Part 1, Put your backend first - About to update your dealer group or OEM website?

Content is the foundation of any website but the primary content for automotive retail websites is the new and used vehicles for sale yet the focus for a website revamp is more likely to be on design.

Sure, a website needs to appeal to would-be buyers with pretty pictures, accessible information and easy navigation. Showcase your vehicles with a range of images and video together with compelling descriptions. Sounds simple, right? For most marketing managers, website designers and comms agencies, it really is that straightforward particularly if they’ve gained experience in other markets.

But this is automotive retail and as we well know, all’s not as it seems.

Let’s take a step back. The first question to ask your marketing managers and website agencies is: how do we source our vehicle descriptions and images? The used car feed, someone will no doubt say. Aha, you will reply, but where does the information come from?

Data from vehicle spec providers isn’t always accurate, it is often full of acronyms and wasn’t designed to populate content for websites with consumer-friendly descriptions. Yet car retailers have so much information on each individual vehicle but contained in several different systems which usually perform specific retailer tasks and, crucially, are unlikely to ‘talk’ to one another.

Let’s pool that information. Great idea, you’ll say, in fact, many website design and digital agencies have devised their own interfaces to gather a host of vehicle information to generate richer descriptions whilst some dealerships overcome it by having sales executives input additional or halo features manually although that’s not just labour intensive but open to error.

But can you be sure that when promoting two similar cars that you can explain the difference? They’re priced differently because they have different features beyond the mileage. Do your vehicle descriptions convey those messages easily to the consumer? Does your potential buyer get why this car is priced ‘x’ and that one ‘y’? And it’s no good expecting to explain that when they contact you.

This stuff is complicated and time consuming. It requires integration with all the different platforms at work in a single dealership or OEM.

At Autofinity, we feed from and to 40+ different third parties via our integration platform ViHUB. It’s hard work to maintain all of that to ensure that every feed every day functions.

We deliver the high level integrations required to deliver the highest quality inventory management and marketing platform possible whilst marketing managers and web agencies undertake the science and art of building a well architected front end.

Bring both together at the same time and you deliver an exceptional user experience that converts into sales.

We are very keen to work with marketing and digital agencies who are expert in their craft of driving traffic and converting enquiries into leads whilst we manage the nuts and bolts of vehicle inventory.