We see dealerships’ websites making this mistake every single day, and we’re gonna tell you how to fix it. 

Today, September 1st, is national TOFU day. 

In marketing speak, TOFU stands for the top of the funnel, i.e. shoppers that are in the early stages of their buying cycle. This describes the vast majority of people visiting your website today. They’ve ended up there from a google search, a 3rd party aggregator, a paid campaign, an email newsletter, whatever.

The big mistake we see dealers making is thinking they’re all ready to buy a car right now, or “bottom of the funnel”, and steering them into a full-blown appraisal or digital retailing process. Just don’t.

To be fair, the dealers really aren’t at fault here. Us, the automotive software vendors are. Every company insists you use their call-to-action buttons, whether or not that’s actually what’s best for that end user and where they are in their buying journey.

Yes, some small percentage of shoppers will be ready to buy a car and spend more time answering questions, finding their VIN, taking pictures of their car to upload. 

The fix is to use your call-to-action buttons and their wording wisely. Steer those highly motivated shoppers to those tools. Everyone else, the 95% of your other website visitors? Give them the information they want quickly for their trade-in, for a payment quote, for whatever. 

And I hope I don’t have to eat tofu every time we talk about top of the funnel. See you next time.