Category Archives: facebook

How Car Dealers Can Target In-Market Car Shoppers Using Facebook

In the Fourth Quarter of 2015 Facebook had $5.6 billion in ad revenue. Mobile advertising made up a huge portion of their revenue, accounting for 80% of it. If you want to reach out to your customers on mobile devices then Facebook advertising needs to be a part of your dealership’s digital marketing strategy. There are multiple ways you can target your ads in Facebook. You can set up a custom audience (Facebook’s version of retargeting), demographic targeting,  financial resources, interest-based targeting and in-market targeting. In this post we’re going to be discussing Facebook’s In-Market targeting capabilities and how it can be utilized by your dealership.

What Is Facebook In-Market Targeting?

Our online behavior says a lot about our buying intentions. Utilizing data from a variety of sources that may include websites you’ve visited, Facebook is able to tell who is in process or considering buying a specific product. This is a powerful digital marketing tool that will allow you to show ads to people who is interested in or actively looking for your specific product.

How Dealerships Can Utilize In-Market Audience in Facebook

Facebook behavior targeting allows you to target people in-market for specific vehicle brands such as Honda, Toyota, Chevrolet or Ford. You can even target people who are in-market for certain vehicle types such as SUVs or trucks. Below is a table showing the potential reach for various in-market target audiences within a 30 mile radius around the Seattle market.

There are multiple ways a dealer can utilize in-market audiences to target potential car shoppers. Here are some potential ideas:

Target Competing Brands. Show your ads to people interesting in competing brands to try to sway them into your sales funnel. Example: A Honda dealership could target ads to people who are in-market for Ford, Hyundai, or Kia cars.

Combine In-Market Audience for competing brands with people who have liked your page. As a dealership brand loyalty plays a big part in your bottom line. You don’t want past customers to switch over to a different car brand when it’s time for them to get a new car. By targeting people who have liked your page with In-Market competing brands you can target past customers who may be thinking of jumping ship from your brand.

Target your own brand. This one is rather straight forward. Target people who are actually interested in your product.

Target In-Market off brand interest. Target high sales funnel shoppers who are interested in a specific type of vehicle, but haven’t quite decided which brand yet.

These are only just a few ideas to get you started in targeting potential car shoppers using in-market Facebook audiences. It’ll definitely get you started in the right track in targeting the right people with your Facebook ad campaign.

I came across an interesting article the other day that pointed out a really interesting statistic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey. According to the survey, Americans now spend more time on Facebook than they do on their pets. It seems Facebook has replaced Lassie as man’s best friend. If it’s any condolence Facebook just barely beat out pets in regards to time spent — 39 versus 40 minutes a day.

This stat really highlights how Facebook has fully integrated itself into our daily lives and how important it is for your dealership to be seen on Facebook by potential customers. With the amount of time your potential customers are spending on Facebook, shouldn’t you be as well?

There are multiple ways for you to engage with your customers on Facebook. You could engage with customers who are already ‘like’ your Facebook page with daily and relevant Facebook posts. However, not all of your potential customers have ‘liked’ your dealership Facebook page. A great way to engage these potential customers on Facebook is through a Facebook retargeting campaign. A Facebook retargeting campaign targets people who have visited your site, and shows them your Facebook ad the next time they’re ignoring their pets while on Facebook.

Source: Business Week

Social PPC on a platform such as Facebook won’t replace advertising on Google anytime soon. However, with nearly 699 million users on Facebook – many who visit the site multiple times a day – social media PPC is becoming harder to ignore from any digital marketing strategy. Social PPC makes a great complement to a search campaign to increase the reach of your car dealership. Here’s what you need to know about advertising of Facebook.

How are ads targeted?
Facebook has advanced targeting options that allows you to target your audience based on location, gender, age, likes and interests, education, workplace location, relationship status, and more. Such a comprehensive targeting option allows you to exactly pinpoint who sees your ad. So you can show specifically relevant ads to a narrow targeted audience.

You can even target your ads to people who you are already connected to you. Bring back return customers by advertising people who have already ‘liked’ your company page. You can even target audiences based on an email address lists from your CRM. The email address targeting option can be utilized to show car service based ads to someone who just bought a car from your dealership. Thus, allowing you to increase profits by ‘double-dipping’ on a sale and creating customer loyalty.

Where on the page can Facebook ads be seen?
Facebook ads will either be shown directly in the news feed or on Facebook’s right hand column.

What is the average cost per click for Facebook ads?
Overall the average cost per click for a Facebook ad is $0.80 – much lower than Adwords. it’s also important to note that there’s a discrepancy between ads that lead to a Facebook page and ads that lead off-site of Facebook. For ads that direct to a Facebook page the average CPC is $0.70. For ads that lead off-Facebook the average CPC is $1.08.

What is the average CTR for Facebook Ads?
The average click-through-rate for Facebook ads is 0.041 percent. This average CTR is comparable to the average for display ads on the Google Display Network.

If you’d like to learn more about advertising on Facebook, then contact an Integrated PPC representative.

In the age of social networking Facebook has become a large part of any online marketing campaign, alongside SEO and PPC. Just as how Google is constantly making changes to their algorithm to alter best practices and penalize SEO tactics that moved from an acceptable tactic to a spammy tactic (i.e. keyword stuffing); Facebook is following suit with changes of their own that will affect how many businesses use social networking to meet their marketing goals.

It’s a common practice for businesses to ask for likes, shares, and comments to promote their product or business. This practice has been going on since business started using their Facebook pages as a marketing tool. Under Facebook’s new guidelines, the social networking giant is cracking down on these calls to action, referring to this practice as “like-baiting”. If a business or website continues to follow the practice of “like-baiting”, it will be much less likely that their posts will show in a users news feed.

Another tactic Facebook is looking to squash is recirculated content. It’s not uncommon for businesses to re-post the same content over and over again to promote a product or an event. Facebook finds the repeated visibility of duplicate content greatly diminishes the user experience of their news feed. They found that reducing this practice causes users to hide 10 percent fewer stories from their news feed.

Facebook says that their goal isn’t to impact pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, but rather focus on Pages that post explicitly asking for likes, comments, and shares. So if your business is practicing any of these social media marketing tactics, then you may need to rethink new and creative ways to get people to like your posts without specifically asking for them outright.

Content Motive’s current social media posting strategies will not be effected by these updates.  Content Motive is proud to offer unique content on each post and does not bait likes, but instead encourage people to follow on Facebook naturally.

I’ve noticed a few rumors on the web that Facebook can help your SEO, or that having more likes will boost your Google pagerank. These are (currently) inaccurate, but that doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t a legitimate way to generate traffic and leads.

Facebook falls under the “Content Marketing” strategy. Content marketing is all about putting relevant content out there for customers to find. Where Facebook comes into this strategy is providing content for the customers that have already connected with you in the hopes that they will spread the word.

The best content strategy for Facebook tends to be 1 offer/promotion to every 4 posts of useful content. The goal is to provide value to your followers so that they tell their friends, and as your reach increases, you send the offers that convince them to come to your website and convert. For each new follower, that’s another free impression you have on all future content, because your new posts will show up in their feed.
Facebook advertising can accelerate the process by putting your content in front of the people you want to target, in the hope of getting them to like your Facebook page so they’re part of your audience for future content. Alternatively, you can just have your ads take the user directly to your website.

If your dealership is interested in a Facebook posting service, click here to learn more.