Car Dealership Videos - Get more sales with video (10 Ideas)

In order to get the full picture of all of the potential car dealership videos you can do, you have to think in terms of the customer lifecycle. Not all videos are made equal. Each one has its purpose, and it should be served to the customer at the right time. If you think about the purpose of the video, you will be able to come up with a lot more ideas.

The customer lifecycle is the journey that your customer goes through. It starts from the moment that the customer becomes aware of you, all the way to the purchase and later repeat purchases. The customer lifecycle phases are:

1. Awareness - The customer becomes aware that your dealership exits. They potentially see a car that they would like to purchase.
2. Engagement - They start to engage with your dealership, this could be through email, social media or simply through the phone.  They are warming up to the idea of the purchase.
   
3. Consideration - The make it or break it phase. In this phase, they need just a little nudge and the sale is made. They are coming to see the car, they are requesting a quote and they are looking online for reviews of this car.
4. Conversion - The sale is made, and you can take a short break…because the next step is probably the most important.
5. Retention & Activation - Once you’ve made the sale, you should nurture the customer and keep them engaged…because there will be services, maybe a new car purchase and a whole lot of revenue to come in from this customer. It’s much easier to sell to the customers that already bought something from you, than to acquire a new one.
   

You can now clearly see why there is a video (or a few) you can utilize in each of these phases. Depending on the frame of mind of the customer, you can nudge them into the next phase. But there is another key thing you should pay attention to.

Personalization and targeting. You HAVE to know who your target market is. Car dealership videos don’t make sense if i’m shopping for a Toyota Civic, but you are offering me a Ford Ranger. I’m sure you already knew this, but technology made it possible to target your customers even more. 

Nowadays, with video personalization, you can target individuals with your car dealership videos. There is a significant increase in conversion & engagement because of this. Stop and think about this for a moment. It actually makes sense, and i’m going to give you tools to execute these kinds of campaigns later in the article.

Let’s go through some of the video ideas for your car dealership:

Car Dealership Videos - Awareness Phase

When it comes to the awareness phase, I actually have only one video idea. And that’s ads. 

I know this is an expected answer, and ads existed for a long long time…but technology made it possible to make ads more targeted and more effective. If you target the ads properly, you can reach the potential customer right at the moment when he/she starts thinking of purchasing a new car.

In that frame of mind, your ads come as a perfect remedy for their problem. Video ads could be placed all over the digital and physical world.

You can promote your car dealership on social media, Youtube, Facebook Groups, Digital Signage and a whole other spectrum of places. Proper targeting and personalization is the key here. First of all, you have to go where your customers are, second of all - you have to personalize those ads to them.

If you own multiple dealerships, you will want to localize your ads and tailor each ad to the market you are showing it to. This can be achieved by swapping out the deals you show in the ad, adding local imagery and info…and so much more.

Here’s how Southwest Kia uses engaging video to basically let users know they exist.

Car Dealership Videos - Engagement phase

New arrivals

Whenever there are new arrivals, it’s a great opportunity to nudge the customer into the next phase because they were potentially thinking of purchasing that exact car. Since they became aware of you in the previous phase, you can use video to notify potential customers of new arrivals into your dealership.

Remember, you are in the engagement phase…you don’t want to do too much selling here. The goal is to engage the customer. If you do this right, it might trigger the customer to move into the next phase.

Here’s how Mini of Ramsey car dealership engages customers with new arrivals. If you think about it, a still photo like this blends into the Facebook feed. Using video, in this case, would be much better.

Best deals

Showing off your best deals is the most common use of car dealership videos. Similarly to the new arrivals, the goal of this is to highlight the new deals in your dealership and nudge the customer into the next phase. 

Usage of video here means that you’ll engage the customer more, and your throughput of the information is bigger. As this is the most common car dealership video, i won’t spend too much time on it.

The formula is simple. Show off the best deals, and make sure that those deals are targeted to your target market.

Here’s how Bell Road Toyota does it:

Newsletter videos

If you don’t have a newsletter, you are losing big time. People don’t hang out on your Facebook / Instagram page…but they do check their email regularly. As you know, buying a car is not an impulse purchase, and that’s why it requires building trust.

What builds trust better than sharing useful tips, the best deals, and stories from your car dealership through video…all delivered to your customer's email address. If you read any newsletter you know that, over time, you get to trust the sender…you feel like you know that person although they probably know 0 about you.

Car dealership videos and newsletters go hand in hand. As i mentioned above, you should try and be as helpful as possible in your newsletter, and give value to the potential customers through educational content & cool stuff.

Car Dealership Videos - Consideration phase

If you’ve done things right, the customer is now engaged. They are one step closer to the purchase, and here are car dealership video ideas that will nudge them.

Quotas & Personalized Offers

These types of car dealership videos could be super personalized. By their nature, they are already personalized, but it’s super common to do it in a PDF or other text formats. That doesn’t separate you from competitors. 

Why not do it in a video format?

Here's how this can look:

It’s more engaging, it looks nicer and there are a lot of possibilities for personalization. Also, with automated video tools like Plainly - this can be fully automated.

