Inventory marketing is the process of displaying and advertising your inventory listings on your website and third-party marketplaces. Inventory marketing creates a comprehensive online presence that caters to various customer preferences, leading to increased sales opportunities and improved customer engagement. In other words, it’s the heart of your dealership’s marketing efforts—it keeps customers and your inventory flowing through your business.
In this article, you will learn all about online inventory marketing and discover insights, tips, and practical-use tactics about the following topics:
- The Power of Digital Presence
- Building a Comprehensive Online Inventory
- Embracing eCommerce & Online Sales
- Implementing Effective Inventory SEO
- Leveraging Third-Party Platforms for Inventory Exposure
- The Role of Customer Engagement
- Personalization & Customer Relationship Management
- Engaging with Your Dealership’s Community on Social Platforms
- Analytics & Continuous Improvement
- Choosing the Right Vendor & Marketplace
- Maintaining a Holistic Online Inventory Marketing Approach
The Power of Digital Presence
Showcasing your inventory online is a strategic move that can greatly benefit your dealership by expanding your reach with prospective customers. Specifically, online inventory marketing has several benefits and advantages over other forms of marketing.
- 24/7 availability: Online inventory is accessible around the clock. Potential customers can browse and explore your offerings at their convenience, even outside of regular business hours. This flexibility enhances the likelihood of engagement and leads.
- Convenience for customers: Allowing customers to explore your inventory from the comfort of their homes or on-the-go makes the shopping process more convenient. They can compare different options, research specifications and make informed decisions before visiting your dealership.
- Competing in the digital age: In today’s digital landscape, consumers expect businesses to have an online presence. Dealerships that showcase inventory online stay competitive and relevant in the market.
Building a Comprehensive Online Inventory
In today’s digital age, most purchase discoveries occur online. Shoppers input information into search engines looking for actual inventory listings, not just dealerships. Your dealership may have a great reputation, it may even appear prominently in search results, but if your inventory isn’t visible, shoppers are unlikely to click on your website.
Listing your inventory on your website gives shoppers what they want. It also puts your dealership top of mind and proves that you have the type of inventory people are interested in. But how do you build a comprehensive online inventory and showcase it to your customers? Consider the following tried-and-true inventory marketing tips.
Integrate Your DMS with Your Website
Integrating your DMS with your website is a crucial step in keeping your website listings up to date and rich with detail, without costing you hours of time each day. When a unit is sold, added or removed from the DMS, your website inventory is automatically updated, preventing discrepancies and inaccurate information that could disappoint potential customers. It also eliminates the time-consuming effort of manually adding, updating and removing inventory listings on your website.
Categorize & Organize Inventory Listings for Easy Navigation
Your physical lot is well organized—your online inventory should be too. Best practices to keep your online inventory organized and easy to browse include the following:
- Structure your website inventory navigation into main categories and then subcategories so shoppers can easily narrow down their search to the right units.
- Maintain consistent and clear naming conventions.
- Include search bar and filter options to help shoppers refine their search.
- Highlight special promotions, featured vehicles and new arrivals on your homepage.
Showcase Units & Accessories Through High-Quality Visuals
Compelling, high-resolution photos not only attract shoppers, they convey important details about each unit and drive shoppers toward a sale. As you organize your inventory, consider ways to showcase each unit by providing interactive 360-degree views so shoppers can explore inventory from all angles. You should also add alt texts to improve your website’s accessibility—an underrated, underused feature that will also help to boost your image search rankings.
Embracing eCommerce & Online Sales
Your website operates around the clock, allowing customers to browse at any time. This means shoppers can potentially make a purchase at any time of day, even when your dealership may be closed. You want to give shoppers easy access to all the information they need to make a purchase, regardless of what time of day they’re visiting your website.
Transparent Pricing & Inventory Information
By providing shoppers with transparent pricing and inventory information, you can give your customers everything they need to make informed purchasing decisions. Customers can easily compare prices, features and availability to determine which product best fits their needs and budget.
