Dealership Marketing Software for Every Sales Channel

One system for campaigns, landing pages, texting, email, voice and paid ads, with the lead flow landing in the same place your team already works.

Walk into almost any store and ask where last month's sold units came from. You will get an answer, and roughly half of it will be a guess. That is not because managers are careless. It is because the pieces live in different places. The ad platform reports clicks. The website vendor reports form fills. The lead provider reports deliveries. The CRM reports appointments. The accounting office reports sold units. No two of those systems agree on what a lead is, and nobody has time to reconcile them by hand every month.

The gap costs money in a specific way. When you cannot see which channel produced the sold unit, you cannot cut the channel that did not, so you keep paying for all of them. Marketing budgets at dealerships tend to be sticky for exactly that reason. The line item survives because nobody can prove it should not.

The fix is not a better spreadsheet. It is putting the campaign, the lead, the conversation and the deal in one system so the connection is recorded at the moment it happens instead of reconstructed at the end of the month. That is the design principle behind the marketing side of our platform, and it is why the marketing tools and the CRM are the same product rather than two products that exchange files.

Vague marketing language is how software gets oversold, so here is the actual surface. On the outbound side you get SMS campaigns with campaign lists, email campaigns with lists, bulk email with recipient management, voicemail drop with recipient lists, and RCS messaging that falls back to SMS when a handset does not support it. On the inbound side you get lead pages, which is a landing page builder with per page URL settings, a free live chat widget for your website, and personal salesperson websites so individual people can run their own traffic.

The paid side has its own module for ads and targeting, plus Leads Manager, a self service campaign builder with a zone editor. That last one matters more than it sounds. Most dealers cannot change their own targeting without opening a ticket and waiting three days. Leads Manager lets a store adjust the zone it is buying in without asking anyone's permission, which is the difference between reacting to a slow week and reading about it later.

Automation ties them together: automations and automation lists, task automation, follow up processes, drip leads with a drip editor, reminders and appointments. A campaign that generates a lead can immediately hand that lead to a follow up process with its own cadence rather than dropping it into an inbox and hoping.

Every campaign needs somewhere to land, and sending paid traffic to a generic inventory page is the most common way dealers waste money. The click cost is the same whether the page converts or not.

Lead pages is a landing page builder inside the platform with per page URL settings, so a trade in campaign, a credit campaign and a model specific campaign can each have their own page with its own form and its own tracking. Submissions land directly in the lead inbox and enter distribution rules like any other lead, which means the response clock starts immediately rather than after somebody checks an email account.

Two pieces of advice from watching stores do this well. Build one page per offer rather than one page for everything, because a page that tries to serve three audiences converts worse than three pages that each serve one. And ask fewer questions than you want to. Every extra field costs completions, and you can qualify on the phone far better than a form can qualify for you. Our page on website lead attribution covers how to keep the source attached once the form is submitted.

Marketing at a dealership is mostly conversation, and the conversation happens across three channels whether you plan for it or not. Handling all three in one system is what keeps the record intact.

Text is where response rates live, and it is also where compliance risk lives, so consent handling and opt out records are not optional. LeadLocate runs SMS and MMS with full threading, campaign sends, and RCS with SMS fallback for handsets that support the richer format. Email includes a real inbox, a composer, single message views, an archive, campaigns and bulk sending, plus email domain authentication so your messages are recognized as yours. Voice runs through an IVR with call routing and number management, click to call with a VoIP softphone, call recording with transcription, and voicemail drop.

The two hygiene tools are the ones dealers never expect. A phone validator and an email validator, built in. Before a bulk send goes out, bad addresses and dead numbers can be cleared out instead of burning your sending reputation and your dial time. At campaign scale that is not a nice extra, it is the difference between reaching an inbox and reaching a spam folder for the next six months. More on that in text message marketing.

The cheapest traffic a store has is the traffic it already paid for once. Sold customers, unsold shoppers from four months ago, service customers, people whose lease is running out, and every lead that went cold before anyone finished the follow up cadence.

The platform holds all of that in one place: customer profiles with encrypted personally identifiable information, contact import so you can bring in a list you already own, contacts and lists, and campaign tools that can address any segment you can define. Drip leads with a drip editor let you build a long horizon cadence that keeps running without anyone remembering to run it, which is the whole point, because remembering is what fails first in a busy month.

A caution worth stating plainly. Campaigns to your existing base are subject to the same consent rules as everything else, and financing related campaigns run under fair lending rules that forbid narrowing an audience by age, gender, income, marital status, household size, education, language or ZIP. We build the tools to respect that, and a vendor who encourages you to target around those categories is handing you a problem, not an advantage.

Marketing software with no traffic is a car with no fuel, so most stores buy the software as part of a lead program rather than on its own.

