Marketing Lessons from LingsCars - the Best Website Ever

Why I love Lings Cars

If anyone asks me what my favorite website is, there’s only one answer, LingsCars.com! It’s a masterwork of sales but looks like it came straight out of geocities.

Since I need to hit 12 blog posts by tomorrow, I’m going to put aside SEO value and write about this masterwork.

How to Stand Out In a Crowded Market

If you’re in marketing or sales, you should be familiar with Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising. One of the key concepts in this book is the 5 stages of Market Sophistication.

As a market gets more competitive and sophisticated, the way you need to talk to your audience changes to get them to buy

Here are the 5 levels of a market:

• Level 1: Birth of market: Just make any claim.
• Level 2: Make the claim bigger than your competition.
• Level 3: Introduce a mechanism that offers a logical reason why your claim is achievable.
• Level 4: Create a better mechanism, or an upgraded version of the previous mechanism.
• Level 5: Because the market’s skepticism is at its highest, they may no longer believe in mechanisms.

At level 5, the marketing is no longer about the actual product, it’s about the customer, it becomes about identity and personality.

A great example of this is the evolution of the ipod ads. At the end, when the market was saturated, Apple ads weren’t about the product at all. Instead it was about the feeling of using an ipod,

Car leasing is a Level 5 market and so the only way to success is to make it about personality. Ling Valentine completely succeeds, and has cracked the market to become the #1 independent car leaser in the UK.

Stop right now and ask yourself how competitive is your market? Are you using the right claims for your audience?

Sales Techniques

Ling is a natural master at sales.

Her website explains every step of the sales process.

Let’s break down the sales page

Her sales pages are lengthy. If you’re selling a complex product, it can be better to have a long page, but it needs to be easy to navigate and include multiple opportunities for customers to move forward with their purchase.

Ling even includes an index for her sales page, making it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Ling gives every car a “unique mechanism” or personality, the Volvo V60 becomes an “Ikea Wagon” - she calls out the target customer for each car.

Her calls to action are all over the page, and she explains exactly what will happen in the order process. There’s even a youtube video on the page explaining exactly how to fill in the order form.

She removes any hesitation by conquering every objection or unknown in the customer’s head.

In the end, how could you buy a car from anyone else?

One aspect I really like is how she minimizes the cost of the car by comparing it to a pack of cigarettes and big macs. Pictures below.

At every scroll, you’re hit with more and more proof of happy customers. Her map of the UK is absolutely covered with customers, there are no blank spots left, now that is proof.

Every single sentence is written in plain and easy to understand English. This really helps when you're selling something complicated like a car lease.

It’s the little things

Ling has added PERSONALITY into every single word on the page, let’s look at some examples.

Instead of “Business Hours 9am-5pm” It’s “We live inside our car leasing website all day Monday to Friday 9am-6pm.”

“Made in the People's Republic of China (Ling, not the website... which was handcrafted by Ling, in the UK)”

Take a look at the privacy policy! It's hilarious and has Ling in a Tank protecting your data.

Proof, Proof, and More Proof

You can never go wrong adding more proof to your website. Ling goes the extra mile and shows exactly how many customers are in each stage of the process, a map with thousands of customers, and even a picture of Ling made out of a mosiac of thousands of customer photos. There are dozens of quotes from prominant news media calling her the "Leader of the Pack"

FAQ and staff section

The FAQ video promises it's the best FAQ section in the world, and it doesn't disappoint! Another example of taking a normally boring page and making it into something special

Each FAQ video has a chinese flight attendant asking the question while ridiculous situations are happening like the plane crashing.

The meet the staff page is done in the style of the Brooklyn 99 intro, showing the staff in ridiculous situations.

I could talk all day about LingsCars.com and I probably will one of these days. But the best thing you could do it see for yourself.

There are hundreds of examples of amazing marketing on this website, and I hope we all realize that our businesses can make the world a less boring place.