Read Our OEM Guide on Digital Must-Haves to Create a Seamless Branded Experience
With the rising online competition, creating a perfectly tailored digital showroom should provide a curated, brand-exclusive experience that guides customers to find the desired products. By focusing on high-quality images, detailed product specs, and optimized navigation, you can create an engaging digital space that showcases your inventory and strengthens your brand.
The same should be true of your dealer network’s digital showrooms. These online counterparts to physical showrooms should direct shoppers to the inventory they’re after and accelerate the purchase process. They should also showcase your product lineup, support your brand’s reputation, and provide excellent customer experiences.
This article will give you an overview of the essential digital tools and practices you can implement today and roll out across your dealership network tomorrow to attract, increase the urgency to purchase, and convert customers while supporting your brand’s goals.
- Building a Seamless Branded Experience
- Leveraging Technology for a Better Experience
- The Perfectly Tailored Dealership Digital Showroom
- Brand-Exclusive Digital Showroom
- Detailed Product Specifications
- User-Friendly Design and Navigation
- Mobile Optimization
- High-Quality Images
- Customer Reviews
- Inventory Management
- Streamlined Digital Retailing
- Local Discoverability and SEO
- Effective Digital Marketing Integration
- Continuous Collaboration and Feedback
- Ensuring Long-Term Success for Your Brand and Dealer Network
What is a Seamless Branded Experience?
Your dealer network directly links your brand to the end consumer. That means it’s imperative for them to follow best practices in their digital showrooms and marketing strategies.
After all, you are vested in ensuring that each of your dealerships’ digital showrooms consistently reflects your brand’s high standards and identity. But what can you do when you have multiple dealerships with their own vision of how their digital showroom should look and feel?
A seamless branded experience is the handoff that shoppers experience between your dealer locator and local dealership websites with active inventory. When shoppers start on your website (where research has shown most new buyers begin the buying process), they research information on makes and models and eventually use your dealership locator tool to find a nearby place to buy.
Seamless branded experiences, otherwise called Branded Zones, are an essential strategy to implement in your dealer network to ensure that every shopper: 1) lands on the dealer’s website (and not some obscure site like Facebook or an old domain that’s out of commission), and 2) views your product lineup so that the buyer can continue down the purchase path without getting distracted by other brands.
In addition, Branded Zones standardizes visual elements, messaging, and product showcases to provide a unified experience that strengthens brand recognition and creates an urgency to purchase your products.
Leveraging Technology for a Better Experience
In today’s competitive marketplace, creating a perfectly tailored digital showroom is crucial to ensure a seamless and consistent experience across all digital touchpoints. As a bonus, it also reinforces customer awareness, trust, and loyalty to your brand.
LeadVenture’s all-in-one platform bridges the platform gap between OEMs and their dealerships’ websites by providing several technology options and detailed analytics on customer interactions and conversions.
Branded Zones will prominently showcase your brand, provide a brand-exclusive digital space, and drive more robust buyer engagement – across your dealer network’s digital storefronts. As a market-leading digital solutions provider, LeadVenture moves dealers and OEMs forward through best-in-class technology, setting industry standards and creating winning customer experiences.
Positioning your products’ promotions directly in the buyers’ path—on the vehicle search results page—will create shopper urgency and accelerate inventory turnover, ultimately overcoming the traditional limitations of separated promotional pages. Integrate your promotions with your dealer network’s inventory to increase visibility, drive shopper urgency, and further develop the dealer-OEM relationship.
The Perfectly Tailored Dealership Digital Showroom
To ensure a seamless branded experience, you can help your dealership network elevate their websites into comprehensive digital storefronts where customers want to spend time browsing inventory, finding answers to questions, and progressing toward a purchase decision.
The very best branded digital storefronts all share a few essential features. These elements streamline the browsing experience and allow customers to make informed purchasing decisions online. Consider the following best practices to implement a seamless branded experience across your dealership network.
Brand-Exclusive Digital Showroom
Implementing a digital brand-exclusive space within each dealer website gives you and your inventory consistent, dedicated representation, no matter where consumers shop. With this dedicated space, you can showcase your products and ensure that your brand guidelines are followed to your exact specifications consistently and effectively.
Even beyond brand look and feel, brand-exclusive space can speed up the purchase process so you sell more inventory. It directly connects shoppers from your site’s search tools to your dealers’ branded zones, enabling shoppers to explore your inventory without distractions.
Detailed Product Specifications
The best online showrooms spell out everything the customer wants to know in simple, easy-to-understand terms, posted in convenient places right next to the unit. Instead of wandering around asking questions, customers should easily be able to research information on their own time and terms.
A true digital showroom works the same way. All the necessary information a customer may want should be posted conveniently next to each unit. Dealers should highlight desirable details and more obvious ones like price, so each unit stands out uniquely.
User-Friendly Design and Navigation
The best dealer showrooms are smartly designed to be clean and clutter-free. Dealers know that distractions can negatively impact the customer’s first impression and reflect poorly on your brand.
Every dealer should prioritize intuitive digital storefront design, including a clean homepage. Simple navigation menus with clearly defined categories (like Inventory, Services, and Contact Information) help customers reach their desired destination and make them feel comfortable with the dealership.
Similarly, clear calls to action (CTAs) seamlessly guide customers through the purchase process from one phase to the next. These should be prominently placed at strategic points on every page, prompting customers to take the next step. Some examples may include: “Calculate Your Payment,” “Sign Up for Our Newsletter,” and “Buy Now.”
