Your Digital Sales Funnel: Increase Your Lead Generation (1 of 4)

By Alex Matson on 04/27/17
Updated on 01/29/19

The automotive market is growing. To adjust, auto marketers have the crucial task of establishing themselves in a competitive landscape.

Our own Scott Meyer mapped out the six steps to building a digital sales funnel to help you increase exposure for your dealership. Today, we’ll go over the first part in detail: generating leads.

Your leads are the fuel for your digital sales vehicle — the entire operation can’t function without them. Before you can work toward maximizing your potential with leads, you must understand the ins and outs of your lead generation.

All About Leads

Before generating your leads, it’s vital to understand the basics behind them. Knowing who they are, how many you should have, and why they are important will set the tone for managing them effectively

What Are Leads, and How Many Should I Have?

Leads are the fuel of the digital marketing process. A lead is essentially any potential customer whom you are able to contact. By generating leads for their dealerships, automotive marketers directly influence who will walk through those dealership doors.

Having as many leads as possible is ideal, but realistically, you want to shoot for 1% of your web traffic (excluding leads who come from third-party lead providers).

You don’t need to start worrying about your number of leads unless it dips below 0.5% of your web traffic. Conversely, you shouldn’t start celebrating until that number rises above 1.5%. Essentially, for every 5,000 web visitors a month, at least 50 of those should become digital leads.

This makes your conversion rate incredibly important. If you aren’t able to convert, your sales cycle will take a negative hit.

How Are Leads Connected to My Sales Process?

Leads are like socks. You can never have enough, you get frustrated after losing a few, yet you’ll always have a need for them.

The formula here is simple: the more leads you have, the more people you are able to reach out to and then convert into sales.

So long as your sales conversion rate doesn’t change, filling the top of your sales funnel will lead to more sales and grow your dealership. Maintaining a conversation with these leads is a diligent process, but it’s the most effective way to bring them to your dealership.

How Can I Improve My Lead Generation?

The key word for improving the number of leads you generate is convenience.

Making it simple for digital shoppers to give you their information will more than likely create more leads for your funnel. Some effective and easy ways to achieve this are creating forms and implementing chat windows that will allow your leads to tell you their needs directly.

Increasing your web traffic is another effective way to improve your lead generation.

By identifying and tracking the leads you have from online form submissions, you will be able to identify the sources that generate the most sales. From there, it becomes easier to plan your lead nurturing strategy.

Turning Leads into Digital Sales

Remember: effectively tracking your leads is just as important as adding them.

Leads whom you have already contacted (and who are still interested in hearing from you) are known as your hot leads. Nurturing these leads is as important as generating them in the first place.

To find success with these hot leads, you must be willing to invest the time and money into making the process as efficient for them as possible. Do whatever you can to keep the conversation going. Identifying in your CRM which leads eventually purchased a vehicle is vital to figuring out the best methods for improving your sales.

Because leads are the fuel for your digital sales funnel, establishing a solid lead generation structure will prime your operation for success. From your fellow marketers, believe us when we say that being proactive about your leads is the first step to success.

Keep checking in with us as we continue to explore the steps to improving the digital sales process for auto dealers.