Auto Dealer Monthly Magazine is the daily operations publication serving the retail automotive industry. This automotive publication serves dealer principals, officers and general managers with the latest best practices.
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industry expert / technology
Get Serious About Advertising the Service Department Online
Ali Amirrezvani is the President, CEO and co-founder of DealerOn, Inc. He has spent the last 10 years helping DealerOn customers dramatically increase sales and profitability from their websites and online marketing efforts. He can be reached at 877.543.4200.
AAmirrezvani@AutoDealerMonthly.com
dealer who didn't have a website, had a website built by a family member or had a minimal website that didn't even integrate with the DMS. In 2012, practically every fran- chise dealer has a website that fully integrates with the DMS, is hosted and updated by a
A
s recently as five years ago, you could find the occasional franchise
fairly large website provider focused on the automotive industry, and generally does a good job of showcasing inven- tory. For all the progress that dealers and their website providers have made marketing their vehicle inventory online, they have almost completely failed their biggest profit center, fixed operations. It is time dealers get serious about
advertising their service departments online.
In 2012, typical car dealers have a few pages on their web- sites with limited information about their service depart- ments (hours, phone numbers, employee information, etc.). Dealers are trying (usually futilely) to compete with national service brands like Firestone, Goodyear, Meineke, Midas, Jiffy Lube and Pep Boys for local service business. These national brands literally have hundreds, even thousands of pages of website content devoted to fixed-ops-related services. If you do a Google search for any of the most popular services that your
dealership performs, all you will find are these national players. If you want to seriously com- pete with these heavyweights, you need to start by building a stand-alone service website.
Dealers need a service-only website that markets all of the fixed-ops services (oil change, new tire services and cata- logues, brake repair, tune-ups, alignments, inspections, diag- nostics, batteries, suspension, etc.) they provide to compete with these brands. You need dozens of pages of content, each focused on a particular service, part or accessory you sell if you are going to compete with the local Jiffy Lube or Firestone. If you can create and frequently
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