April Newsletter – Priced to Market or Marketable to Price?

In our continuing series on Internet marketing strategy, this month’s focus is on pricing. The question of “Priced to Market or Marketable to Price?” is an area of growing attention in effectively selling used cars over the Internet. The following guidelines will make you a better online used car marketer.

For years we have been talking to dealers about pricing cars to market and using a pricing tool that allows you to be highly competitive to garner more conversions from the traffic you are already getting. If cars are priced the most competitively in the market, then you will get more than your fair share of consideration of the vehicles you have. Consideration comes in the form of traffic, and better-quality traffic on aggressively priced vehicles converts into more sales.

Here is another key factor in this area that ties into our message of simplifying the digital landscape to make dealers more effective in 2015.

Being the most aggressively priced in the marketplace does you no good if you do not have the most marketable used cars in the marketplace. Or, more simply put – you can price your cars as low as you want, but if it’s a car nobody else wants, you will not see a great share of traffic on it.

Pricing used cars online and merchandising them with 30-plus pictures, custom videos and great descriptions is the price of admission. Everybody has to do that today just to not get left behind. But taking it one step further is having a master plan and a strategy for what cars you are keeping and going to stock based on what the market around you buys.

Having a used car stocking strategy just based on what you trade for, or what your managers feel are marketable from your store or what they like to buy at auction is not what is going to make you highly successful. But having a strategy from real-time data that shows what cars are hottest in the marketplace, what is selling at the highest rate and what the public wants to buy will. Plus, you will be letting your digital marketing dollars – such as for PPC, SEO, AutoTrader, and Cars.com – go even further for you because you are promoting the most popular products.

You will see more conversions, a better quality of leads, more views on vehicle display pages and a greater ROI on your dollars spent if those dollars are spent merchandising a hot product versus a cold product.

In the end, this is a very simple theory in premise but a very difficult one to execute if you are not already doing it to some degree. It takes a serious concerted effort, but will make you a better online used car marketer if you take advantage of it.