When it comes to helping auto marketers move cars, 2017 was a year of moving fast and equally fast growth for Facebook and Instagram. With over two billion monthly active users on Facebook and 800 million monthly active users on Instagram, people are looking to these platforms to be informed, inspired and heard.
As a dealership, you want to reach your target audience where they are spending their time. Facebook and Instagram offer opportunities to reach people who are shopping for cars, at the right place and the right time. As the growth of digital advertising accelerates in 2018, mastering the fundamentals of advertising on Facebook is key to keeping up with the quick pace of consumers on mobile today.
Here are four steps to kick-start your 2018 Facebook campaign efforts:
Mobile Video as a Sales Tool
The average person in the U.S. touches their phone more than 2,500 times a day, and many of those touch points are spent on Facebook and Instagram, with one out of every five mobile minutes spent on either platform(1). People enjoy exploring content on these platforms, especially when experienced on a mobile-friendly version of these platforms, which helps with ease of navigation and consumption. Your videos for mobile should follow this same principle and aim to grab attention right away. People absorb information faster on mobile, and we know 1.7 seconds is what it takes for people to consume content on a mobile feed.
Focus on your end objective, and drive the incentive for that objective within the time you have to impress the consumer. You no longer have to be a “creative” to develop compelling mobile video, and free apps on your phone, such as the text animation app Legend (2), can help you achieve the mobile-friendly videos consumers are attracted to while being cost effective.
Better target potential customers with the Facebook Pixel
How do you currently track and retarget the visitors to your website? The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code for your website that will let you build audiences based on website visitors and target those audiences in your Facebook ad campaigns. You can place Facebook Pixel code on every page of your website to track specific actions taken by visitors. When someone takes an action such as booking a service appointment, the Facebook Pixel reports this action. These events are trackable in your Pixel dashboard and also available to utilize as custom audiences to deliver tailored messages through Facebook ads.
Measure offline conversions
Until recently, advertisers have not been able to connect sales data to Facebook to measure which audiences and campaigns are driving these results. But Facebook’s Offline Conversions helps close the loop on measurement, and attribute the value and quantity of offline sales to ads run on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network. To begin, make use of your CRM system, which is holding your best data – car sales.
Simply upload your car sales data into Business Manager on Facebook, and Facebook will match this offline data with online interactions to tell you which offline customers saw an ad from your recent campaign. Don’t wait to set up offline events. Setting up offline events is best early on in a campaign, so you can measure conversions from the start of your campaign.
Tap into auto enthusiasts on Instagram
Instagrammers are informed shoppers and are more likely than the general smartphone-owning population to do research when making a purchase. Of people who use Instagram, 38% said they use Instagram to inform what they buy more than they did two years ago – among auto purchasers, this jumps to 59%(3). Reach these informed shoppers in a cost-effective way by pairing Instagram with your Facebook campaigns, which reduces your overall cost per outcome. To do this, select the Instagram placement option when setting up a Facebook campaign and use different creative content on each platform through this option.
This can be helpful in the auction, because if there is a day where your target audience is more expensive to reach on Facebook, it will attempt to reach them on Instagram at a lesser cost (and vice versa). With lower costs, this leaves more of your budget to reach more people.
Follow along with the latest auto success stories on Facebook and Instagram here: www.facebook.com/business/industries/automotive.
Sources: (1) Source: US ComScore data, Media Metrix June 2015; (2) available in the Google Play and iOS Store, (3) “Path to Purchase 2016” by Kantar (Facebook-commissioned survey of 215 people ages 18+ in the US who use Instagram at least once a month and had made an auto purchase in the last 12 months), Aug 2016
About the Author
Gabrielle Garrison is on Facebook’s Partner Manager Team where she makes sure clients are thriving at the forefront of the quickly changing digital landscape on Facebook. With 7 years in the media business, Gabrielle has held positions in all aspects of the advertising space ranging from radio to traditional media and currently digital media. An alumnus of the University of South Florida in Tampa, Gabrielle got her start in advertising helping small businesses in Tampa succeed in their marketing objectives, and later moved to digital advertising for eBay.com helping brands such as Progressive, Ford, The Chrysler Group, Ronald McDonald House and State Farm just to name a few.