How Much Should a Golf Cart Dealer Spend on Marketing? Setting the Number Without a Rule of Thumb

How much should a golf cart dealer spend on marketing? Not a share of revenue. No percentage fits a cart lot. Start from the carts you need to move, put your own gross on them, and pay only for the extra buyers the lot will not get on its own. This post shows you how to set that number.

Why does no percentage rule fit a golf cart dealership?

Because a golf cart dealership is not a steady business, and every percentage rule assumes one.

Ask the question around and you will get a percentage anyway. Some share of revenue, quoted with a straight face by someone who has never had nine carts sitting on the front row since March.

Picture Tuesday, 7:15 a.m. The owner is in the back office before the doors open. Bank statement on the left. Ad invoice on the right. Out the window, a row of lifted four-seaters that came in for spring and are still there. He is trying to decide whether that invoice was worth it, and a share of last year’s revenue tells him nothing.

A cart dealership swings hard. July and January at the same store can be different businesses. Gross on a new six-seater is not gross on a used two-seater that came in on trade.

A percentage flattens all of that into one number. It overspends in the months you did not need it and underspends in the months that would have paid. Start from the lot instead.

How much should a golf cart dealer spend on marketing this month?

Work backwards from the carts you need to move. Four steps.

Start with the carts. Not last year’s revenue. This month’s lot. How many carts do you need to sell this month, and how many will sell on their own with the traffic you already have? The gap between those two numbers is the whole reason a golf cart dealer marketing budget exists. No gap, no extra spend.

Put your own gross on the gap. You know what you make on a cart, after the trade, the freight and the accessories thrown in to close. Multiply the carts in the gap by that number.

Count what a buyer who shows up is worth. Not a lead. A buyer who walks onto the lot or calls and stays on the phone. Check your own logbook: of the buyers who showed up last month, how many left in a cart? That turns the carts in the gap into a number of buyers you need who were not coming anyway.

Decide what you will pay for one more of them. This is the only judgment call. What slice of one cart’s gross would you hand over to bring one more real buyer onto the lot? Multiply it by the buyers you need and you have your number.

Here is the arithmetic with numbers I am making up on the spot, so nobody quotes them back to me. They are not a benchmark. Say you need to move twelve more carts than the lot will move on its own. Say your logbook says one buyer in three who shows up drives one home. That is thirty-six more buyers who need to show up. Say you would give up a slice of a cart’s gross to get one of them in the door. Thirty-six times that slice is your demand budget, tied to twelve real carts instead of a spreadsheet.

Turning the Facebook and Instagram part of it into a number of its own is covered in golf cart Facebook ads budget.

What has to be fixed before you buy any traffic?

The place the buyer lands. Do not buy a single click into a website where a buyer cannot shop the inventory on a phone.

A woman sees your ad on a Sunday night, taps it, and lands on a home page with a stock photo and a phone number. She wants to see the lifted six-seaters you have, with prices. The inventory page has not been touched since the spring show and shows four carts, two of them sold. She closes it. You paid for that visit, and you will never know she existed.

Every dollar of demand you buy is multiplied by how well the site turns a visit into a call or a message. If that rate is low, more traffic makes the leak bigger. The 72-cart story below is a fix-first story: the site’s lead rate went from 0.17 percent to 1.1 percent, and the leads followed.

So before you set a number for ads, pull up your own site on your phone and shop it like a buyer. Every cart has its own page, real photos, a real price, and a way to ask about that exact unit. If any of that fails, the first money goes there. The marketing strategy for golf cart dealers lays out why the order matters more than the spend. The places that budget can go are compared in golf cart dealer advertising.

What is the difference between the showroom cost and the demand lever?

A cart dealership’s marketing money is two kinds of money. Keep them on separate lines of the whiteboard.

The online showroom is a fixed cost. It is the site where your inventory lives, every cart with its own page, updated from a phone. It is the lot lease of the internet: the price of being open to a buyer at 10:30 on a Sunday night when the gate is locked. What a dealer should expect to pay for one is in what a dealer website should cost.

Demand creation is a lever. Ads, boosted inventory, anything that puts your carts in front of a family that was not searching yet, or in front of the one who is searching right now. This is the number the four steps produce. Set it in January and leave it all year, and it is just a second fixed cost.

