How To: Start off on the Right Foot with Social Media Advertising
Last week we covered why social media should be a priority for your dealership. We talked about why your dealership has a competitive advantage on social media as a (relatively) small local business, with the ability to connect and target legitimate leads through your social media accounts. Our final point in last week’s blog post discussed the cost-effectiveness and the high chance for success that comes with running social media ads for your dealership. Today we’ll go through a basic “How-To” guide to getting your ads up and running.
Choose a goal to focus on.
Your overall goal is likely to increase leads and sales for your dealership, but how can you get there through your social media ads? There are a few different strategies to choose from:
∙ Promote awareness of your dealership. This would simply mean that you’re putting general promotional ads out there so that social media users will begin to recognize and get familiar with your brand.
∙ Increase traffic to your dealership website. Making your ads clickable to the homepage of your site or a specific landing page (ex. one that is designed for a sale or event) is certainly an effective way to drive website traffic.
∙ Engage with followers. Create a conversation with social media users who view your ad by asking them a question, holding a survey, running a contest – get creative! “Likes” and comments are highly valuable for attracting social media algorithms.
∙ Generate leads. Advanced set-up options on the backend of your chosen social media platform may give you this ability, or you can link your social media ads directly to a lead form for a specific unit or sale.
Target the right audience.
As we discussed earlier, your dealership is at an advantage as a local business. You will likely want to target an audience within a certain number of miles from your location. Beyond that, you can also target social media users who fall into certain categories depending on age, interests, behaviors, job titles, and more. If you create the audience for your ad carefully and strategically, it will be small but highly targeted. You won’t be wasting money advertising to people who are not likely to buy from you.
Create and design an ad that will align with your goal and resonate with your audience.
This may be the toughest part of social media advertising, especially if you don’t have an in-house creative team. Should you go with bright or neutral colors? Real photography or cartoon illustrations? Urgent text about a sale that can’t be missed, or casual verbiage that encourages customers to visit? It all depends on the chosen objective of the ad, the nature of your audience, and the personality and culture of your dealership. It’s also a good idea to test out a few different options for the first day or two and see which ad performs best before launching into the full-term campaign.
Set your budget and monitor the results.
The great thing about advertising on social media is that you can work with basically any budget. Some platforms are better than others, of course – for example, Facebook is king when it comes to business-to-consumer (B2C) ad campaigns. Facebook will take the budget you assign and disperse funds appropriately through each day of your campaign. It does depend on how frequently you want your ads to run, but overall advertising on social media platforms like Facebook is far less expensive for local businesses that have a smaller audience. Results are easy to track, too – you can monitor views and engagement on your ad through a fairly simple backend dashboard. And, the beauty of social media advertising is that you can adjust budget, settings, or even the ad itself at any time.