Get your stock moving with Video

Selling cars isn’t easy, and the internet has made it challenging for dealers to distinguish themselves. From a buyer’s perspective, another dealership is just a click away. Dealers need a way to immediately capture the customer’s attention and differentiate themselves from their competition, online video is one of these ways.

No other marketing medium creates emotional attachment like video can. Whether you’re selling a house, car or a widget, video helps you merchandise at a whole new level.

In October, Trade Me Motors will be implementing a new video technology called AutoReel. This automatically creates a simple video presentation for participating dealers’ cars for sale on Trade Me Motors. AutoReel stitches together the photos of the vehicle, and adds an automated audio voice-over created from over 2,500 pre-recorded phrases. We think it is going to be a great way for dealers to stand out from the crowd.

The process is all automated, so the good news is that dealers don’t need to do any additional work to create the AutoReel presentations and have them bolted onto their Trade Me listings. Check out a Demo of this product here.

"Watching video content on computers has become just as common as watching video content on television among online consumers" 

Dazzz Wiltshire, Trade Me 

According to Nielsen’s global survey of multi-screen media usage, watching video content on computers has become just as common as watching video content on television among online consumers. More than 80 percent of Internet respondents in 56 countries reported watching video content at home on a computer (84%) or on TV (83%) at least once a month. By contrast, in 2010, more online consumers reported watching video content on TV (90%) than on a computer (86%) in a month-long period.

Back home in New Zealand, Nielsen also tells us that over 73% of Trade Me’s audience use YouTube, justifying that online video is just as popular here as well. As video consumption becomes part of everyday life, it should be no surprise that consumers prefer the use of video in product evaluation and selection, and that includes when shopping for a used car.

So why video, and what makes a product like AutoReel so special compared to a well-constructed static car listing?

Different - It sets you apart from other dealerships and means your listings will potentially appeal to a larger audience. Not all your visitors prefer to receive content using text alone, and AutoReel means they will now have the option to watch, listen and read at the same time.

Videos are "sticky" – AutoReel is a way to make information more interesting. Video engages visitors’ senses more than text, and is likely to attract more vehicle viewings encouraging visitors to look longer at your listings. This helps build long-term relationships with your visitors which can lead to more sales.

The use of video online is exploding – and if a picture speaks 1000 words, then video must be worth a million.  Can you afford not to be involved?

Please contact us here for more. 

Keeping up and being found is the goal

The internet shows little mercy and respect for business, even those businesses that only overlap the web don’t remain immune.  While Yahoo is still a large internet player it is in the shadow of Google and there is much expectation on Marissa Mayer as Yahoo’s new CEO to address the imbalance.  No matter how large or how successful you are currently, unless you are following the trends and technology you quickly fall off the pace and into history.  Even large and very successful companies like Nokia and RIM (Blackberry) who have ruled the mobile world are struggling to survive as the internet and mobile domains have merged. So great is the drive from consumers around internet usability, the old benchmarks of what made a fantastic mobile phone have been consigned to the past. Keeping up is the goal as with internet selling we rely on many components to successfully come together to make it work.  There can be more to it than a newspaper and eyeballs environment.

User behaviour on the web is rapidly changing brought about by evolving access methods and devices.  It is also not the world of the young any more with recent statistics showing more people over the age of 35 access the web than under.  Generally with age comes wealth, mobility, smartphones and tablets.  Following these users and their habits is now becoming a fulltime job and art, but so important to being successful online.  For dealers using Trade Me, the cost and time invested to ensure the maximum reach and exposure for vehicle listings just happens, what is not seen is the huge amount of work going on in the background.  The iPhone application emerged in November 2010 and in February this year both an Android and Touch site were launched. With this suite of three applications there is not a common mobile or tablet device that does not have access to an optimised Trade Me user experience.  It is not enough now to just be on the web you need to be device optimised.

This year has also seen the growth of the home eco system and Apple is the master of this. Without knowing it, one Apple device within a house becomes two, iTunes becomes the content provider of choice all served through an Apple TV; if your home does not already look like this your child’s classroom might.   Apple is not alone with Microsoft pitching the Xbox as a media centre and Sony the Playstation.  The concept of the second screen is alive and growing, as sitting in that cold spare bedroom or home office loses its appeal; life on the internet is now a tablet on the couch in front of TV. We are all winners as our customers move from looking at the web once or twice a day to an environment where they practically live on it.  An interesting exercise is to look at our own household internet usage, I would be surprised if you have not found it doubling each year.

