Convert Unsold Leads with Facebook (part 3)

Making the Most of Your Ad Campaigns

As we wrap up this blog series, the final takeaway we’d like to leave you with is how to make the most of your ad campaigns on Facebook.

So, how should your dealership best use Facebook to reach your audience? First, it’s necessary to define what you want each campaign to accomplish.

Designing a Facebook Ad Campaign

From a sales perspective, you can advertise individual vehicles, driving traffic directly to a specific vehicle display page (VDP). You can also let shoppers know about your dealership’s upcoming sales and community events.

From a service standpoint, Facebook ad campaigns about specials in that department can reach customers who haven’t been in for a while and win back their business, along with increasing loyalty for those who have.

The ability to segment your market allows you to reconnect with other leads, as well, such as customers about to come out of a lease, those in an equity situation who could get into a new car for the same or lower payments, customers who have declined recommended service in the past, and more.

These customers, who might have been lost leads at one point, can be brought back to life with the right message delivered through the right medium.

Facebook ads are also a great way to build brand awareness and connect with your customer, keeping your dealership at the top of their minds and making future marketing efforts more effective.

It’s important to remember, however, that Facebook’s reach goes beyond just its webpage and phone apps. Facebook’s display ads span multiple channels, which include Facebook Messenger (which we’ll examine a little later), display ads on different sites the shopper may visit, and on Instagram (also owned by Facebook).

Once you have a clear objective in mind, you can use the tools Facebook provides to dial into the audience most receptive to your message. When you combine these tools with the strengths of a marketing partner, Facebook’s true worth to your dealership comes into focus.

The Power of Lookalike Audiences

One of the most powerful tools available to Facebook marketers is the lookalike audience. With this feature, you can build a list of potential customers by using what you already know about your existing client base — an audience that looks like the customers you already have. This is generally the least-expensive audience for your marketing budget and is a great way of conquesting customers from the competition.

But the effectiveness of your lookalike audience is only as good as the data used to build the list in the first place. This is where your marketing partner can really make a difference in your results. While much of the data rests in your CRM and DMS, a quality marketing company will go beyond that, looking in areas such as the entire multi-channel behavioral data ecosystem of your dealership. They’ll also examine high-value lifetime customers, use advanced technology such as AI-driven buyer detection and automatically update these lists as new data comes in.

And, just as important as who is included in various lists is who should be excluded from certain audiences. By using tight DMS integration, exclusion lists help you avoid sending certain ads to people who have just bought from you or serviced with your dealership. This conserves your marketing budget while keeping irrelevant messages from reaching valuable customers.

Facebook Marketplace and Your Dealership

Another route dealerships can take in reaching Facebook users is by putting their used inventory up on Facebook Marketplace. In addition to Cars.com, companies like Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds have entered partnerships with the platform. This has led to Marketplace becoming one of the biggest car buying sites online, used by 550 million people each month.

Vehicles are displayed to potential customers based on their location (the default is to display listings from dealerships within a 40-mile radius), and shoppers can filter their selection based on price, model and other criteria. The vehicles viewed will also begin to appear in that consumer’s regular Facebook news feed, keeping them fresh in the shopper’s mind. Clicks take them directly to the VPD on your website, and the consumer can make contact with the dealership via Facebook Messenger, allowing them to interact with you immediately.

When working with a marketing company, Marketplace becomes even more powerful coupled with dynamic inventory, where your dealership’s vehicles are automatically uploaded. This allows your entire inventory to be constantly updated and ready for shoppers to preview at any given moment. Also, dynamic inventory ads automatically cycle through all the images your dealership provides, so no additional creative effort is necessary.

Partner with a Pro

Facebook is one of the most powerful marketing platforms available to dealerships right now, but it can also be a complex undertaking. Partnering with a marketing company is essential to take full advantage of what Facebook has to offer. Integrating a dealership’s CRM, DMS and other systems with the tools offered by Facebook is key to getting great results, but most dealerships don’t have the staff available to do it all on their own.

Also, while it may be the biggest, Facebook certainly isn’t the only platform you need to have a fully realized social media marketing plan. In recent years, Facebook has started to skew to a slightly older demographic. To reach younger markets, Snapchat might need to be in the mix, with 78% of 18 to 24-year-olds regularly using that platform. And, while some might not strictly consider it to be a social media channel, YouTube also must be accounted for, with 73% of American adults regularly watching videos there.

Your marketing is most effective when it connects with shoppers where they already are. Take advantage of all the tools available to your dealership, including Facebook, and build relationships with customers that are constantly revitalized and will last for years to come.

Learn more about Outsell Social.