Make no mistake—in this economic environment, selling a car is a good thing. But unless you’re dealing with either a first-time car buyer or a buyer who is coming off a lease, selling a car also usually means taking another one in trade. So now you exchange new inventory for old inventory and, if you’re doing your job well and expanding the base of your franchise, it’s probably inventory with which you’re not familiar. So here’s your dilemma: you’re a Honda dealer and you know pretty much everything there is to know about Hondas. Now all of the sudden, you have a five-year-old Ford sitting in your lap. You know virtually nothing about the franchise and even less about how to market the car.

 

 

Fortunately, there’s a simple, highly cost-effective solution out there—search engine marketing or SEM. Or to put it in simpler terms, let the car sell itself. If you partner with an internet marketing provider who can provide you with the right tools, you should actually be able to create search engine ad campaigns around specific vehicles on an as-needed basis. By using an optimized page on your website specific to that vehicle, you can drive high rankings in the paid search section of the results pages. So any time a customer in your geographic area searches for a Ford of that model and year, a link to a specific page on your website is one of the very first things he’ll see.

 

Sounds expensive, right? After all, if you were placing an ad about a specific car on TV or in the newspaper, that would cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. But that’s the beauty of the SEM solution: you only pay once people actually click on the link to your vehicle. That means that only people who are interested in the type of vehicle you’re selling see the ad in the first place, and you only pay to show your web page to those who are interested in that specific car.

 

 

If you work with the right marketing partner, all of this takes place automatically—the creation of the campaigns, the placement of the ads, and the creation of the optimized web pages (complete with images, video, and other important details about the car) as well as a “Contact Us” link that allows you to turn that prospect into a lead and ultimately into a revenue-generating customer. Not to mention that it clears that car off your lot and frees up additional cash. It gets even better; the right partner can also provide “smart” tools that ensure that the ad is removed as soon as the car is sold and that it doesn’t run again until there is appropriate inventory to match. In other words, no car means no ad. Now that’s cost efficiency. And that’s how you convert used inventory that you take in trade into cold hard cash.