Online video is of course the way of the future. What is it, really, but TV online? Did TV get very big and have any impact on the world?

Here’s my question, though, and it encompasses the internet marketing requirements that dealers have no choice but to participate in in 2009: Can’t there be a better way to drive potential in-the-market car buyers to a specific site, versus relying on the Autotrader.coms and Cars.coms of the world basically ensaring every person who’s on the internet?

It seems to me that using television to drive people to specific websites–and I don’t mean national branding ads for Cars.com or eBay Motors–would produce a far more pure unique lead. Local TV programming or advertising on TV designed to drive car buyers to a single website…am I way off on this?

All content can be relevant dependending on where you want to approach your customers in the “buying funnel” or cycle. Viral marketing of a video can create a “buzz” and brand awareness that will survive and develop top of the mind awareness for when a customer needs a vehicle. Videos posted for “informational” or branding purposes on a website add valuable content and improve the transparency of the site for people further down the buying funnel since they have already found or searched for your site and the added “personality” that a video can give to a message is a gteat differentiator from sites with similar information that might be less “entertaining” and personal.

All of these applications of video are important, but the “ad guy” in me still likes to know that the video will be seen as far down the buying funnel as possible and it should include a “call to action” with a trackable and accountable R.O.I. since today’s limited advertising budgets have unfortunatley forced auto dealers to focus on today deals so they can survive to worry about tomorrow’s.

For this reason, I prefer videos that are placed with embedded long tail and short tail search words and meta tags pushed to the search engines with regionally targeted exposure and integrated schema layers with actionable messages that allow a viewer to “drill down” to linked micro sites, lead forms or other conversion tools that create a call to action that can be attributed to the video so the dealer will invest in another one. The applicable phrases are vSEO and conversion and they trump the other valued applications of video, in my opinion, only because in today’s tough economy we must sell something today if we expect to survive to sell one tomorrow and the more exposure we can develop to supplement the SEO of our main site the better.

Alex, as far as video goes in the wild west phase… 20 to 50 years is too long bro, I’ll be dead. Let’s shoot for 5-10:)

It looks as all here are experienced enough to know but for any new people who now are in a managerial position to make spending decisions, I posted the “snake oil” excerpt below.

Stew-It’s like hearing myself, “the wild west with dealership video right now!

I don’t mean this in a bad way about online video and all the vendors who offer the service. Just the one’s that over promise what it can do.

It just reminds me of that covered wagon that rolls through that dusty town while heading west back when.

Wikipedia-”The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a traveling “doctor” with dubious credentials, selling some medicine (such as snake oil) with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence, typically bogus. To enhance sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a “shill”) would often “attest” the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The “doctor” would prudently leave town before his customers realized that they had been cheated. This practice is also called “grifting” and its practitioners “grifters”.”

Hope this relays as intended, having a bit a humor in it when read.

Driving sales to me means bringing a shopper in the dealership that’s ready to buy.

Could a dealership promo video do this alone?
Absolutely not.

Could a vehicle video do this alone?
Yes… about as much as an online single photo, price, and description could of that same vehicle.

So I’m agreeing with you both, maybe you didn’t pick up on the sarcastic nature of my original post:)

I’m not against videos promoting the dealership. That’s a VERY important component to a shoppers overall decision. I just don’t believe it can drive sales by itself tho, you still need the right inventory and the right interest from the shopper.

We could argue this point for NEW cars, because vehicle inventories are the same among franchises, but USED inventories are a much different scenario.
The shopper will first need to be interested in a used vehicle online and a vehicle video could help, but won’t drive sales.

The video on your website should be used to engage consumers and get them interested in your dealership, not in your cars. Everyone has cars. What do you have that’s different?

Here’s the cheap and easy way to get video on your website: buy a Flip camera. Walk around your dealership and take videos of employees and customers. Put together stories. Then use a free video hosting service like YouTube or Viddler and embed the videos on your site. Set up a YouTube channel for your dealership because your local customers watch YouTube also. The video results can show up in an organic Google search with the write keywords.