Special Finance Video Search Engine Optimization

By Sean V. Bradley

Where does all of the Special Finance traffic to dealerships come from?   Much of it is generated by third party companies who have various strategies to attract vehicle buying prospects.  Popular methods use television, radio, print and you guessed it the Internet. I have had the pleasure of working with some of the top companies in this market and I am impressed by their process and its effectiveness.

Many dealers spend thousands and thousands of dollars for names, phone numbers, email addresses and credit information from these companies to bring prospects in the door. After working for years at dealerships I see that dealers can often make their own opportunities to bring that same targeted traffic into their showrooms.  Using every source possible to bring business in the door is a good policy, but I strongly encourage dealers to utilize their own resources to make it happen.

For those that might have forgotten let’s review some industry stats. You have a higher closing ratio (almost double),  generating a direct lead to your dealership’s website, or generating a lead to your dealership’s Special Finance website site than you do from purchasing a third party lead, which close on average 8 to 10 percent. When you think about this it makes sense. As consumers do more of their shopping and research online many find their way to local dealers who are convenient, promote special finance on their sites and have a good inventory of vehicles. So, naturally more of these shoppers will end up buying at the dealership.

With that being said, lets look at how we can drive traffic to your Special Finance friendly website? A few issues ago in World of Special Finance I wrote about home grown leads, where I discussed this whole concept in detail. One of the items mentioned was utilizing video.  I want again bring your attention the power of Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO).  VSEO is search engine optimization on steroids. Try to imagine infomercials running on the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, when and where people want to be informed.

 Most dealerships spend money on what is called intrusive advertising.

• Broadcast TV
• Cable
• Radio
• Print
• Mailers

When I say intrusive, it just means that consumers were engaged in another activity when they were exposed to an advertisement, commercial or reading a piece of mail they didn’t request. It means you’re trying to sell something when people didn’t ask to be sold. People DO NOT watch American Idol or Sunday afternoon football to see your car dealership’s commercial or your bad credit ad. They aren’t listening to the radio to find your credit sale commercial, they don’t drive down Interstate 95 just to see your bad credit, no credit billboard. They don’t rush home to tear open their mail in hopes of seeing a credit check coupon from your dealership. Now you have a better understanding of intrusive or traditional advertising.

Now let’s turn our attention to where the audience is more receptive to your message. Remember a very large segment of the population go online each and every day.  As a matter of fact, the Internet is the preferred media source for practically everyone under 40 years old, and people 41 to 61 spend almost as much time listening to the radio as they do on the Internet.  As the chart below indicates, this spells opportunity for you and your dealership.

Media usage by age groups:

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.  – The State of Consumers and Technology: Benchmark 2006

Right now Video Search Engine Optimization is fast becoming a dominating online marketing force. This is how it’s working. A consumer types in a search phrase such as,
“bad credit car loan” along with the name of your city or town into Google or Yahoo.

What’s returned is a listing with and seeing a video testimonial of your happy customers that you helped get a car loan pop up on the first page, in the top 10 listings!

Let’s go over to your computer now, and logon to the Internet to see some examples. Navigate to Google.com and enter special finance Indiana.  Within the top 5 results you should see at least two or three links to dealer videos.  Clicking on them will bring up a video of customer testimonials from a dealership in Noblesville, Indiana.

Now, again on Google.com let’s enter a brand and a city name. Try Toyota Hatfield in the search box. You will see a number of the links to videos returned from the local Toyota dealership in Hatfield, Pennsylvania. 

All you need to get started is a digital video camera and a place in the dealership where you can film your short videos, testimonials where customers say a few words about how your dealership was able to get them approved after they encountered some credit issues.
If you have a local video production company they can also help you get started with the process.  You also want to make sure you have your customers sign a release form that authorizes your dealership to use their video in the promotions of your dealership. Then you place the video on the Internet, either on your site or on sites like Youtube.com and append your video with a keywords file to insure your placement in the search engines.

Then you need to target the key words in your market place on the various search engines.  Program information is available on how these work at Google, Yahoo and Ask.com. Give the program a few weeks to work as it takes some time for all the spider bots from the various engines to gather all these files.

Special Finance customers like many of your regular customers are widely using the Internet for information and entertainment, and the use of videos has increased dramatically now that 70% of Internet households have broadband connections.  This is a great, inexpensive way to reach more of this market segment.