Three steps to boost the media quality of your vehicle listings

4 December - 2023

Staff MotorK

In today’s automotive business, being online with your inventory is mandatory to be able to tap into customer searches, which nowadays are mostly performed digitally.

But the way this is done can also make the difference when it comes to increasing lead generation. A successful strategy to handle your vehicle listings should therefore take three essential steps into account:

feature high-quality media both in your digital showroom and online ads, focusing on professional vehicle photos and videos.
make sure your vehicle detail pages are complete and accurate, and contain the right keywords to match online searches.
ensure your inventory is updated in real time (there is nothing worse than generating leads for a vehicle that is no longer available, as this is often perceived as a dealer’s tactic to trick users into visiting their website).

To be able to stand out in the crowded online space, complying with the bare minimum requirements is not enough: if a few years back having a home page and a few classified ads could already offer a competitive edge, now is the time to think of a consistent and effective digital identity as part of a dealer’s online strategy and innovation roadmap.

How can you achieve quality at scale?

The concept of quality is made of two elements: the intrinsic quality, which refers to the overall worth of your product or service, and the perceived quality, which is the result of how you present your offer. For automotive distribution, quality is a key ingredient for business success but delivering it takes up a huge amount of resources – manpower, time and money. How can you achieve quality without sacrificing profitability or slowing down your operations? In other words, how can you build quality at scale? Let’s put this in numbers. Processing one car from physical to digital requires two hours on average and the support of a professional photographer available on site every time a new vehicle comes into stock. It’s easy to understand that dealers simply cannot afford such a complex routine to stay efficient and competitive. As a result, on average 12% of dealerships’ inventory is showcased with no photos at all (Source: MotorK internal analysis), which is a slow-moving stock ending up to stay unsold for 30% more time. To be able to produce high-quality media for your listings in a time- and budget-savvy manner, you therefore need a digital solution specifically designed for photo editing and tailored to the dealers’ needs; this way, you will increase execution speed five times while realising a significant return on your investment.

A media wizard powered by AI

MotorK’s StockSparK App has been developed to provide automotive distributors with a powerful instrument for qualitative inventory management. Paired with StockSparK and both part of the SparK Platform, the first fully integrated Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for automotive distribution, this app empowers dealers to maximise inventory performance by creating high-quality listings for their stock. With just one tool, you can have a positive impact on lead generation and expand your advertising capabilities. Thanks to the integration of generative artificial intelligence, StockSparK App also offers advanced features such as background removal – that works on both newly taken and pre-existing images – and 360° animations to streamline the editing process and obtain consistent and effective imagery throughout a dealer’s website and ads.

Step One: high-quality media

You don’t need to be a professional to take excellent photos of your inventory; you only have to follow a few basic rules and leave the heavy-duty work to the app:

position the vehicle on a solid ground, with wheels in line, doors, windows and hatches closed and headlights off
ensure there is good lighting
when shooting, ensure the entire vehicle is in frame (only one at a time)
avoid capturing strong reflections (e.g. wet vehicles, sunset light, posters or coloured billboards in the background)

The Guided Shooting Wizardwill take you through the entire process; from creating a vehicle page to its publishing, you would only need as long as 10 minutes.

Step Two: vehicle detail page

Thanks to the database integration, you will have easy access to the features of over 450 car models and more than 5,700 versions. You will be able to recall the relevant technical specifications, including WLTP, in seconds and automatically populate your page with exactly the contents your potential clients will be looking for.

Step Three: updated inventory

Besides being able to publish your inventory in your preferred portals, selecting from a range of 60 classified options, you will also have all the right instruments to keep your offer updated at any time. In the digital world, trust is a serious matter and you don’t want to lose a lead because you deceived a potential customer with a non-existent vehicle. Instead, you will be in the best position to maintain an excellent stock rotation and bring the perfect vehicle to the right customer. By analysing the interactions with vehicle listings created using StockSparK App, we discovered a 52% increase in clicks clearly related to the perceived quality of the vehicles, enhanced thanks to the professional-looking photos made with the support of artificial intelligence. This is what we call a win-win scenario!

Are you curious to know more about the MotorK solutions for effective inventory management and StockSparK App? Please get in touch.