By Izzy Alpert, CEO of EZ360
Earlier I wrote you can’t live with vAuto. Here I add you also can’t live without a photo studio.
A Photo Studio – even if you agreed with me and followed my thought process so far I am sure that I earned your mental-eye rolling already … “What does all that talking about vAuto has anything to do a photo studio ??? !!!
Ok, ok, I am getting to it. You see people don’t buy horsepower anymore! Gone are the days that people will make their decision to buy your vehicle because of a certain feature and even the price doesn’t matter that much. After all, the vast majority of your clients will finance (or lease ..) the vehicle thus $ 50 +/- per month makes no much difference to them (but a huge difference on the dealers’ bottom line…).
Car buyers simply know what kind of vehicle they are looking for (in many cases they are not even married to one make or model ..) setting the desired price and year range and clicking “search”. It would be great if that “search” option is exclusive to your web site but the fact of the matter is that it’s probably on Autotrader, Cars.com or Car Guru (I used alphabetic order and don’t mean to indicate that spending your advertisement budget any place else is wasting your money … )
And after they click on the “search” button? It will be handy-dandy (but quite boring indeed) if all dealers will get their fair share of clicking to the VDP (and, hopefully, submitting a leading / calling the dealer. The fact of the matter is that people are buying beauty.
People are buying beauty ??? !!! – well, let me rephrase it – people are shying away from ugliness / anything that is not appealing to their aesthetic value and that’s where your photo studio comes to play such an important role on your bottom line.
When the search results page open your potential clients are presented with many choices. Of course, they will scan the price, year, milage etc but their decision not to click on the VDP to any particular vehicle is largely dictated by the first picture.
Read my lips (nope, I am not related to GB. In fact, I am a proud Texan only about ½ my life … ) – Tress, bushes, meadows, big blaring sun reflection or even a telephone pole sticking behind a vehicle is a sure way to make them scroll down and skip that vehicle. Further more, (in my humble opinion …) “faking it” by shooting the vehicles outside and photoshopping the background away, replacing it with a background of the ealership front is even worse. It does look much nicer, no doubt, but but it takes watching just few pictures to realized that its a fake. The potential car buyer can “live with it” but it doesn’t eliminate the effect of direct sun light, reflections and shadows. Dealers who choose this practice just add to their advertizement and operation costs simply because ALL car buyers has the same human brain and we are all attrcated to vehichle that looks the best.
The only way to do it right is to eliminate the environment by shooting your vehicles in a photo studio, as sson as the detailing is done. Period.
“But a photo studio cost that much, I cannot afford it !” ? In my next segment I’ll discuss the economics of a photo studio. The reality is that a photo studio (done right and operated right …) not only increase profitability by increasing the numbers of vehicles sold at tier 1 pricing but also saves on operation costs. Dealers who do it right save $ 2,000 – $ 6,000 a month !
Stay tuned, I’ll be back with the actual numbers.