In an industry where shoppers are making significant purchases online, often involving complex products, the importance of transparency cannot be overstated. Shoppers expect to see accurate information on your website, and any inconsistencies between online and in-store information can lead to frustration and distrust.
Furthermore, shoppers want the convenience of sourcing everything they need from your website. They don’t want to pick up the phone or send an email to ask about pricing. In fact, many will simply move on to another dealership if they can’t quickly find information about your units or services offerings, pricing, current sales or contact information.
Online Financing
Online financing streamlines the buying process by allowing customers to explore lending options, apply for credit and get pre-approved—all from the comfort of their own homes. Pre-approved customers with online financing are likely to have a smoother and quicker sales process when they visit the dealership because they already know their budget and can focus on selecting the right vehicle.
Streamlined Checkout Process
Offering a “buy online, pick up in-store” (also known as BOPIS) service is a great way to satisfy shoppers’ desires for a digital experience, while still driving them to your dealership. Shopify has found that 59% of consumers are interested in BOPIS.
Many customers prefer to research and buy online, but also want to physically inspect or test the unit before finalizing a purchase. Offering in-store pickup caters to these customers by combining the convenience of online shopping with the reassurance of inspecting the purchase before taking it home.
Giving customers the option to finalize the purchase at your dealership has benefits beyond customer convenience alone. Forty-seven percent of consumers have also reported making additional purchases when going to a business to collect an online order. Implement the following BOPIS best practices to streamline your digital checkout process and maximize your profits.
- Simplify the process: Implement a clean and intuitive checkout interface that guides buyers through the process, step by step. Complex or time-consuming checkout processes can lead to cart abandonment. By offering a streamlined and intuitive online checkout, you can minimize the chances of customers leaving their purchase midway due to frustration.
- Make your platform secure: Offer a variety of secure payment options, including credit/debit cards, PayPal and other trusted methods. Display security badges, SSL certificates and other trust indicators to reassure customers about the safety of their personal and payment information.
- Order confirmation: Provide buyers with an immediate order confirmation page and follow up with a confirmation email containing order details and instructions to collect the unit.
- Abandoned cart recovery: Implement tools to track abandoned carts and send reminder emails to shoppers to encourage them to complete their purchases.
Implementing Effective Inventory SEO
With all the work you put into organizing and showcasing your online inventory, you want as many people as possible to visit your site and browse your listings. Every successful online inventory marketing strategy relies on SEO to drive traffic to inventory pages. In fact, 53% of website visits are driven by organic search. You can increase the visibility and searchability of your website inventory listings by following a few SEO best practices.
Optimize Your Product Titles & Descriptions for Search Engines
- Craft clear and descriptive titles, including the brand, model and year.
- In the description, highlight key features, specifications and any unique selling points.
- Avoid using duplicate content across your listings or from OEM sites.
Utilize Relevant Keywords to Improve Search Rankings
- Conduct keyword research to identify relevant, high-traffic keywords related to your inventory and services. Tools such as Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush can suggest suitable keywords, if you aren’t working with an SEO agency.
- Include location-based keywords to optimize your inventory for local search. 46% of Google searches are seeking local information.
Highlight Seasonal Promotions & Special Offers
- Highlight units that are on sale to motivate visitors to make a purchase. After all, the purpose of listing inventory on your website is to have it scooped up by a buyer as soon as possible.
- Make special offers and seasonal promotions to capture customers’ attention and encourage them to explore inventory further. When customers feel that they’re getting a deal or taking advantage of a limited-time offer, they are more likely to engage with your dealership’s offerings.
- Offer discounts or special financing options to motivate potential customers to convert from browsing to purchasing. This sense of urgency created by limited-time offers can prompt quicker decision-making.
Leveraging Third-Party Platforms for Inventory Exposure
Inventory syndication is the process of pushing inventory from your content management system (CMS) to third-party marketplaces. Benefits of using an inventory syndication solution include consolidation, automation and easy access to analytics.
