We all know that Special Finance is extremely profitable for dealerships. With that said how can dealers maximize the opportunity to drive even more special finance customers in the doors and create a huge advantage over the competition?

Just because you have a website and it says “bad credit, no credit… no problem” Does NOT mean you are actively engaged in special finance online. What you are doing is reacting to people that are looking for a car and happen to have bad credit. What you want to do is think like the special finance lead generators and pro-actively pursue the online special finance customers. The first step is to create what I call is a pseudo-site. A “pseudo-site” is a website that has nothing to do with your dealership; in that it is a separate site and not a page within your current site.

When I was a manager at a major dealer group in New Jersey we sold over 110 units online. We hit a point that we couldn't sell anymore units online conventionally, so I created a site to target special finance customers. I used the domain name AutoCreditApproved.com and that was our "pseudo-site". Once I had the domain name our team created a marketing plan just for this site.

Some of the plans included:

• An infomercial on the local cable TV channel
• A 30 second ad for broadcast television.
• A radio spot promoting our capabilities and sending listeners to the site (English and Spanish).
• Advertising in several used car publications like Auto Shopper and Auto Mart.
• Creating unconventional advertisements like diner mats… yes diner placemats. I bought 150,000 diner mats a month in 4 different diners that were popular in our market area. That’s 1.8 million placemats a year!
• Advertising to specific groups like law enforcement, teachers, military bases, etc. In one instance we advertised in a free publication sent to every law enforcement agency in New Jersey and In 3 days we signed up 25 police departments for our dealerships value added and special finance program.
• Billboard advertising with the web name real big on the sign. Many of these were right next to my competition. I can just imagine the folks in that dealership reading the text on the billboard, “When your dealership says NO… AutoCreditApproved.com says YES!” The best part was we were able to stay within the OEM compliancy for advertising in our competition’s PMA… We weren’t advertising the factory product, and we set up a separate corporation for utilizing the domain name, AutoCreditApproved.com.

We essentially had our own geo-targeted, special finance lead generation company. Now let’s look at the online advertising aspect of marketing your pseudo-sites. Banner ads, unless they are really dynamic, aren’t hugely effective to drive traffic. When we saw only a .002 click through rate we stopped all our banner ads branding our dealership and focused all of our banner ads to drive traffic to our special finance pseudo-site. The results were immediate and powerful, and we generated over 500 percent more leads from these special finance banner ads. I invite you to look at this strategically. If a prospect is going to Autotrader.com looking for a pre-owned Ford Explorer and there are 20 listings on the page what is the motivation for that shopper to click a banner for ABC Ford? Not much incentive there. However if there was a banner ad for Bad Credit or No Credit with a nice call to action; then the results would be huge. Auto portal websites are perfect for placement of credit banners.

I am seeing more dealerships using micro-sites (also called focus sites) which are content rich and limited pages with the purpose of driving more traffic to the primary dealership site or other site in the network. Micro-sites help the search engines give you better placement when certain keywords are entered into their systems. Courtesy Chevrolet in Phoenix, AZ has been known to use over 100 domain names that pointed to either their main website or to various micro-sites targeting various segments of the market. The dealership where I worked created over 40 websites (mine, micro and focused) and directed traffic to the main special finance site. You can come up with various market segments and I even created one that would attract people looking for lenders catering to special finance clients.

Think about what all of your vendors do to you… Google (78% of people that search use Google) whatever franchise you are and the closest major city to your dealership… for example Google: Ford dealership in LA. Right after the sponsored links is Cerritos Ford and then a listing for automotive.com, a 3rd party lead provider. That is what you will find on most search engines using these types of keyword searches.

Now enter the search term “bad credit car loan in LA” on Google or Yahoo. There are a number of paid (SEM) campaigns, but nothing from car dealerships. What a great opportunity this is for dealerships. This is a strong alternative to paying for leads on an ala carte basis.

I am not suggesting that you get rid of your lead providers; I am simply suggesting you explore all of your options and leverage them for more revenue streams. Create your very own pseudo-site campaign, try creating a marketing plan for that campaign and watch how you can out maneuver the competition. It’s amazing what you can do when leveraging the power of the Internet and special finance.