After Purchase Videos (Team videos, testimonials…etc)

Buying a car doesn’t end with, well, buying the car. Your interaction with the customer continues after the purchase. That’s why you should create videos that will show the customer how will their life look after the purchase.

Create videos about your team, create testimonials previous clients and generally make the customer feel like they are in good hands.

These types of videos are also good because they are building trust and connection with you and the customer. Any car dealership can take a camera and film behind the scenes videos, but rarely they do. Capitalize on this, build trust, make the customer feel like they know you and they will convert.

Car walkthrough

Any good car dealership knows that car walkthrough videos are the key. If you are selling to a customer that’s out of town, they will want these. Don’t waste this chance. This is another touchpoint with your customer that can build trust and connect you with them.

When you pick up the camera and start filming, there are two options:

• Be boring, plain(ly?), and professional
  
• Show off your personality, be fun and stand out of the competition

You don't need to come off as a high energy, super fun person. Just be yourself, and show that you are a person also. This will connect on a personal level with the customer.

Here’s a good example (Credits to walkaroundvideos.com & Austin Czernick):

Car Dealership Videos - Conversion

Congrats! You’ve just made a sale. Now what? Well don’t just stay there, you should act. 

Spending a good sum of money can wake up buyers remorse. Videos that are focused on conversion battle these. Their sole purpose is to convince the customer that they made a good decision.

That’s why you need a welcome video! This one is straight out of internet companies playbook. Whenever you sign up for a new service, you get a welcome email. This is also what you should do. Create a car dealership welcome video and show the customer that their money is well spent.

Instead of sending a generic video, send a personalized video that will include the customer data in it. Using an automated video tool like Plainly - you can scale up this process and create these in a few clicks.

This is another opportunity to stand out of the competition and shine! Use personalization.

Car Dealership Videos - Retention & Activation

Once the customer buys the car, you need to keep in touch with them. It’s much easier to sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new one. But you already know all of this. Let’s move to video stuff.

In all of the examples below, there is A TON of personalization possible. Usage of car dealership video instead of a boring email in these cases will definitely cut through the competition and it’s guaranteed to engage the customer.

Important dates (Birthdays, Vehicle anniversary, Lease & Warranty Expiration, Service Intervals)

If you are already sending these, it’s probably an automated email.

Sure, that works…but what if you could send an automated & personalized VIDEO. People will much rather watch a 30 second video than read black words on a white screen. That’s why video transfers more information.

If you have time, and a small number of customers, i’d actually recommend filming these videos by hand. Sure, it’s more work than setting an automated workflow but it’s also more engaging.

Gathering your staff to congratulate a customer's birthday, or filming a mechanic saying that they should change their oil is super effective. Also it takes the most time.

If you want to cut a bit of personalization (for example voice), you can create these videos fully automatically with a tool like Plainly.

The goal of these videos is to engage with the customer, remind them that you think of them and build trust and loyalty.

Here's an example:

Here's how these would look if you personalized them to each one of your customers.

Year In Review Videos

I stole these from tech companies. Same as welcome videos. Year in review videos are super engaging, they get shared around social media (just look at Spotify year in review), and your competition is definitely not doing them.

A year in review video is a great opportunity to build trust and remind the customer why they trust you. This car dealership video can be easily set up with a tool like Plainly. Once set up, they are personalized & sent automatically, without human interaction.

Car dealerships are a classic business, and it’s been around a long time. Thinking out of the box will help you stand out in a sea of competition. Using car dealership videos (among which are year in review videos) is definitely one way you can think out of the box. Where your competition zigs, you should zag.

The example above is from Spotify, but you can get the idea. There is a ton of data you can include in your use-case, like how long they've been a customer, how many miles they made, and soo much more.

Car dealership videos - Closing words

Your mind is probably brimming with ideas now. That’s good. What about execution?

Well, luckily there are only a few options there:

1. Do it yourself - a big majority of these videos can be done with a smartphone. We carry around a high quality camera in our pockets all the time. Use it. Start filming, be consistent and the result will be there. In some cases, some of your staff may know some video editing which will boost the production value a lot!
   
   Also, there are a lot of easy-to-use online video creation tools that you can use. These require no technical knowledge, and they can produce high quality videos. Some of these are veed.io and biteable.com
2. Work with an agency - if you have a bit of marketing budget, hiring an agency will cure all your pain pointsw. They will know how to execute each of these ideas, and they’ll probably have some of their own.

You can also do a combination of these two. Some of the ideas above make sense to go through an agency (like ads), and some can be filmed with a smartphone (like a welcome video).

If you have a lot of customers, creating a lot of videos could be an issue that you face. That’s where using a video automation tool like Plainly can help you out. Not only with automation, but also with personalization. 

Plainly will automatically insert your customer data into a video template, and it will automatically create videos for each customer that’s personalized to them. It can also be used to localize videos for each dealership and partner, if you have them. You can book a demo below, and see how it works.

Creating car dealership videos is definitely an unique marketing strategy that’s going to delight customers and hopefully lead to more conversions. Video is becoming a standard, go to, medium in marketing and you should capitalize on that