TAMPA, Fla. -
Since the onset of the $5 charge on Craigslist, buy-here, pay-here dealerships have taken on a multitude of approaches regarding how they not only understand this marketplace, but also, more importantly, how they utilize this marketplace to attract customers to visit their stores.

The most important thing that we have learned is that dealerships that are not posting inventory are losing opportunities to gain qualified prospects and sell more vehicles.

Leads per ad continue to grow on a month-over-month basis, proving the importance of dealerships to leverage Craigslist as a market to advertise their pre-owned inventory. If you have not budgeted for Craigslist ads and a software provider to post through, operators should start immediately.

Things to Consider

Today, 50 percent of traffic on Craigslist is found on a mobile phone. Are your ads and vehicle display pages mobile ready?

Titles and content are searchable. Ensuring your ads have a strong title, price, pictures and content is critical.

Are you taking advantage of all 24 photos with photo overlay calls-to-action? How many ways are you connecting to your customers? Having multiple calls-to-action, including phone number, email and copy and paste links to Vehicle Description Pages, only increase your chances of selling the vehicle.

We may all believe we know what sells on Craigslist and have our own theories, but only a select few can take years of past data and tell you which vehicles will generate the most leads and are priced closest to the market price. Utilizing a partner that offers this level of sophistication will only help you achieve a higher percentage of leads per ad, increase your ROI, and ultimately, help you sell more cars.

Now for a Little Math

Let’s assume you want to start with a $1,000 monthly budget including $300 for a software provider. This will allow for $700 in Craigslist posts. This will get you 140 posts on Craigslist.

Considering an ad is good for 30 days, this should give you the ability to post most dealers inventory at least once per month. Using these stats as a reference, this will generate 154 leads for the month. That is an average cost of $6.49 per lead.

If you can close 5 percent of your leads (a little below average), this equates to almost eight vehicles sold. Averaging $1,200 on the front end, a $1,000 budget will generate $8,400 in profit.

Is Craigslist the only marketing site a dealership should use? Absolutely not. It’s a strong compliment and a necessity for all dealerships with any size budget to market their inventory.

Jason Turner is the director of marketing at LotVantage, a sofware company that provides a complete set of online inventory marketing applications for dealers. He can be reached at (866) 881-3229, ext. 221 or jturner@thatsus.com.