What’s the best way to promote your car dealership?
You get your customers to vouch for you. When customers share the exciting news with their friends and family — that they purchased a car from your dealership, and their experience was wonderful, word spreads quickly. Customers want their car buying experience to be a positive one.
DealerRater reviews helps you do just that.
We’re doing to take a look at DealerRater, one of the biggest names in dealership reviews.
Table of Contents
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Why DealerRater is important to your dealership
Research from Beepi found that 87 percent of Americans hate the experience of buying and selling a car at a traditional dealership. If you’re part of a dealership, you’ve probably already heard this before. Shoppers dread the experience for various reasons — pushy salespeople, a poor experience, manipulation, ripoffs, etc.
Your dealership is different, isn’t it?
If you’re wondering how to use DealerRater reviews to generate more leads and sales for your dealership, you’re definitely different.
How do I know?
Bad dealerships don’t want customers to write honest reviews!
What about DealerRater?
DealerRater is a premier review platform that’s focused exclusively on car dealerships. Here’s what makes their platform so important to your dealership.
- DealerRater reaches 45 million unique customers per month.
- They have a network of 41,000 U.S. and Canadian dealerships, including a national network of more than 6,000 certified dealers.
- DealerRater collects nearly 100,000 reviews from automotive shoppers each month.
- Dealers receive 5x more reviews if they use ReviewBuilder, DealerRater’s unique service.
- Dealers using ReviewBuilder receive 94% positive reviews.
- 97% of customers read dealership responses to reviews.
- Dealerships get 2 weeks to respond to negative reviews.
- 20% of customers read reviews specifically to find salespeople.
- DealerRater gives dealerships 2 weeks to respond to a negative review before it’s posted on DealerRater.com.
- 98% of customers want to choose their dealership salesperson.
- Customers who visit DealerRater profiles are 3.5x more likely to buy a vehicle than the average consumer.
Millions of customers rely on DealerRater each month.
It’s the key to changing unspoken biases customers may have about your dealership. It allows you to attract eager and engaged customers, using feedback from your happy and satisfied customers.
How DealerRater compares to other vehicle review platforms
DealerRater is very much a niche platform.
It’s focused primarily on car buyers and dealerships. But is their niche focus worth your time? Or is this a waste of time for dealerships looking to grow? Let’s take a look at DealerRater to see how this compares with other mainstream platforms.
They’re part of Cars.com; they also have syndication agreements in place with lots of third-party publishers. This means they’re able to attract a significant amount of traffic to their site via their third-party agreements.
Still, 540 million visits each year is a lot.
So what does this tell us? If you’re running a dealership in the United States or Canada, DealerRater should definitely be part of your marketing plan. If it’s not, you’re losing to your competitors.
Your DealerRater goals
Your goals on DealerRater are pretty straightforward.
- Phone calls: Customers who are car shopping may want to call you directly. Customers will treat this phone call like a dealership audition. They'll use a brief phone call to evaluate the dealership's rapport building and selling skills. These customers are looking for a reason to disqualify your dealership from consideration.
- Leads: Contact information from a qualified shopper – someone who's interested and ready to purchase a new vehicle. You'll want to verify that the leads you generate are marketing qualified leads (MQLs) before turning these leads over to sales.
- Reviews: A well-built review portfolio on DealerRater means customers are 3.5 times more likely to buy a car from you rather than your competitors. You'll want to focus your attention on getting both your satisfied and unsatisfied customers to share their feedback with you.
- Sales: Car sales — you provide customers with the amazing experience and service they're looking for and a new vehicle in exchange for money. A strong review portfolio directly correlates to increased sales and revenue.
These goals are easier to achieve with consistent, upfront work.
Claiming or creating your profile on DealerRater
There’s a very good chance that DealerRater already has your dealership in its database. Customers can add dealerships to the site. Don’t worry if your dealership isn’t listed; it’s easy to get started on DealerRater. Let’s take a look at how you go about claiming or creating your profile.
1. Head over to DealerRater.com/Dealers
2. Click the “Get Started” link on the left side of the page.
3. Fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Under “Package,” choose the plan that’s best for you (e.g., DealerRater Connections, Connections Plus, Essentials for Independents, or AutoResponse).
4. That’s it! If you’ve filled out the form correctly, you should see a “Thanks for contacting us! We will get in touch with you shortly” message at the bottom.
One thing that’s nice about their platform is the fact the application process is simple and easy.
Optimizing your DealerRater profile
DealerRater is primarily focused on reviews.
Optimizing your profile on their platform is straightforward since the feature set is so specific to reviews. When it comes to your dealer profile, you have two sections you can optimize, your dealership, and service sections. Here’s a screenshot of City Volkswagen of Chicago’s profile.
Each profile has four sections.
