Writing Great Vehicle Descriptions
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Tuesday Tip Video Clip. Today, we’re going to talk about vehicle descriptions – not the “why you need them” part, we’ve gone over that enough in the past, and if you still don’t think you need descriptions, you can go on not selling cars or you can go watch our older videos.
Today, I want to help you write descriptions faster without sacrificing the quality of what you write.
Okay. So you’re sitting at your computer, you just exploded the VIN, and it’s time to write a description about this new vehicle on your lot. Where do you start?
Act like you’re describing the car to someone on the phone. They’ve just called and asked you to describe the car in more detail. If it helps, turn on the voice memo app on your phone, hold it up, and say what you’d say to the customer. You can write it down later.
Customer: Hi. I was wondering if you could tell me about that sweet car I see on your site.
You: “WOW!!!!! Crazy good deal! Excellent financing! Deals deals deals! No trade-in rejected! Come to our Dealership today! See more inventory on mywebsite.com!”
You wouldn’t say that because you’re not insane. What would you really say?
You: “It’s a gorgeous F-150 with a spotless red paint job and upgraded chrome bumpers. It was a 1-owner truck, and the guy really took amazing care of it. The interior is all leather, and still smells new. We’ve got all the maintenance records and it’s only got about 50,000 miles on it.”
That sounds a lot better, right? Take that and run with it. Have that phone conversation on your computer screen. Answer the questions: how does it run? What does it look like? What special features are there?
Try to get a solid two or three paragraphs of information – you should have at least one paragraph about the interior and another about the exterior. If there are any special features, or if you need to point out minor imperfections or dings, put those in a third paragraph.
If you want to put in a “standard” paragraph with dealership info, that’s fine – but a good rule of thumb is to make sure that your actual description is at least twice as long as your dealership info paragraph.
Done? Go back and check your spelling – if you’re using Chrome or Firefox, look for red lines under words for obvious errors, but read through it again just to be sure you catch anything that might be wrong. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, you might need to compose your description in Microsoft Word or another document editor so you can see your errors quickly… (and then go download Chrome or Firefox because Internet Explorer sucks)
After you check spelling, read your description out loud to yourself. If it doesn’t sound like something you’d say on the phone to a customer, fix it. You don’t scream at your customers, so you shouldn’t use multiple exclamation points. Also, for the sake of your customers’ eyes, if you’ve written in all caps, go back and capitalize appropriately.
Once you’ve gone through this process a few times, it’ll become second nature, and you’ll be writing awesome descriptions quickly, every time you stock in a new car.
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