The National Independent Auto Dealers Association recently surveyed over 10,000 car dealers throughout the United States.
The focus was on… surprise? Selling cars. A strange thing has happened besides the continued domination of online classified sites such as Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, Autotrader, and cars.com.
Print is making a comeback. And not just any old gawker rag such as ‘Truck Trader’, which many of us here in the South could have bought for a buck at any gas station, but newspapers.
While three-quarters of dealers use the online world to sell cars, newspapers have become a solid number two with more than one in five dealers now using paper and ink to give their cars more exposure.
This shouldn’t surprise you that much. Think about it. How many retirees from the less metropolitan areas of the USA don’t have smartphones? The answer according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center is 58%. This doesn’t include those folks of all ages who do have smartphones, but don’t use them to surf the internet.
This may be a passing trend, but with the average age of a car buyer stuck firmly on the edge of AARP territory, newspapers, especially in those areas that are more rural, are still a popular way to sell cars.