It is essential for automotive dealers to have strong online web presence to ensure mobile web users segment is effectively targeted. Apart from PC based dealer website, mobile websites can enhance the online web presence of the dealer in this competitive market. As more potential customers nowadays access information on web through smartphones, they can also search for automotive dealer’s website. Thus, having a mobile website improves online web presence as customers can find dealer related information quickly.

More Opportunities for Sales
Mobile websites help to target specific customers and provides more opportunities for sales by receiving quality leads. Better usability of website, faster load time, navigation, and good web page layout provides superior user experience thereby increasing the chances of lead conversion and improving sales. With the fast changing market trends, they help to tap emerging segments of customers and provide more opportunities for sales.

Get Quality Leads
The main objective of maintaining online web presence is receiving quality leads. The mobile websites provides potential customers with easy access to automotive dealer information from anywhere and anytime thereby increasing the website traffic and bringing in more quality leads.

An optimized mobile website for mobile users will grant automotive dealers a competitive advantage by increasing their brand awareness in a positive way. They are also an excellent communication channel to explore new markets and generate more revenue.

Automotive Advertising Agencies Need to Reinvent Themselves to Support Social Media

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The role of automotive advertising agencies is changing along with the auto industry that they serve. It is important for automotive advertising agencies to educate themselves and their auto dealer clients about their changing roles in a consolidating auto industry that is shifting onto the Internet Super Highway vs. local car rows.

Problems and solution shared at real world venues in the auto industry are having an impact and the slow shift to the new pull/push world of the consumer driven Internet is becoming more obvious. Similarly, a growing number of online social networking communities are also all helping to spread the word and their timing couldn’t be better.

The only constant in the auto industry is change. Of course human nature is also a universal constant, but since that is the fuel that powers most change in the auto industry it must be factored in and considered by automotive advertising agencies who can now look to consumers for the answers.

Radio, T.V. and newspapers are no longer the media of choice for today’s Internet savvy consumers. B2C messages online are filtered out in favor of C2C conversations in social networking communities that now dot the landscape on the World Wide Web. Automotive advertising agencies must reinvent themselves as the resource that auto dealers rely on to navigate them onto the Internet Super Highway because that is where their customers are.

Keeping ahead of new technologies and applications that integrate selling processes between the real and the virtual world showrooms and inserting auto dealers into the conversations that make up the online marketplace must be job one for automotive advertising agencies who wish to serve their auto dealer clients in today’s challenging auto industry. Radio, T.V. and print production has a shrinking role in an automotive advertising agency’s tool box and leveraged online production resources will eliminate them altogether in the near future. Similarly, agency commissions earned from conventional media analysis and placement are being absorbed into the media providers as value added services for their auto dealer advertisers. At the same time, automotive advertising budgets are being shifted to online digital marketing platforms with more verifiable sourced R.O.I. that is far superior to conventional media. The writing is on the virtual wall and automotive advertising agencies must either read it, write it or accept their diminishing value in tomorrow’s auto industry.”

The Internet has empowered consumers to bypass auto dealers and even their most strategically placed marketing message in favor of online information resources that are not dependent on automotive advertising agencies or auto dealers for their content. Initially, third party aggregators captured online auto shoppers attempting to avoid real and virtual world auto dealerships by collecting inventory from hundreds of auto dealers anxious to get their inventory in front of today buyers for new and pre-owned vehicles. Consumers quickly realized the limitations of looking at vehicles in this kind of dealer-centric platform and the technology driven evolution of online marketing platforms soon provided more consumer-centric solutions.

Auto dealers are now able to monetize social media with features that invite car shoppers to share their vehicle selections with their online friends and family to assist them in their car shopping experience. These C2C conversations pushed to Face Book and other social networking communities replace previous unsuccessful attempts by automotive advertising agencies to post B2C messages on the same social media platforms. Automotive advertising agencies need to know about sites that offer a variety of free services and a way to earn a seat at the social media table More relevantly, they need to tell their auto dealer clients about them to justify their agency fees!