Single Source for Inventory Syndication
A good inventory syndication solution offers multiple marketplace options, so you can easily push your inventory to every relevant platform. It removes the second step of working with a marketplace vendor.
Automation
Instead of manually uploading and managing your many inventory listings, inventory syndication automatically updates inventory listings daily, even if the unit information changes regularly (price, OEM information, etc.). You can also choose the marketplace destination and number of monthly posts, set your budget and let the solution manage the listings for you.
Analytics Reporting
Using an inventory syndication solution means any analytics that can be pulled from third-party platforms are available in one central source. This can help you identify which marketplaces are driving the highest number of qualified leads, so you know where to focus your budget for a better ROI.
The Role of Customer Engagement
Inventory marketing involves creating a positive and personalized experience that goes beyond simply showcasing your units online. A unit purchase often involves a significant investment from the consumer, and effective customer engagement can make a substantial difference in overcoming obstacles in the buying process.
Virtual Tours & Unit Demonstrations
Virtual tours and demonstrations provide potential customers with an immersive and interactive experience. They can explore the vehicles and equipment from the comfort of their homes, gaining a detailed understanding of the product’s features and design. Virtual tours can also help minimize the number of customers who visit the dealership solely for exploration purposes, as they can get a good sense of the available units online at no cost to your dealership. This leads to more focused and purposeful in-person visits.
Incorporating Customer Reviews & Testimonials
Incorporating customer reviews and testimonials into online inventory marketing can help your dealership establish credibility, attract potential customers and provide a comprehensive understanding of the value your dealership offers. Benefits of maintaining an active brand presence include:
- The power of positive persuasion: Nearly all consumers will read reviews when shopping for a product or service online. Many consumers rely on these reviews and testimonials when making purchasing decisions. Positive feedback can sway potential buyers to choose one dealership over another.
- Unique selling points: Customers often mention specific features or experiences in their reviews. These points can serve as unique selling propositions and differentiate the dealership from competitors.
- Better SEO: User-generated content, such as reviews, can boost your dealership’s SEO. Search engines tend to value fresh and relevant content, including customer-generated content.
- Customer insights: Analyzing customer reviews can provide insights into what customers appreciate most about your units, services and the overall shopping and buying experience. This information can guide future marketing and operational decisions.
Personalization & Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Having a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can greatly improve your online inventory marketing by creating a personalized shopping experience for your customers. A CRM can gather and organize shopper information, purchase history, preferences and interactions in one place, so you can custom tailor recommendations based on each shopper’s browsing history.
Using customer data, a CRM can suggest relevant products from the online inventory based on a shopper’s previous purchases or browsing history. This enhances the shopping experience by presenting options the individual is likely to be interested in.
Maintaining a CRM database can also help with your dealership’s targeted marketing efforts. With the data collected in the CRM, you can segment your customer base into different groups based on demographics, interests, buying behaviors and more. This allows for more precise targeting of marketing campaigns related to specific powersports vehicles or products.
A CRM also enables the creation of personalized marketing content, such as emails, that resonate with each customer’s preferences and previous interactions with the dealership. Your dealership can use this data to automate various email communications, such as sending follow-up emails after a customer’s visit to the website, notifying customers of new inventory arrivals or sending reminders about upcoming service appointments.
Engaging with Your Dealership’s Community on Social Platforms
Social media is another important companion to a successful online inventory marketing strategy. Not only is social media a great place to showcase your inventory through engaging posts and stories, as much as 44% of internet users, from Gen X to Gen Z, use social media as a primary source of information when researching a business. Organic posts are also generally free, making them a budget-friendly way to promote inventory. And they help maintain an active social media presence without a significant financial investment.
Consider running targeted advertising campaigns to reach potential customers. Social media ads can extend the reach of inventory listings beyond your existing followers. In fact, 26.8% of internet users discover businesses, products and services through social media ads. These ads can be targeted to specific demographics, interests and locations, ensuring that the listings reach potential buyers. Social media platforms also offer retargeting options, which allow you to show ads to users who have previously interacted with your inventory listings, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Analytics & Continuous Improvement
Tracking website traffic, shopper behavior and conversion rates is essential to gaining insights into your online audience’s preferences, interactions and buying habits. By analyzing this data, you can make informed decisions to optimize your inventory marketing strategies, improve user experience and ultimately increase sales. Follow these tips for tracking and utilizing your data.