The showroom is the cost of being open. The lever is the cost of being busy.

How do you split money between fixing the site and buying demand?

You do not split it down the middle. You fill the first bucket before you pour anything into the second.

The site comes first because it decides what each ad dollar is worth. A leaking site makes every ad cost more per cart sold.

Here is the order, top to bottom:

1. Every cart on its own page. Real photos, a real price, the seats, lift, battery and hours in text, and a button to ask about that unit.
2. The lot and the site match. A cart sold Saturday comes off by Monday. A trade that came in Thursday is on the site by Friday.
3. Someone answers. A message that sits until Monday is money spent on nothing.
4. Then demand. Ads pointed at specific carts, into pages that are ready for them.

Picture Wednesday, 3:20 p.m. A used four-seater comes in on trade. By 3:45 it has a page with photos and a price. That cart is ready for an ad.

Once the first three are solid, the lever gets the new money. If they slip, the lever pauses until they are fixed.

How should spend change with the season in your market?

The season changes the gap, and it changes when the money has to go out.

Every market has its own calendar. A lake town sells before the docks go in. A beach town sells before the rental houses fill. Your logbook knows yours.

In peak season the gap is small. Buyers are already coming, so the extra spend can be very little. The best spending in a busy month is aimed, not broad: the aged carts, the carts with the fattest gross.

The money that matters goes out before the season. A family that buys in April started looking in February. Spending ahead of your buying season is laid out region by region in when do golf carts sell.

In slow season the gap is wide, so the number can go up. Attention can also be cheaper when fewer dealers in your area are bidding for it. A Florida dealer in January is selling to people who just arrived for the winter, while a dealer up north is waiting for the snow to melt. That is a principle, not a figure.

Spend where the gap is wide and attention is cheap. The plan for that stretch is in golf cart dealer slow season.

What do you cut first when a month is slow?

Cut the demand that was not bringing buyers who showed up. In this order.

First, cut anything you cannot trace to a buyer. If a line on the invoice has never been tied to a person who called about a cart or walked onto the lot, it goes.

Second, cut broad before aimed. The ad that shows “golf carts” to the whole county goes before the ad that shows the lifted four-seater at $8,900 to families near the lake. Aimed spend has a cart behind it. Broad spend has a hope behind it.

Third, shrink the circle before you go to zero. Fewer miles, aimed at the carts you already picked.

Last, pause the lever. Pausing is for this month only. Run the four steps again on the first Monday.

What should you never cut in a slow month?

The things that keep you open. Every buyer who does show up in a slow month is worth more.

The online showroom. Never the showroom. The dealership that goes dark in January starts spring from a dead website.

The inventory updates. Aged carts get repriced in a slow month. If the site still shows the old price, the buyer who would jump on the new one never sees it.

The answer. Somebody on your team still replies to every message within minutes.

The aimed ad on your oldest cart. If one cart has sat since spring, the small ad behind it is the last line to go.

Picture a Thursday in January, 4:50 p.m. The lot is quiet. A text comes in about the red six-seater with the lift kit. The cart has a page, the price on it is the new one, and the salesperson answers at 4:52. Cheap to run, ready for the one buyer who shows up.

What is the one number to check before raising the spend?

Leads that got a call back within minutes. Check that before you spend one more dollar on demand.

A message comes in at 6:40 on a Saturday evening about a used four-seater. The salesperson who would have answered it is at his kid’s game. It gets a reply Monday at 10. That buyer bought somewhere on Sunday. More budget would have brought more of those messages to die over the weekend.

So pull last month’s leads and put two columns next to each one: when it came in, and when a human called or texted back. Count the ones answered within minutes. If that share is low, the cheapest marketing you will do this year is fixing it, and no spend goes up until it is fixed. The minute-by-minute version is in golf cart lead follow-up.

The second number is the one from step three: of the buyers who showed up, how many bought. If that dropped, the problem is on the floor, not in the ad account, and the numbers a golf cart dealership should track will show you which part of the floor.

How do you know a month’s spend paid?

Match the sold carts to where their buyers came from. If you cannot do that, you do not know, and nobody else does either.

An ad report tells you clicks and messages. Only your deal file tells you which cart left the lot.