Other technology driven applications automotive advertising agencies need to tell their auto dealer clients about that will allow them to sell more vehicles and service for less money and with less staff include dealer hosted personal web sites for their staff, dashboard tools that integrates telephone and SMS text messaging for more comprehensive and cost effective follow up, automated video production platforms that converts the pictures on an auto dealer’s website pushed onto the search engines with Facebook applications that allow an auto dealer to display their entire inventory on a non-offensive tab within the customers Face Book page, customer interaction platforms that allow online shoppers to initiate a two way video conversation from within an auto dealer’s website that can accommodate a turnkey online transaction without having to drop the glass wall that empowers online shoppers to move forward in the negotiation process and appraisal tools which provide site visitors with NADA sourced values for their trade-in while selecting suitable vehicles from the auto dealers online inventory to find a car to replace the one that they are selling.

Any one of these new online conversion and marketing tools can develop a superior R.O.I. to even the best written and placed conventional automotive advertising messages and/or online digital marketing campaigns. These technology driven solutions and their importance to automotive advertising agencies are needed to justify their agency fees to their auto dealer clients in today’s consolidating auto industry. Many automotive advertising agencies still operate under the assumption that if they bring enough bodies to the front door then they have earned their fees. In today’s consolidating auto industry; not so much!

Reduced sales volume and profit margins coupled with increased expenses demand that automotive advertising agencies must increase their areas of responsibility to include internal selling processes using systems to increase efficiencies across all departments in an auto dealership in both their brick and mortar facilities and their newly developing virtual showrooms. You have to be in it to win it and for the foreseeable future the game is being played on the World Wide Web. The most active lanes on the Internet Super Highway are those that lead to social networking communities that share information between automotive advertising agencies and auto dealers as much as they do for their customers.

Philip Zelinger is a former auto dealer principal with an earned reputation as

How to Invest in the Right Automotive Tools and Automotive Equipment

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If you own or operate an automotive service center, then you know the importance of keeping costs low. Not only is this important to you, but in a day where fuel costs are rising, and insurance premiums aren’t getting lower, this is even more important to your customer. Car owners that are looking to have their vehicle serviced are doing so in an economy today that is tough. What they want and need from a good service center is low costs, quality parts, and mechanics that can get the job done right the first time. An auto service center is only as good as its reputation, and this is an industry where the stigma of con artists hoping to make a quick buck is high. You don’t want that to be you if you want your service center to be busy. You are in the business of making people’s lives easier, by providing quality service that keeps their vehicles safe, and their wallets in good shape. How you do this is by investing in the right automotive tools and automotive equipment to keep your costs down. When your costs are down, you can pass those savings on to your customers who will not only keep coming back to you, but send you everybody they know as well.

Customer satisfaction starts with having the right automotive tools. Investing well in these tools is the most important start to increasing your customer satisfaction. You will keep a large client base and a busy shop by ensuring your mechanics are superior, and are using superior tools and equipment. The best way today to find superior automotive tools and equipment is by shopping online and comparing prices. You don’t always want to go with the lowest costs, as very often these costs translate into poor quality. You want a parts and equipment provider that has stood the test of time in both of the same things that are important to you, quality AND cost.

There are a number of different automotive tools and equipment you will need in your service center. Investing well will go a long way towards keeping your shop open and busy. When you buy the wrong tools, or order poor quality parts, your business will suffer. Items such as auto lifts, air compressors, lubrication, wheel balancing, tire changers, and service and exhaust equipment just to name a few. The most popular forms of auto lifts are two posts, although you can purchase four posts or mid rise or turf products as well. Safety standards will be ensured by the manufacturer. Air compressors can be run on either electric or gas power, and in some cases diesel. These are just a few of the examples of standards to look for when purchasing automotive equipment.

When you are shopping online for automotive tools, you want a supplier with a wide range of product choices in each of these categories. This will enable you to choose the quality you need and want to run a successful service center. Distributors that offer minimal choices may give you the best deal, but they may not give you the best product. You also need a distributor that has stood the test of time in their business. Businesses that have only been open for a few years may not have the quality standards you seek. At the end of the day, when you buy automotive equipment, you are buying equipment that will keep others safe on the road. It is an investment that will lead to your long term success.