- An overview which is pictured above
- Employees which is a full listing of the employees at your dealership
- Reviews from customers
- Inventory, the vehicles you have in stock (provided via their parent company Cars.com)
This is how you optimize your profiles on DealerRater.
You simply complete the information needed to fill your profile with data. This means you’ll need to:
- Post business information (e.g., the name, address, and phone numbers of your dealership)
- Share a brief description of your company, including your history, values, and customer expectations
- Add your days/hours of operation
- Post headshots of all your employees
- Create a list of job titles for your employees
- Add certifications for your dealership/employees
- Add your vehicle inventory on your Cars.com account (which will be embedded on DealerRater)
- Add any DealerRater awards (e.g., 2020 Dealer of the Year, Consumer Satisfaction Awards)
- Request reviews from previous customers using DealerRater's platform or a third-party tool
That’s about it.
DealerRater syndicates your dealership and review content, doing their best to draw more attention to your business. The more detailed your approach to online reviews, the better your results will be on their platform.
Responding to reviews on DealerRater
DealerRater takes a unique approach to online reviews. Dealerships get 2 weeks to publicly or privately respond to negative reviews with their Resolution Advantage program! That’s a significant advantage that simply isn’t available with other review platforms. What’s also significant is the fact that each review is evaluated before it’s posted on their site.
Reviews have a significant impact, so DealerRater helps dealerships resolve conflicts with customers. Some customers aren’t happy about this, which is okay.
It’s still a huge value add for dealerships.
What about responding to reviews on their platform? DealerRater believes all reviews should be responded to, which is a unique take on review management.
So how do you do it?
If you’re signed in to your account, you can:
- Click on the "Respond" button within a single review card or click on the "View Details" link.
- Dealership responses on DealerRater can be either public or private.
- Cars.com, Facebook, and Google reviews can only be responded to publicly.
- Google and Cars.com reviews can only be responded to once. However, DealerRater and Facebook reviews can be responded to as many times as you'd like.
So here’s the thing.
Sometimes it makes sense to post a public review for third-party prospects who are reading the reviews and a private review for the individual customer.
Advertising on DealerRater
DealerRater offers advertising on its platform, and they have a specific set of requirements they expect dealerships to follow.
- Ads must not contain false or misleading statements or suggestions.
- All ads must display your dealership's logo.
- All ads must open a new browser window or tab.
- All non-Flash ad updates can be self-managed in the Dealer Panel.
- Ads cannot expand in size without prior authorization.
If you’re familiar with advertising in any capacity, this is all standard stuff. There are three available ad placements on DealerRater.
- Ads on dealer profile pages: Every Dealer Profile Page on DealerRater contains an advertising space located on the left-hand side of the page, above the ‘Recently Reviewed Employees’ and to the left of the most recent review on the page.
- Ads on dealer directory pages: DealerRater directories are divided up by brand of vehicle and by state, city, or zip/postal code (i.e., Volkswagen dealers in Massachusetts). Every directory page has an advertising space at the top of the page, with a specific set of dimensions (728 x 90 pixels).
- Ads on mobile format pages: These are ads that are viewed on a mobile device. They’re mobile versions of ads on dealer profile pages or ads on dealer directory pages.
When combined with the profile optimization strategies I’ve shared above, these advertising campaigns extend the reach of your dealership, enabling you to reach more customers. How do you use this to your advantage?
Here’s an obvious strategy.
You create ads using your best reviews, which you advertise on DealerRater and link to your DealerRater profile. It’s a straightforward way to take customers away from your competitors. It’s easy to verify and far more likely to be approved, as it keeps customers on DealerRater.com.
It’s a win/win all around.
Goal tracking via DealerRater
Using the DealerRater dealership app, you can track leads and online reviews; you can also update your profile, automate review requests, and syndicate reviews to third-party partners.
The app is available on Android and iOS devices.
Your DealerRater point-of-contact
Unlike mainstream review platforms, DealerRater is pretty upfront with their contact info. They make it easy for dealerships to get in touch with customer support. That’s necessary, especially if you’re paying for your account.
Phone: (800) 266-9455
This may seem like an obvious requirement until you try to reach someone at Google or Facebook regarding your business review. It’s a frustrating ordeal with mainstream platforms, so it’s nice to see that DealerRater makes this simple and easy for dealerships.
DealerRater reviews are a secret weapon for your dealership
It’s one of the best ways to promote your dealership to new and skeptical customers.
Using DealerRater reviews, you get your customers to vouch for you. By optimizing your profile, you increase the likelihood that customers will choose your dealership over a competitor.
When customers share their exciting news—they purchased a new car or truck from your dealership, their family and friends will ask about their experience. With DealerRater reviews, they’ll be able to show that their experience was wonderful.
Most Americans hate the car buying experience at a traditional dealership; with DealerRater, you get the chance to show you’re the exception to the rule.
