Whether you love or hate the social media giant, Facebook ads should be an invaluable part of your dealership’s marketing strategy. If your car dealership is currently using Facebook ads, awesome. However, are you getting a positive ROI, or are you throwing money at it and seeing enough leads to keep it around?
These seven tips are designed to help you spend your marketing dollars more efficiently, yield higher quality leads, and boost your overall campaign strategy.
7 Tips to Optimize Car Dealership Facebook Ads
Evaluate Your Pipeline
Before creating an ad or thinking about how much you want to spend, what is the goal of your ad? Are you looking for prospects to contact you, are you looking for form submissions, do you have content that you want prospects to download? Where in your sales pipeline do your Facebook ads fit?
Once you determine where in your pipeline your ads will fit in, you’ll be able to create better copy, hone your audience, and implement a stricter budget.
Set Your Audience
Facebook ads allow you to get as granular or broad when it comes to targeting your audience. So why waste ad dollars on people who you won’t actually buy a vehicle from you? Set the right audience and show them the right products. Your ads will perform better, your sales team will appreciate higher quality leads, and your marketing budget won’t skyrocket. Everybody wins!
Retarget Past Visitors
It’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to get a new one. It’s a similar mantra to retargeting past visitors. Visitors who have already seen your ads, so long as you set a specific audience, have already shown interest in your dealership. Maybe the timing wasn’t right or the vehicle that showed up wasn’t exactly right. Maybe it was something else, but there is interest there. Use retargeting to stay in front of your audience to stay relevant and front of mind for your prospective customers.
Get Specific
Your ads should be specific to your audience. If you want to target sports car owners, know who they are, what they like, their education, and where their interests lie. By creating specific ads for your audience, you’ll not only show your audience that you are relevant and relatable, but you’ll also show them that you know who they are. Ask yourself who you would rather buy from. The car dealership that is looking to close a deal at the end of the month and put you in anything that moves, or the dealership that took their time to get to know you and helps you find your dream car? That’s what it means to get specific.
Understand Who and Where
Know who and where your ads will be shared. Just because you want to buy ads on Facebook, doesn’t mean your ads will only show on Facebook. Facebook’s default settings ensure that your ads will run on their Audience Networks. Monitoring and understanding where your ads are running can help your ads perform better and prevent your campaign’s cost from ballooning.
Monitor Your Campaign’s Performance
Whenever you run a paid campaign, you need to set up proper tracking metrics. Otherwise, how will you know if your money is actually resulting in a net positive or negative? Facebook has tracking metrics, but if you want a form submission, ensure it’s specific for this campaign, maybe have a specific landing page set up, track full submissions, incomplete submissions can be retargeted, UTM tracking in case someone clicks on your ad but then types in your website to learn more. Test your ad’s tracking metrics to monitor your campaign’s performance.
Perform A/B Testing
Sometimes one element of an ad will resonate better than another. Maybe there is one call to action color that yields better results than another. Testing these small yet major elements can have a major impact on the effectiveness of your campaign. Where your audience goes after your ad may also impact the effectiveness of your campaign. Test on a smaller audience and once you have a clearer direction forward, make the necessary changes and implement them on a larger scale.
Start Improving Your Ads Today
Facebook ads can be very complex, and if managed improperly, can result in high costs with low results. Our goal at Market Doctors is to help you effectively utilize your marketing budget so you can keep your ad spend low and generate high-quality leads.
We are the premier digital marketing agency for car dealerships and have the experience and expertise to help you increase sales.
Contact us today for a free Facebook ads audit to see if you are spending your ad budget as effectively as you can. If you are looking to get started with Facebook ads, our team can help you lay the groundwork for a successful campaign.
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