Digital Dealer - January 2018 - 48

// Direct From Facebook

4 WAYS TO SELL
MORE CARS IN 2018
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
48

JANUARY 2018

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

D I G I TA L D E A L E R . C O M

By Gabrielle Garrison,
Partner Manager,
Automotive 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
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.
http://www.facebook.com/business/industries/automotive http://www.facebook.com/business/industries/automotive http://www.facebook.com/business/industries/automotive http://www.eBay.com http://www.DIGITALDEALER.COM
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Dealer - January 2018