With users being more internet savvy, being found and keeping customers engaged becomes the next challenge and as I outlined above they generally won’t hang around on content that is not optimised for the device they are using, hence why Trade Me has three standalone mobile applications.  If you have website, optimising it for mobile use is imperative as people who are shopping on their mobiles have different needs and expectations than those who are shopping online on their laptop or PC.  They need easier to read pages and for pages to appear quickly, they are searching for specific items therefore the information accessed on their mobile needs to be easily searched and accessed.  If your dealership does not have a mobile website, you are missing out on potential leads and sales.

More time online does not necessary mean more time looking at the same content.  As users become more knowledgeable and their search skills become more honed this leads to the fragmentation of content.  Once upon a time, Facebook was the be all and end all of social media and you would have thought no one could compete, however as users gain experience they are now moving to more niche sites for dedicated content or functionality.  People are choosing the application Path, for a more secure closed user group social network and sites like Instagram and Pinterest for more visual imaged based networking, and even sites like Spotify are starting to compete with Apple’s iTunes.  Like these sites, Trade Me holds a huge amount of user/dealer generated content and it is important that each time someone returns they are presented with new interesting vehicles.  Holding a mix of classified and auction listings ensures the user is always presented with something new and dynamically changing; if the content is not fresh the customers will not keep returning as they have choice.

Keeping up and being found is the goal, leverage where you can by partnering with providers that enhance both your fixed and mobile web presence. The longer and more often your customers are online the more dynamic and engaging your content needs to be to standout.

The internet – The gift that keeps on giving

The best present we all received at Christmas was the conservatively estimated 50,000 internet capable devices opened on the 25^th.  In reality this number could be four times more as this count does not include iPad's, iTouch’s or similar devices from other manufacturers.  Within our extended family there were three iTouch's and an internet TV with all connected to Facebook and Trade Me within an hour.  Without one of us spending another cent on our business we all gained a small city of potential customers in one day.   

The truth is that many of these users may already have access to the internet; however this may be through a shared device rather than a personal device.  So does this really matter? From a business perspective it does as it increases the frequency and time online dramatically.  It is hard to say what has driven this evolution and with Apple being such a major player it could be argued that either Steve Jobs identified trends earlier, or that they were so big they set them. We have moved from one shared PC in a household to a number of internet capable personal devices over the last few years; if you add up the number of devices including smart phones in your house you might be surprised.  Both Microsoft and Apple with their cloud applications now allow ubiquitous access to the same content from many devices.

Before returning to the business benefits let me relay two personal experiences.  My son got an iTouch for Christmas but not because I thought he really needed it.  It was more a gift to me to get my phone back which always seemed flat, had the sound turned down so I could never hear it ring and was full of 4GB of games!  On top of this I was sick of being woken during the night with an alert from ‘iGun Pro’ that a new and more potent gun was available for downloading.  The second experience was the introduction of an iPad to the family; once these are setup to access all your internet applications you quickly understand that these are for personal use and not to be treated like a shared device. 

So, let’s come back to the business benefits for our industry.  Business has understood the value of educating potential purchasers at a young age and none have done this better than Vodafone in New Zealand.  Their early introduction of prepay mobile and text messaging gave them a foothold on the market that in time has followed through into business as these consumers have grown up.  Telecom has unsuccessfully tried to launch a number of youth brands over the years.  For us we now have the access required to our products and services within the pockets of most kids walking down the street; the challenge for all of us is to start the interaction that turns them into future customers. This is not as hard as you think, as we know that they all head to Trade Me and Facebook and how to be successful within both these applications is well documented. 

Not to cover old ground around measuring website performance, but it is something we need to fully understand as it is the web for catching our prospects.  Firstly we need to understand the changing behavior of internet users matched with our online offerings.  For me I am more interested in the frequency and the length of the sessions rather than any other measure. The reason for this is based on the fact that in our industry websites are essentially classified sites filled with content.  A healthy website keeps people engaged and returning time and time again.  With the access barrier dropping and the number of devices increasing, frequency must increase.  If you are not seeing this trend you could be wasting effort in attracting new customers.  Why Trade Me is winner for all of us is that the mix of auctions and classified listings keeps the content fresh and ever-changing which drives urgency for users to return in case they may miss something.

Another consideration is the old UB (Unique Browser) which is the number of individual internet browser sessions that have been generated against a website. The debate here is that one user can generate a number of UB’s and there is double counting.  For a classified website like your dealerships this is a moot point; if the same person is driven to keep returning to your website through a different browser or device at a higher frequency, who cares? This is customer engagement and the goal we are all driving towards!  Another thing not to get too worried about is device substitution where a user will swap a lesser device for a better one when it becomes accessible.  An example of this is swapping from surfing the web on your mobile when access to a PC becomes available.  Two changes have reduced this behavior; users would rather stick to a device where their personal data is located, and secondly, most customised services and applications are optimized to the device it is currently being hosted on.

Let’s hope the internet and consumer electronics companies keep on giving for our benefit.

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