Mobile Optimization
One of the best things about digital showrooms is that traditional space constraints do not bind them. Your dealers can have an expansive showroom with all the inventory in the world, and customers can still browse each unit without even working up a sweat.
Instead of physical space constraints, digital dealerships have to manage the constraints of the screens each customer uses to view inventory. That means your dealers’ websites should be fully optimized for all devices, ensuring seamless browsing from any search engine and shopping experiences for customers.
High-Quality Images
Customers who walk through a showroom want to see shiny new technologies and toys. They want to see big and small details, view features, sit in or stand next to a unit, and imagine what it would be like to take one home.
They don’t want to wander around sifting through information and asking salespeople questions to get a second-hand opinion or experience. They want to see and experience the units for themselves.
The same is true of digital storefronts. High-quality images are the next best thing to actual physical interaction. Ensure that your dealers use high-quality, high-resolution photos of actual units (not stock images) that showcase desirable details. These kinds of images not only help customers imagine themselves owning a new unit, thereby boosting sales, but they also paint your brand’s product in a favorable light.
Customer Reviews
Word of mouth has always been an effective selling tool. When customers have a good experience, they naturally want to share that experience with others. In today’s digital age, this type of marketing happens more online and less through person-to-person interaction.
This naturally lends itself to implementation in your dealer network’s digital showrooms. Encourage your dealer network to formulate a plan for securing positive customer reviews and posting them on their websites. These positive reviews attract new customers and enhance dealers’ online reputation.
Of course, not all reviews will be glowing. Prompt responses to positive and negative reviews show customers that the dealer values their feedback and is committed to customer satisfaction. By highlighting positive reviews and showing website visitors how they manage negative ones, dealers can leverage online reviews to promote your brand and sell more inventory.
Inventory Management
There’s nothing more frustrating for customers than discrepancies between dealers’ physical and digital showrooms. Whether these discrepancies seem minor, like a slight difference in price, or more prominent, like a disparity in in-stock inventory, they annoy the customer. Any discrepancy, big or small, reflects poorly on your brand and can potentially drive away customers.
Ensure your dealers utilize systems that integrate with their DMS to automate inventory updates. This guarantees that product listings are accurate and always up-to-date. Not only does this reduce frustration, it gives each customer a seamless branded experience, from online to in-store, no matter where they shop.
Streamlined Digital Retailing
Even when the research and shopping phases are smooth sailing, the financing and payment process tends to bottleneck every new purchase. To help alleviate these holdups and give customers a more seamless branded experience, encourage dealers to implement innovative payment tools and financing options online.
Payment calculators and online financing applications allow customers to estimate their payments and even pre-qualify for financing directly through the website. This reduces barriers to purchase and speeds up the buying process.
Similarly, a simple and secure online checkout process is vital. Dealers should use trusted payment gateways and implement features like cart abandonment tracking to encourage customers to complete their purchases. A dealer’s work is never done after the sale is finalized.
Encourage dealerships to offer shipping, delivery, and buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) options. These features align with modern customer expectations and can significantly enhance the customer experience.
Local Discoverability and SEO
Instead of showing up at the dealership or picking up the phone to ask questions, today’s customers increasingly turn online for answers. They use search terms related to your inventory for research purposes, to find nearby dealerships, and to browse available inventory. SEO can give your dealers a digital leg up on the competition by outranking other dealers in search results.
Encourage your dealers to optimize their websites for local search. They can do this by maintaining accurate Google Business Profiles and using location-based SEO strategies. They should also consider utilizing voice search optimization to ensure their websites and keywords reflect how customers speak naturally.
Of course, SEO is not a one-and-done marketing strategy. It needs to be adjusted and readjusted continuously. Encourage your dealerships to post new content and monitor and adjust their SEO strategies to stay relevant and visible in search engine results.
Effective Digital Marketing Integration
By this point, your dealers have worked hard to develop a connected digital experience. It only makes sense to market their digital storefront to maximize their investment. Through targeted advertising, social media engagement, and automated email marketing, dealers can bring more buyers to their sites and simultaneously support your brand’s reputation.
- Targeted Advertising: Dealerships should implement targeted paid advertising campaigns to use demographic and behavioral data to reach potential customers effectively. Setting spending limits and adjusting ads based on performance can maximize ROI.
- Social Media Engagement: A mix of organic and paid social media posts can help dealerships build a community and attract new customers. Dealerships should promptly respond to comments and inquiries to foster a positive brand image.
- Automated Email Marketing: Automated email campaigns that follow up with customers based on their actions can keep customers engaged and drive them toward completing a purchase. Post-purchase emails are also essential for building long-term relationships.
Continuous Collaboration and Feedback
Creating seamless branded experiences only works when you and your dealer network work closely to ensure the correct implementation of the right tools and practices. Try to maintain open communication with your dealerships.
Review their digital showroom and marketing performance regularly and provide guidance and support to ensure they adhere to best practices. These strategies can help dealers enhance their digital presence, meet customer expectations, and drive more sales.
Ensuring Long-Term Success for Your Brand and Dealer Network
As dealerships continue to evolve to meet the needs of modern customers, simple, siloed websites will naturally transition into dynamic digital storefronts. Manufacturers must support this change. Your guidance in inventory merchandising and management, mobile optimization, SEO, digital marketing, and more can help your dealers stay ahead of the curve and outpace the competition.
By fostering a cohesive brand experience and supporting your dealerships in adopting these best practices, you’ll empower them to deliver a superior shopping experience that aligns with your brand’s goals, ensuring long-term success for your brand and dealership network.
Download our OEM guide on digital must-haves to create a seamless branded experience with LeadVenture.