Once a month:

1. List every cart sold. Stock number, the buyer’s first name, the gross.
2. Write the source next to each one. Ask the buyer at the desk how she found you. Write down her answer, not the one you hoped for.
3. Add up gross by source. Ads, search, walk-in, referral, repeat buyer.
4. Put the spend next to it. If a source took money and shows no sold cart, that is a line to question next month.

Say, with numbers made up for the example, that the ad line shows three carts sold to buyers who said they saw the ad. You know your gross on those three. You know what the ad cost. Now you can see whether that slice of gross was worth handing over.

The sheet that makes this easy are in golf cart lead tracking. Counting which spend sold carts is how next month’s number gets smarter.

What does the 72-cart case study say about the budget?

It says the order matters more than the size.

The dealership in 72 aged golf carts in 45 days went from 24 carts sold in a month to 72 aged golf carts sold in 45 days, in winter. That was $587,284 in carts that had been sitting.

The numbers to notice are the site’s numbers. Roughly 10,000 visitors had produced 17 leads, a rate of 0.17 percent. The rate went to 1.1 percent. Qualified leads went up 542 percent. New leads got a pre-sale video, and the floor ran one sales process.

Read it the way this post reads a budget. The place buyers landed worked better, so more of the people who showed up online reached out. And it happened in winter.

The carts that needed to move were the aged ones. Nothing in that story tells you what your number should be. All of it tells you how to find it.

Which channel should get the demand money?

The one that matches the buyer you are missing. Two kinds of buyers, two kinds of ads.

Facebook ads for golf cart dealers reach the family that was not searching yet. She is scrolling on a Tuesday night and sees the six-seater in the color she likes.

Search ads catch the buyer who is already looking. She types what she wants into Google at lunch and picks from what shows up. Google Ads for golf cart dealers covers how that works for a cart lot, and golf cart PPC covers when search is worth paying for and when it is not.

The trap is buying the buyers instead of earning them. A list of names sold by a lead company is not thirty-six buyers who showed up. It is thirty-six phone numbers other dealers also bought. The difference is in buying golf cart leads and golf cart dealer lead generation.

How do you keep the budget honest month to month?

Recalculate it once a month, on the same day. The first Monday works, because last month is closed and the new lot is in front of you.

1. Carts. What does the lot need to move this month, and how much of that moves on its own? That is the gap.
2. Buyers. Of the buyers who showed up last month, how many bought, and how many leads got a reply within minutes?
3. Money. Multiply the buyers you need by what you decided one is worth. That is the lever for this month.

Then: which carts does this money go behind? A golf cart dealer marketing budget with no cart names on it is a wish. Golf cart dealer inventory management is how you pick them.

Once a year, step back further. Set next year’s number in December, with twelve monthly sheets in front of you. The ten questions for that sit-down are in the golf cart dealer year end review.

The honest answer to the question in the title is a method, not a number. Run it on the first Monday, point the money at specific carts, and never buy traffic into a site a buyer cannot shop from her phone.

Where does Cart Launch fit?

We build the fixed half, and we can run part of the lever.

Cart Launch builds the dealer’s online showroom. Every cart on your lot gets its own page, with real photos, a real price and the details in text. Your team updates it from a phone, so the site matches the lot the same day. You can see which carts got looked at and who reached out. The domain and the content stay yours. That is what golf cart dealer websites are supposed to do.

We run Facebook and Instagram ads for established dealers, only after the online showroom is ready to catch what the ad sends. We run Google search ads for dealers as well. We do not answer or follow up the leads. We do not post for you. Your team does that.

On the lever, we think the way this post does: fix the gaps first, then create demand pointed at specific carts. How that works with a dealer is on our golf cart dealer marketing page. We will not hand you a percentage.

Between the owners there is 14+ years operating in 8-figure golf cart dealerships.

If you want to run the four steps on your own lot with someone who has done it, book a call. The site calls it a free audit: we audit your online sales process, how buyers find you, what they see and what happens after they reach out, and walk you through where the biggest opportunities are.

Keep reading

• 72 golf carts in 45 days: the case study
• Golf cart dealer slow season: keep the lot moving when the calls stop
• Golf cart lead follow-up: the first five minutes decide the sale