3 ways to elevate the car buying journey

Buying a car rarely happens in a single visit anymore. Shoppers move between search results, vehicle listings, reviews, social media, and video as they research what—and where—to buy.

Research from Boston Consulting Group found that only around half of 2,000 surveyed car buyers were fully satisfied with their purchasing experience, with the biggest disappointment occurring during the awareness stage.

For dealerships, that means the car-buying customer journey starts long before someone walks into the showroom. Every digital interaction has an opportunity to build confidence and move them closer to a decision.

In this guide, we'll look at the modern car shopping journey and how dealerships can improve the experience from initial research through to purchase.

What is the car buying customer journey?

The car buying customer journey is the process a buyer goes through from first considering a new vehicle to researching their options, choosing a dealership, and making a purchase.

For dealerships, understanding the car shopping journey means looking beyond the final sale. Every interaction along the way can influence which vehicles make the shortlist, which dealerships buyers trust, and whether they feel confident enough to take the next step.

The journey can broadly be understood across four stages:

• Awareness: The buyer begins exploring vehicles and considering what might suit them.

• Research and consideration: They compare vehicles, prices, dealerships, reviews, and other information.

• Purchase: The buyer moves from consideration to contacting a dealership, viewing or test-driving a vehicle, and completing the sale.

• Post-purchase: The relationship continues through ownership, servicing, reviews, and potentially the buyer's next vehicle.

The important part is that buyers can move backwards and forwards between these stages rather than following them in a straight line.

How has the car shopping journey changed?

The biggest change in the car shopping journey is how much of it now happens before a buyer ever speaks to a dealership.

Shoppers can research models, compare prices, explore available inventory, watch videos, and read reviews independently. By the time they make contact, they may already have narrowed their options considerably.

That changes what dealerships need to deliver throughout the journey. Rather than focusing primarily on the point of sale, they need to support buyers from the moment they start exploring their options.

The question becomes: how can dealerships make each stage of that journey better?

How to improve the car buying customer journey

1. Have an Omni-Channel Presence

If a car buying journey starts online, how can it continue at the physical dealership without creating friction?

Buyers can move between online research and the showroom throughout their journey, so those experiences need to feel connected. Information a shopper finds online should match what they encounter when they contact or visit the dealership, from vehicle availability and pricing to how the car is presented.

An omnichannel approach helps create that continuity. Instead of treating the website, digital marketing, and physical showroom as separate experiences, dealerships can make it easier for buyers to pick up where they left off.

That matters because convenience isn't just about offering more ways to interact with a dealership. It's about making the transition between those interactions feel effortless.

2. Optimize your car listing content

In a sea of competitors offering the same vehicles at similar price points, how can your dealership stand out?

Hint: with your branding and how you present your vehicles.

Starting with the basics, using real, actual photos of your stock is crucial. According to Kelley Blue Book, 90% of vehicle shoppers prefer viewing actual photos of new vehicles on the dealer's lot over stock images​​.

And why not incorporate the most popular format of all: video? A recent study by Google revealed that over 75% of auto shoppers were influenced by online video in their purchases​​. From an SEO perspective, advertising your videos on platforms like YouTube helps expand your reach and drive even more traffic to your website.

3. Personalize the car shopping journey

Personalization can make the car shopping journey more relevant by helping buyers find vehicles that match what they're actually looking for.

Meta’s Automotive Inventory Ads (AIA) are a perfect example of this. Their Machine Learning and AI personalize the customer experience by leveraging customer data and presenting active car buyers with relevant ads based on their online behavior, interests, and geographic location.

Following the release of Meta’s new Product Level Video (PLV), an extension of AIA, sellers can now advertise their entire catalog with engaging videos, rather than only images. For car dealers, it’s a no-brainer: they can advertise their entire inventory seamlessly and in multiple formats, while fully leveraging Meta’s vast user base and smart targeting capabilities.

How AI can support the car buying journey

Creating a better car buying customer journey becomes more difficult when you're managing hundreds or thousands of vehicles. Every car needs accurate, engaging content, and that content needs to be ready wherever buyers encounter the vehicle.

AI and automation can help dealerships scale that experience without scaling the manual workload alongside it.

At Phyron, vehicle photos and inventory data can be used to create and update content automatically, helping dealerships maintain a consistent experience across their stock and throughout the digital buying journey.

Consistent photos every time

Vehicle photography is often captured across different locations, by different people, and under different conditions. Without a consistent process, that can lead to noticeable differences in how inventory is presented online.

The Phyron App guides teams through capturing vehicle photography consistently. AI can then enhance those images with features such as background replacement, lighting adjustments, and vehicle repositioning.

The result is a more consistent visual experience for buyers as they compare vehicles, without requiring every image to be edited manually.

Personalized videos at scale

Video can help buyers get a better sense of a vehicle before they ever see it in person. But creating a unique video for every car manually quickly becomes difficult when you're managing a large inventory.

Phyron uses existing vehicle photos and data to automatically create Inventory Videos for individual cars. Each video can highlight the vehicle's features and selling points, while adapting to different formats and placements across the digital journey.

This allows dealerships to make video a consistent part of the car shopping journey, rather than reserving it for selected vehicles or campaigns.

Fully automated and always on

A strong car buying journey depends on buyers seeing accurate, up-to-date inventory wherever they encounter it.

Phyron connects to a dealership's inventory data to automatically create and update vehicle content as that data changes. The same approach extends to Inventory Ads, where available stock can be promoted with vehicle-specific creative, including video.

For buyers, the technology sits in the background. They simply get a more consistent experience as they move through their car shopping journey.

Want to create a more engaging car buying journey without adding more manual work? Book a demo with Phyron to see how AI-powered content can support your inventory at scale.