Craigslist Marketing Continues to Grow Up

Since the onset of the $5 charge on Craigslist, dealerships have taken on a multitude of approaches on how they not only understand this marketplace, but more importantly utilize this marketplace to attract customers to visit their dealerships.

The most important thing that we have learned is that dealerships not posting inventory are losing opportunities to gain qualified prospects and sell more vehicles.  Here are the results from dealerships posting in our software:

*March estimated through month end

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, do so immediately!

Things to Consider

Other important factors to look at are your Craigslist ads.  Today, 50% 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 VDPs 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, increasing your ROI, and ultimately selling more cars.

Now for a Little Math.

Let’s assume you want to start with a $1000 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 the stats above, this will generate 154 leads for the month!  That is an average cost of $6.49 per lead.  If you can close 5% of your leads (a little below average), this equates to almost 8 vehicles sold.  Averaging $1200 on the front end, a $1000 budget will generate $8400 in profit!

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

If you are interested in learning more, send me a message.