Our lead programs are territory based. You choose a zone around your store and every lead submitted in that zone comes to you exclusively rather than being resold to three competitors. Inbound buyer leads are a mix: some arrive VIN specific against advertised inventory, others are open shoppers describing what they want in general terms. We never promise a ratio because we do not control which customer fills out which form.

The seller side, Marketplace Acquisitions, is inbound and opt in. Local owners fill out a vehicle offer request and ask to be contacted by a dealership about selling their car. That is an acquisition channel for stores that need used inventory and cannot buy it profitably at auction. The seller leads page explains how it works end to end.

Nothing is filtered or scored. We ask pre screening questions at capture and deliver everything that comes in, and lead problems are handled through post delivery replacement review rather than with a quality promise made before anyone has called. That is a more honest arrangement, and it also sets expectations correctly, which is what what to expect from car sales leads is for.

Three reporting layers ship with the platform. Activity reporting shows what individual people did, which is only meaningful because the communication happens inside the system rather than on personal cell phones. Company reporting covers store level performance. Management reporting rolls it up for whoever is looking at the whole operation.

The number most stores should watch first is time to first response by source, because it is the most controllable variable in the entire funnel and it varies wildly between channels at the same store. The second is follow up depth, meaning how many touches a lead actually gets before everyone quietly gives up. Industry research has repeatedly found that follow up stops far earlier than managers believe, and the data inside your own CRM will tell you whether that is true in your store rather than in a study.

Here is an illustrative example, and it is illustrative only, not a promise. If a store spends $4,000 in a month on a channel and books 40 leads from it, the cost per lead is $100. If the same $4,000 produces 25 leads that close at twice the rate, the cost per sold unit is lower even though the cost per lead looks worse. Cost per lead is the metric that misleads dealers most often. Judge channels on cost per sold unit, and make sure your system can actually tell you that.

An honest scope statement saves everyone a wasted demo. LeadLocate is not a dealer management system. There is no general ledger, no accounts payable or receivable, no payroll, no deal posting to accounting, no title and registration processing, no parts inventory, no repair orders and no service scheduling. You keep whatever system you use for those and run the marketing and CRM layer alongside it.

We also do not sell website hosting for your main dealership site. What we provide is lead pages for campaigns, personal salesperson websites, a live chat widget you can add to the site you already have, and customer facing deal pages. If a full site rebuild is what you are shopping, the website platform page lays out what we do and do not cover.

And no guarantees. We cannot promise lead counts, close rates, credit quality or sales results, because the consumer controls most of that and your process controls the rest. What we can do is show you the tools running and price them so the decision stays month to month.

Everything is month to month with no long term contract. CRM Only is $199 a month and includes the CRM, the communication stack and the campaign tools, which is the right starting point if you already have lead flow. Lead Data Only is $599. Inbound buyer leads start at $799. Marketplace Acquisitions starts at $999. The Buyers and Sellers Hybrid Plan starts at $1,599. Skip A Month is $199 and exists so a store can pause lead delivery through a slow stretch without losing its data or its territory.

The way stores usually start is one channel at a time. Pick the campaign you already know you should be running and are not, build the landing page, wire the follow up process behind it, and run it for thirty days with a real budget rather than a token one. Then look at the three numbers that matter: leads in, appointments set, units sold. Add the next channel once the first one has a process behind it.

Rolling out six channels in the same week is how stores end up with six half run campaigns and no conclusion. If you want to see the campaign tools working before you decide anything, the demo is the fastest way, or call 844-376-2274 and ask directly.

Do we have to buy leads to use the marketing tools?

No. CRM Only is $199 a month and includes the campaign tools, landing pages, texting, email, voice and reporting. Lead programs are priced separately and start at $799 a month for inbound buyer leads.

Can we import our existing customer list?

Yes. Contact import brings in a list you already own, and customer profiles store personally identifiable information encrypted. Consent and opt out status should come across with the list, because a customer who opted out stays opted out.

Will this replace our website?

No. We provide lead pages for campaigns, personal salesperson websites, a free live chat widget for the site you already have, and customer facing deal pages. Your main dealership website stays with whoever hosts it now.

How do you attribute a sold unit back to a campaign?

Because the campaign, the lead, the conversation and the deal all live in the same platform, the source stays attached to the record rather than being reconstructed later. Reporting then rolls that up at the person, store and management level.

Is text message marketing compliant out of the box?

The tools support consent handling, opt out records and a blacklist with import, but compliance is a shared responsibility. You still need a lawful basis to contact people, and financing related campaigns run under fair lending rules that restrict how an audience can be narrowed.

How long before we can tell if a channel is working?

Give any channel thirty days with a real budget and a follow up process behind it, then judge it on cost per sold unit rather than cost per lead. We cannot guarantee results, and any vendor who puts a number on that before you start is guessing.

We will build the landing page, wire the follow up process behind it and show you where every lead came from. Month to month, no long term contract.