Dealer Website Stats That Make You Go “Hmmm…”

Jun 09, 2022

Photo from Unsplash

Originally Posted On: https://blog.surgemetrix.com/dealer-websites-stats-that-make-you-go-hmmm/

Here are some interesting stats that should make you go “Hmmm.”. We coded a crawler that analyzed over 10,000 franchise dealership websites for two simple data points:

If the website had Spanish language content; and
The number of Hispanics/Latinos living within 50 miles of the dealership.

What we wanted understand was what portion of franchise websites had Spanish language content on their website as an indicator of whether the dealership was marketing to the Hispanic community in their area. Not surprisingly, once the data was collected by our trusty little crawler we aggregated the data to provide answers to the following questions:

What percentage of all dealer websites had Spanish content?
What percent of dealer websites had Spanish content when there were over 100k Hispanics within 50 miles?

The numbers are concerning. Check out this infographic and let’s see if you see why I made this observation.

What’s the Problem?

Of the 10,290 dealer websites we sampled, only 13.9% had Spanish content. Then, although over half of the dealers had more than 100,000 Hispanics within 50 miles of their dealerships, over 3/4s had no Spanish language content. This doesn’t make sense.

Let’s look at the facts. Over 20% of the US population is Hispanic and that share continues to grow especially when over 50% of US births are of Hispanic origin. What’s more important is that Hispanic spending power is massive. In 1990, it was just $210 billion. Now, as of 2020, it reached $1.7 trillion. What this tells us is that we have a rapidly growing middle class that can buy cars, but many dealers act as if these numbers do not exist.

Something to Think About

With the US Hispanic population rapidly maturing into a economic powerhouse, what are you doing to assess the opportunity for marketing to the community in your area. If you own a franchise, your ability to create new markets outside your area is limited. Therefore, your smartest move is to segment and optimize your local market. You probably already do this via equity mining and other similar methods, but are you doing it with your local Hispanic community? If not, why not?

Any Obstacle Can be Overcome

If you feel that your options are limited because you don’t have bilingual staff, you don’t know how many Hispanics live around your dealership, you don’t understand the market, or any other question, know that these are obstacles that are easily overcome. We’ve helped dealers hire staff, adapt their sales processes, launch Spanish language digital marketing campaigns, create Spanish language content for their website, and even develop methods to generate Spanish language reviews. This stuff isn’t rocket science. It just requires the willingness to change and the support to get things done.