Facebook Ads can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal by helping you reach more in-market vehicle buyers. To help you take advantage of Facebook Ads, we put together five reasons why Facebook Ads is a must-have for dealerships in 2019. Here’s what you need to know:

1. Potential Buyers Spend Time On Facebook & Instagram

Facebook

As the most popular social network in the U.S., Facebook has nearly 221 million people from the U.S. on its platform as of 2019. Of those users, 74 percent visit Facebook every day and 51 percent visit multiple times a day.

Those high usage percentages remain largely unchanged from 2018. This current trend is encouraging news for automotive Facebook advertisers as it means the pool of potential vehicle shoppers will continue to remain high on the platform.

Your dealership can take advantage of the 86 million users already scrolling through their Facebook newsfeeds. Use Facebook Ads to show your vehicle offer ads to people shopping and looking to buy a vehicle.

Instagram

While Instagram doesn’t have the same reach as Facebook, the platform still boasts over 100 million users in the U.S. After Facebook and YouTube, Instagram is the third most used social media network in the U.S.

Like Facebook, Instagram’s user base is growing and at a faster rate than Facebook. As Instagram continues to grow, so will the pool of vehicle shoppers to prospect and serve ads to on this channel.

In terms of Instagram’s usage, 62 percent of the platform’s users visit the site daily and 42 percent visit several times a day. The platform is especially popular among younger adults aged 18-24.

Because Facebook owns Instagram, dealerships can easily advertise their Facebook ads on both social media platforms without having to create two separate ad campaigns. By showing the same ad on Facebook and Instagram, you can take advantage of the combined audience from each platform.

2. Facebook Ads Drives Online Search

Another reason Facebook Ads needs to be in every dealership’s marketing arsenal is that Facebook ads drive online search and complement your paid search marketing efforts.

According to a 2017 cross channel study, Facebook Ads were responsible for 19 percent more organic search-referred site visits and 10 percent more for paid search-referred visits compared to when people didn’t see Facebook ads.

The study also found that people who saw Facebook ads were more likely to take action on a website during their visit.

In other words, Facebook ads provide incremental value across your entire marketing strategy. That value can potentially help increase the efficiency of other digital marketing channels, like paid search, by increasing the amount of purchasing intent in your dealer’s targeted audience.

Facebook also found that mobile-heavy Facebook ads resulted in higher volume and higher quality paid search traffic. People who saw Facebook ads were also more likely to search and click through to an advertiser’s website. Campaigns measured in the study experienced an average of 6.3 percent more mobile search traffic compared to an average increase of .9 percent on desktop.

What does this mean for you and your dealership? By using Facebook Ads, your dealership can drive greater awareness of your vehicle offers. The awareness from your Facebook & Instagram ads affects your paid search campaigns by generating more paid search traffic from qualified shoppers.

3. Organic Reach is Down & Facebook Ads is Cheap

Facebook’s organic reach (the number of people who see your page’s non-paid posts) unfortunately continues to trend downward. In 2018, for example, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will show even less content to people from publishers and pages like your dealership. This means fewer people will see your page’s posts in their newsfeeds. That’s the bad news.

The good news is your dealer can turn this negative trend into an opportunity by cheaply investing in Facebook Ads. With Facebook Ads detailed audience targeting options, combined Facebook and Instagram audience and machine learning AI, dealerships can easily reach in-market vehicle shoppers on Facebook and Instagram at a low cost.

Though Facebook requires you to spend at least five dollars per day for each of your dealership’s ads, you’re given various controls to ensure you don’t overspend your budget. This flexibility and control allow your dealership to customize your experience to ensure you get the most bang for your marketing buck.

Already using Facebook Ads, but want to reduce your ad costs? Use these 4 tips and best practices to lower your Facebook ad costs and overall campaign performance.

4. Machine Learning & Automation Help You Reach More Buyers

Facebook Ads machine learning AI and automation technology can benefit your dealership by helping you find new and existing in-market shoppers easier and faster.

To help car dealerships, Facebook created a special auto-specific ad type called Automotive Inventory Ads. These ads show real-time vehicle availability and pricing to people based on the vehicles they show intent to purchase.

From these ads, you can drive in-market shoppers toward vehicle detail pages or search results pages depending on the link your dealership includes in your vehicle offers.

In addition, Facebook Ads Automotive Inventory Ads are convenient to set up. You only have to set up your campaign once to promote all of your inventory, without having to create each ad separately. Once set-up, your dealership’s campaigns are automatically set to reach people based on the actions they take on your website or Facebook.

One dealership that used Automotive Inventory Ads to prospect for new customers saw 3.2 times more vehicle detail page views when compared to their previous prospecting campaigns with the same budget. They also saw 3 times lower cost per vehicle detail page view.

This is just one example of how Automotive Inventory Ads and Facebook Ads can benefit your dealership’s marketing efforts.

In terms of automation, Facebook Ads provides a number of automatic optimization options toward your dealership goals. For example, you can have Facebook automatically spread your ad set’s budget across multiple ad placements (places where ads can show across Facebook and Instagram) based on where your ads are likely to perform best.

This saves you time from choosing placements yourself while also automatically optimizing your ad placements so they generate the best results for your dealership.

Dealers can also leverage automation through digital marketing tools to make Facebook Ads even more convenient for your dealership. Here at Dealer Teamwork, we have a patented digital marketing platform called the MPOP® (Merchandising, Personalization and Optimization Platform).

This unique digital marketing tool connects your offer creation efforts in the MPOP® with Facebook and Instagram campaigns.

When you are set up with Dynamic Social Media Marketing with Dealer Teamwork, your dealership’s new and used vehicle offers are automatically syndicated to Facebook and Instagram. The MPOP® feeds current offers into a Facebook product/vehicle catalog which powers your Facebook & Instagram ads.

All of your used vehicle offers can also be automatically syndicated to Facebook Marketplace via a product/vehicle catalog. Current offer pricing and other details are pulled into these listings. You can learn more about Dealer Teamwork’s unique Facebook and Instagram advertising offerings here.

5. Facebook Ads Helps You Find New Qualified Leads & Close Sales

Facebook Ads can also help your dealership influence shoppers at more stages of the vehicle researching, shopping and buying journey.  Advertising on Facebook exposes shoppers to vehicle offer ads in more ways and situations than if your dealership just used traditional paid search text ads.

Though text advertisements on search engines are a great way to connect with people in moments where they’re actively researching or shopping, Facebook Ads can further widen your reach with car shoppers to include moments when shoppers are not actively researching.

Because the active shopping period for a vehicle is so short with long periods in between the next purchase, you and your dealership need to cast a wide net to maximize your potential to reach an in-market shopper.

Facebook Ads helps dealerships connect with new audiences and helps them reach previous website visitors and customers.

With an average of 24 touchpoints in a car shopping journey, 19 of which being digital, it is important to reach the same person multiple times if you hope to close the sale.  Facebook Ads helps dealerships do this with the ability to remarket/retarget customers and previous website visitors.

In addition to retargeting in-market vehicle shoppers from your website, dealerships can also create lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences allow you to discover and target vehicle buyers that are similar to your most valuable audiences and best customers. This even includes ones you’re already retargeting from your website.

Dealerships can use lookalike audiences to expand their prospecting pool by letting Facebook’s machine learning technology do the work to find new in-market shoppers based on their purchasing behavior

Article last updated 2/21/2020