Meet Dealer Spike’s Top 12 Products of 2021 ー & Beyond

Dealer Spike is on a mission to equip you with industry-aligned digital solutions to make your brand stand out to highly qualified leads.

We are pleased to provide a complete toolkit of retailing and marketing products that have served as game-changers for our dealer partners around the world.

Recently, we surveyed our team members and partners for their favorite Dealer Spike products. From the results, we created an extensive list of the top features and benefits of our 12 most-nominated products.

360° Walkaround App

Following the pandemic, we are seeing more consumers than ever choose to shop at home instead of at stores. With fewer shoppers browsing your inventory in person, it’s time to bring your store to them ー virtually! 

DealerPic360, our 360° walkaround application, helps you create full-spin images of your units, inside and out, so that online shoppers can feel like they’re viewing the unit in person. Showcasing all angles of a unit creates a highly in-depth shopping experience by spotlighting important unit details, boosting the browsability of your units and building trust with customers.

Automated Email Marketing

Following the launch of your website and digital marketing strategy, the next step is to ensure that the multitudes of leads who find your brand keep coming back again and again. Because only a very small percentage of website visitors make a conversion such as a purchase, we encourage dealers to use automation tools to track each lead’s website visit.

Our newest digital marketing service, Automated Email Marketing, captures each lead’s interests based on their website visit and sends personalized emails at timely intervals. Our email service engages leads at every stage of their buying journey, from initial purchase to parts and service promos and eventual buyback offers.

Search Engine Marketing

SEM is a highly powerful tool to build brand awareness and generate leads. In addition to getting your brand in front of as many online shoppers as possible, SEM paid ads ensure these leads are highly motivated to make a purchase.

Paid ads can run on both social media and search engines to connect with qualified leads wherever they’re browsing. Some of the most significant benefits of paid ads are that they run 24/7 and target only promising leads, which reduces the cost per clicks for your dealership. You also have the power to pause your ads at any time and ensure shoppers only see ads for live inventory. 

Bonus tip: If you’re experiencing an inventory shortage, pivot your ads to promote pre-orders, parts and/or maintenance services.

Premium Text

Texting is rapidly gaining traction among consumers as a means to communicate with companies. If you’re asking, “Do my customers really want to text my dealership?” we’re happy to announce that text messages from brands have a higher open rate than other digital communication channels. Shoppers value texting because they can communicate with your team anytime and anywhere. 

Dealer Spike welcomed our Premium Text tool earlier in 2021 as a means for dealers to master the benefits of texting. Premium Text streamlines customer communication across multiple touchpoints, easily routes leads to the right department and makes it easy for dealers to request payments and follow up with recent buyers.

Search Engine Optimization

The key to website success is SEO, plain and simple. Search engines serve as the starting point for shoppers to discover local dealerships, and SEO strengthens your online presence to make sure local buyers are finding YOU over your competitors. 

Dealer Spike’s SEO experts create a customized strategy to increase your dealership’s online visibility. This includes ensuring that your website’s structure, formatting and content align with any changes in search engine requirements.

Hours Editor Tool

Clearly stating your hours of operations is important. We have all experienced the frustration of travelling to a store or restaurant, only to discover that the hours posted online were incorrect and the establishment is closed. If you find it a hassle to keep your hours of operation up to date, especially around holidays, we have good news for you!

We recently launched our Hours Editor Tool, which is built into your website as an easy platform to make quick updates to your hours. In just a few clicks, you can set or update your hours across your website and even on search engines. The Hours Editor tool is ready to use and can be accessed by logging into the back admin section of your website. 

Auction123

Third-party selling platforms are crucial outlets to get your inventory listings in front of potentially millions of buyers. The downside is that it can be nearly impossible to stay on top of manually posting and managing online listings. Busy dealers need an automated third-party listing tool to push listings from the website to third-party selling sites.

Auction123 provides a complete online marketing suite that automatically lists your website inventory on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace and eBay. Through Auction123, you can create eye-catching inventory ads that update in real time to reflect your current inventory levels.

Facebook Marketplace Posting Tool

A few months ago, Facebook announced it would no longer feature inventory from Partner Catalog Feeds on Marketplace. We know Marketplace is a huge avenue for online shoppers, so we partnered with Auction123 to launch our Facebook Marketplace Posting Tool and keep your inventory running on Marketplace. 

Facebook Marketplace Posting Tool eliminates the need to download images, locate vehicle data and manually add the information to the listing. Instead, simply select the desired inventory listings and let the tool run on your computer’s background while you complete other tasks. You can also leverage the tool to view each listing’s posting date and status, remove sold listings and switch between multiple Facebook pages (if you manage more than one).

Live Web Chat

The popularity of live web chat comes from its ability to provide immediate customer support for website visitors. Additionally, it allows dealers to understand what their shoppers are looking for at that precise moment. The ability to immediately produce an answer or address a customer pain point is an invaluable benefit. 

ChatBridge™, our live web chat tool, grants dealers the ability to chat with active website visitors in real time. ChatBridge’s dynamic platform allows chats to be routed to available team members and even be pre-arranged with visitors in advance. Even better, your team can multitask on several live chats at once.

Reputation Management

Dealership customers often start their buying journeys online, and your reviews are likely to influence their purchasing decision – even before they visit your website. These days, your reputation matters more than ever, as it can determine whether a lead converts to your dealership.

Dealer Spike’s Reputation Management optimizes your dealership’s reputation by funneling positive reviews from Google and Facebook to your website. Additionally, we provide insight on best practices for prompting customer feedback, responding to sensitive reviews and controlling your brand’s image – online and offline

Premium Directory Management

Online shoppers rely on digital directories to locate and contact dealerships. If they have difficulty finding the correct contact information for your dealership, they are likely to switch to a different dealership. Directory errors such as old phone numbers and out-of-date store hours are common, especially when brands are trying to manage multiple online directories.

Our Premium Directory Management keeps your information up to date and streamlined across 150-plus digital directories. This means online shoppers can always find reliable information about your dealership, no matter which search engine, GPS system, app or social network they’re using.

Announcement Builder Tool

Announcement pop-ups on websites are a quick, easy way to draw the eyes to important information. As a website owner yourself, you most likely have used website pop-ups to capture the attention of your customers. To make managing these announcements easier than ever, we launched a convenient tool to update your website announcements whenever you need.

Our newly available Announcement Builder is a built-in website tool that provides the ability to control announcement pop-ups on your website. With the Announcement Builder, you can easily add, edit and remove your announcement pop-up at a moment’s notice. And did we mention this tool is available on your website now?

Thank you for exploring our top 12 most popular products! Dealer Spike is honored to be your website and digital retailing partner, providing lead-driving digital tools to Accelerate Results for dealerships around the globe.

If you would like to schedule a demo or have questions about any of our products, please connect with Dealer Spike today!