Most automotive dealers have embraced the use of chatbots, but the latest upgrade involves using AI-powered CRMs and chatbots to improve customer engagement.
How can using computers to talk to customers improve engagement? The latest development of chatbots allows them to answer most of the commonly asked questions and schedule test drives, meetings with sales staff, and direct online visitors to the sales funnel, where staff can interact with them. There are many AI digital trends and marketing needs shaping the automotive retail industry. Here are a few of them:
Lead Management Powered By AI
Dealerships require high-quality lead engagement processes to stay competitive with each other. This can be the difference between a customer working with your team or with a different dealership. This means AI-powered CRMs are necessary, and digital agents have become an important part of working with customers. These tools allow the sales staff to address leads faster, smarter, and on a much larger scale than before. This should lead to more closed sales, faster vehicle turnover, and improved customer relationships throughout the sales process and beyond. Dealers that use AI for lead nurturing and reporting show increased appointment rates and higher close ratios.
SEO Developed for AI-First Search Engines
Several new AI-first search engines have become extremely popular, and if your content and SEO aren’t set up to answer complex questions for online users, you’ll be left behind. New search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity allow shoppers to discover dealership inventory and ask complex questions to receive accurate results. When consumers ask long questions, these search engines will find content that answers the questions quickly. To ensure your content has been developed for these AI-first search engines, marketing teams must analyze content and update it as needed.
Where Are Car Shoppers Coming From?
You might find a few consumers who are still extremely loyal to one brand or another, but most car shoppers want a vehicle they can trust that fits their needs. With endless possibilities, many shoppers browse Cars.com, watch videos, and allow the internet to provide them with suggestions based on their needs. This means you’ve got to build visibility in many places, which allows search engines to return results that include your dealership’s inventory.
Expanded Use of AI Assistants and Voice Search
One of the greatest benefits of AI chatbots is the development of voice search, which allows customers to ask questions vocally and enjoy the results. Dealerships have begun installing AI chatbots in their CRMs to help funnel potential leads to the sales staff. Many have also begun to add schema markup to VDPs and service pages. The sales funnel is the heartbeat of a car dealership, and voice search using AI assistants has become a great way to get to this heart and create a connection between the dealership team and the online user.
Tap Into Video Marketing
One of the non-AI methods of engaging with your audience is through video marketing. This form of marketing is underutilized and still extremely powerful. Short-form videos are extremely useful, especially if you can connect with your potential customer base with quick and interactive videos that inform and engage with your audience. You can use AI-powered tools to help produce branded, voice-over videos from scripts, ensuring the videos are professional and still relevant to your dealership.
Smarter Spending Using Predictive Inventory Marketing
AI-powered marketing platforms take some of the guesswork out of promoting vehicles. Before adding vehicles to a promotional campaign, you need to double-check for accuracy, but these tools help dealerships determine which vehicles to promote, when, and through which channels. This information is based on real-time demand signals, regional pricing trends, and audience behavior. This approach should improve ROI, ensuring the marketing budget is aligned with what shoppers desire without the guesswork associated with outdated strategies.
First-Party Data Is Fuel For AI-Powered CRMs and Chatbots
Cookies that collect data are fading out, and privacy rules are becoming much stricter than before. In order to collect data about a user, dealerships must ask for it, instead of simply grabbing it from the cookies. This direct-use data allows the CRM to be fed with customer behavior data and service interactions. Additionally, dealerships own the data because they gathered it firsthand, which allows AI tools to be more dynamic and personalized to the user and their desires.
The use of AI-powered CRMs and chatbots makes a huge difference in how dealership teams can engage with customers and understand their needs. The guesswork is basically gone, and every aspect of the dealership’s connection with customers is planned to create a much better route through the sales funnel.