Web Analytics Tools
Use web analytics platforms like Google Analytics to track website traffic, user demographics, popular pages and user flow through your site. This provides a comprehensive view of how visitors engage with your website.
Conversion Tracking
Implement conversion tracking to monitor actions that indicate a successful sale or lead, such as completing a purchase, submitting a contact form or requesting a quote.
Behavioral Analysis
Use tools that offer heatmaps, click tracking and session recordings to visualize where users click, scroll and spend the most time on the website. This can identify usability issues and opportunities for improvement.
As you analyze data about your inventory views, you can identify trends and customer preferences. You can know which unit listings receive the most attention and conversions, so you can focus on promoting and featuring those items more prominently.
By linking your web analytics data with your inventory management systems, you can align online behavior with actual sales and inventory turnover. This allows you to analyze shopper behavior, so you can tailor the user experience, showing related products or recommendations based on the visitor’s interests and previous interactions.
The end goal of analyzing data is to make data-driven decisions to optimize inventory marketing strategies and forecast demand for different units, so you can stock the right quantities for the right customers at the right times. As you develop your analytics strategy, determine which metrics are most crucial to your dealership, such as sales velocity, inventory turnover rate, customer demographics and popular products and conversion rates. Analyze inventory turnover rates to identify slow-moving units and consider offering promotions or bundling to move these items.
Choosing the Right Vendor & Marketplace
If you’re in the market for an inventory syndication solution, choose a vendor that offers pre-loaded vehicle spec data. If you don’t have the product data to fill out your inventory listings (or you don’t have the time to manually enter all that data), the result will be bare bones listings that don’t supply your shoppers with enough information to get excited about your inventory. An inventory-savvy vendor will provide rich unit spec data as part of the process of syndicating your inventory exports.
Your vendor should also maintain good OEM relations to offer the benefits of partnership programs. These partnerships with well-known OEMs open new avenues to help you get your inventory in front of more shoppers. On top of these considerations, there are a few best practices for choosing a marketplace for inventory syndication.
- Be conscious of your budget and know how each marketplace charges for its services. Craigslist, for example, charges $5 per post, while eBay charges a higher price but allows users to purchase a block of posts for each month.
- Understand how each marketplace operates to maximize ROI and avoid over-spending or missing out on qualified leads.
- If you’re a Craigslist user, located in or close to a large city, avoid the common mistake of listing your units on every subsite of the surrounding areas. It may seem like the better choice, but this results in unnecessary ad spend. Most Craigslist shoppers will go to the main geographic site (such as seattle.craigslist.org) versus a subsite for an outlying area (such as eastside.craigslist.org).
- If you’re an eBay user, resist the urge to use a “buy now” strategy on listings. Instead, treat eBay as a lead generation platform. Set a reserve on your unit listings and lower the reserve one or two times during the auction listing. Shoppers who expressed interest in the unit will get notified that the reserve has been lowered. Set longer listing timelines for seven days, to keep your inventory listings up as long as possible. eBay listings cost the same to list the unit for three, five or seven days.
Maintaining a Holistic Online Inventory Marketing Approach
As a dealership, your inventory is the lifeblood of your business—the fundamental elements that allow business to flow smoothly between you and your customers. Maintaining a holistic online inventory marketing approach that integrates various strategies and techniques can help you effectively showcase and promote your inventory to potential customers and ensure business success.
As you check the health of your inventory marketing strategy, an inventory marketing vendor can play a significant role in helping you maintain a holistic online inventory marketing strategy by providing specialized tools, expertise and services that optimize the presentation, promotion and management of your inventory.
Follow these online inventory marketing best practices, tips and tricks to enhance sales, improve the customer experience and infuse your website with shoppers interested in your online listings.