Year End Sales Event season is one of the most crucial times of the year for dealerships. It’s essential to move old models off the lot to make room for the latest models, which means almost every dealership is hitting the gas on its advertising spend to promote the perfect holiday gift. Competition is fierce, which means your message, creative and targeting is more important than ever.
At Facebook, we took a look at how some of the savviest dealers drove success on our platform during Summer Sales Events to build some best practices that will help you stay competitive during the Holiday season — and drive more cars off your dealership lot.
It’s All About Video
Video has become a key way people learn about new products and services over the last few years, and this will continue to grow in the years to come. If you are not currently leveraging video in your marketing efforts, you could be missing out on conversions that entice users who will stop and explore a contextually relevant video in their feed.
You might be thinking that video is expensive and complex to create. But the reality is – mobile has democratized video creation. Now, you can be your own content creator or video producer with a camera in your pocket and free tools like Facebook’s Video Creation Kit.
We launched the Video Creation Kit earlier this year to help advertisers create eye-catching, effective mobile-optimized video ads using existing images. The tool enables advertisers to upload images and add overlays and logos that quickly transform into mobile-first video ads right within Facebook’s Ads Manager. You can combine OEM image assets along with your own images to create a video targeted to in market shoppers telling them about your deals and asking them to come in for a test drive. And, the best part about the tool is that it helps you create videos for both the Newsfeed and Story formats, helping you take the images you have and format it to fit these creative ratios.
TurnKey Marketing began experimenting with the different template styles with the Video Creation Kit during the Summer Sales Event season. They compared the videos created with still image campaigns and found that not only did each video template style yield great results online for the dealerships, but offline with incremental vehicle sales and closed repair orders, even though the ads were focused on car sales.
“Facebook’s new video solutions are scalable, creative and very cost-effective in solving the dealer’s core business objective to sell and service more cars during the holidays” said Erik Baerresen, CEO of TurnKey Marketing.
Now, TurnKey will use Facebook’s Video Creation Kit for the holiday season, tapping into new holiday specific templates.
Stories and Messaging are the New Black
With over 1 billion stories shared every day over 1.3 billion people using Messenger only, these two formats won your customers’ attention. If you are not currently taking advantage of Stories and Messaging for your social media marketing, now is the time to jump in.
Instagram was the first platform to introduce Stories and now have 400M people connecting with this format every day. With 1 out of 3 of the most viewed stories coming form businesses, Stories are a platform where dealerships can communicate with Instagrammers in the space where they are continually spending a lot of time.
“Instagram Stories ads are an integral tactic for our advertising campaigns and will continue to be for 2019. We are now able to relay our clients’ messages to their customers in a highly targeted manner, while maintaining a creative and organic feel, producing high-quality traffic and leads month-over-month” said Silvia Potempa, Social Media Manager at Saxton Horne Communications, the agency for Larry H Miller Automotive.
To get started with Instagram Stories, all you need is a single image with a message. Facebook’s Ads Manager will crop your image to fit in vertical format, or you can take advantage of the Video Creation Kit to add motion to your still images with video. Remember, Instagram Stories passes-by a user’s view quickly, so showcasing sales event deals in a short and sweet manner will be your best chance to capture attention.
Larry H Miller Automotive Group was looking for something to amp up its Facebook efforts for its summer car sales campaigns. They decided to tap Instagram Stories using a mix of highly produced OEM marketing videos as well as simple phone recorded videos involving dealership personnel.
When it comes to communication with businesses, people’s expectations have changed. 64% of people would choose messaging over picking up the phone or sending an email*. This is where Facebook’s Messenger app can become a huge help to dealerships, as this is a place where over 10B messages are sent between people and businesses each month**.
Facebook Messenger can be used in multiple ways when it comes to your social media marketing. You can place sponsored messages within the Messenger app for users to see or you can direct users to a messenger conversation with click to messenger ads. If you are already running traffic ads, try switching your call to action to Messenger and start a conversation with the user to receive more information from them and entice them to come into the dealership.
Your messenger conversations can either be managed by a third party, or you can monitor messages yourself, and our Pages app makes it easy to monitor for those on the go and not at your desktop computer at all times.
For LHM, Click to Messenger ads led to increased interaction with clients in real time and more initial conversations/leads, and low CPR (Cost Per Responses).
“Messenger ads allow us to communicate with audiences conversationally and in a method that they prefer. We can then build audiences for future campaigns after connecting” said Potempa.
Now Larry H Miller will tap into Instagram Stories and Messenger Ads for its year-end sales events to drive cars off lots.
“Utilizing Facebook Messenger and Instagram Stories campaigns have not only helped our clients meet their business objectives, but also connected them with their customers in a natural and engaging way” said Potempa.
We know how important it is for dealers to drive successful year-end sales events. The above solutions simply help solve for a dealer’s primary business objective: to sell cars. Stand out this Holiday season and take advantage of Video, Stories and Messenger Ads for your Year End Sales Event efforts.
* Source: “Facebook Messaging Survey” by Nielsen (Facebook-commissioned study of people ages 18+ who use messaging apps across AE, AU, BR, FR, ID, IN, JP, KR, MX, TH, TW, the UK, the US and VN), Mar 2016. Data is on average across the 14 markets.).
**Source: Facebook internal data, May 2018.