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Are you wasting leads?

The sales funnel for vehicles has changed. One of the most significant changes is that potential car buyers are entering the funnel earlier. 

The unwilling contact

Today’s car owner enters the sales funnel even when they’re not ready to buy, just yet. For example, when someone goes to a website to find out how much their car is worth, they might be told they’re upside down with their loan. 

Of course, as soon as they enter their contact information, it gets sold to a car dealership. Now they’re suddenly getting emails from all of the dealers in the area trying to get them to buy a car or truck.

The buyer’s response is, “I’m just looking.” This gets exhausting. Many dealers stop contacting the lead because they’re not getting immediate results. 

Too often, dealerships are only committed to the short term. They’ll only keep contacting someone if they’re likely to buy in the next couple of months. With the leads entering the funnel much sooner than ever before, lots of leads are being lost to a short attention span.

How to make the most of long leads

There are a number of ways to make a long lead work for you.

Email – Email is a great way to stay in touch with people. Make sure that your email addresses their issues and concerns. If you create an email series that’s geared toward people who are “just looking,” you can answer their questions and nurture their business.

Emails that address issues like, “How to deal with a vehicle you’re underwater with,” and “Can I buy a new car owing a balance?” will go a long way to helping people make up their minds and move forward with a purchase.

Text messaging – Texting is one of the most powerful ways to stay in touch with people. Over 90% of texts get read. That means that you can count on people to see them and react.

Your texts can direct them to articles that interest them, great financing deals, or even special vehicles that they might be interested in. You can host a “No Pressure” event where they can come to your dealsherhip, look at vehicles, and get their questions answered, without being pressured to buy a vehicle right away.

Standing out from that crowd

The best way to stand out from the crowd is to forge a relationship, not just a chance to sell a vehicle. So often, dealerships and sales people are so hungry for the sale they forget what it’s like to be on the other side and feeling pressured to make a decision now!

What about the immediate sales? How will you survive?

This idea doesn’t mean that you should give up what you’re doing now to make sales and pay the bills. This nurturing concept is in addition to your current strategies. 

After about 6 to 12 months, you’ll suddenly find yourself with a bunch of customers who have been reading your messages for a while.

Can you use both email and text messaging?

Yes. Absolutely. 

The emails can contain longer content and help people to learn about buying a new vehicle. Text messages are invites to special events or just a touch base to talk about whatever is on their minds.

The key is to build a relationship. Become the organization that your leads think of when they consider buying a vehicle.

Never throw away leads

The only leads you should get rid of are the ones that tell you not to contact them again. Otherwise, every lead is a lead that you need to stay in touch with. This includes people who just bought a car or tell you they’re just looking. 

Every lead you get, no matter how you get it, is worth money because it cost you money. Don’t give up one someone just because they’re not ready to buy a car today. 

Use the tools that you have to contact them and they’ll reward you by becoming a customer instead of a lead.

Google Ads versus Facebook Ads for Auto Dealerships

When online advertising started, Google ads were all anyone talked about. You could get your business listed on the top of the Google search page and it generated a lot of auto sales.

Then the price started to go up and the return started to go down. Why? Everyone else discovered that Google ads were a great way to find new customers who were looking to buy a car. Suddenly, every dealership in the area was competing for the same clicks. It doesn’t help that the manufacturers were also dumping millions into any auto-related search.

So the price skyrocketed and the ROI dropped, fast. 

Here’s part of the reason: “The top two sites for online car buying were third-party sites (78 percent) and dealer’s pages (53 percent). (Source)”  – from CBTNews.com. 

The reality is that nearly 80% of auto sales coming from searches are going to third-party sites. That’s an article for another day, but you will want to make sure your inventory is in there. Then 53% are going straight to a dealer’s website.

To make matters worse, according to PCG, 80% of Google Ads response that put up an auto dealer’s ads are searches for that dealership name. This means that you’re paying Google to do what they do for free – act as the phonebook for the 21st century. 

What Makes Facebook Different?

  • Facebook ads are different because people use Facebook differently.
  • Everyone goes to Google just to search for that one item and then they leave. People go on Facebook to surf and read and watch videos.
  • Average time spent per Facebook visit is 20 minutes. (Source: Infodocket) 
  • 50% of 18-24 year-olds go on Facebook when they wake up. (Source: The Social Skinny)
  • The average person spends 35 minutes a day on Facebook, second only to television. (Source: Sproutsocial)
  • This means that everyone is on Facebook, they’re on it multiple times per day, and they’re there for over half an hour a day. 

Proactive vs Reactive

Google ads are reactive. The customer has to search for a specific phrase to get the search responses and that’s when the ad will show up. In other words, someone has to do and think something specific first. 

With Facebook ads, it’s a proactive process. The ads are placed in front of people who are your audience – age, income, location, etc. They don’t have to search for cars to get cars in their Facebook feed. 

Imagine that you’re able to place a TV ad in front of a thousand people, in our area, every single day for just a few dollars. That’s what Facebook delivers. 

What About Posting to Facebook?

Doing Facebook posts is a great idea, but there is a lot going on there. It’s really easy to simply be ignored. 

Every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded. (Source: The Social Skinny)

That means that your competing with over one million new pieces of information on Facebook, every second.

You should definitely maintain a Facebook page and post regular updates so that people have something to look at when they look you up, but… don’t think that that’s going to drive a lot of sales your way. 

Ads, on the other hand, are strategically on the page, usually as the second or third thing on the page. In order to get to the rest of their feed, users have to scroll past your ad. That’s an impression. 

According to a report from Microsoft, it takes a minimum of 13 impressions to make a sale. That’s what each of your Facebook ads is doing. No one is realistically going to search the same thing 13 times on Google and certainly not in a few days.

How to Make the Switch?

The power of Facebook (and Google) is the ability to focus your ads to a specific group in a specific location at a specific time, etc. This requires experience and learning. 

While it might seem like something you can do all by yourself, you can get help from professionals who can help you build an ad campaign that will help your ads get in front of the right people at the right time.

Using Facebook for your dealership will probably give you a much higher ROI than advertising on Google. It’s just a different way of marketing.

Make Me More Profit Now

Facebook Lead Gen Ads for Dealerships

There are a lot of sources for leads that auto dealerships can tap into. From third party websites to lead generation companies to Google advertising to email lists, everyone is trying to sell you “leads” that you can sell to.

The biggest concern: can you make money with those leads? What is your return on investment? 

You can look at a lot of statistics, like cost per lead, the number of leads, the quality of the leads, the clickthrough rate of your marketing efforts, and on and on. The real issue is ROI – how much did you make for what you spent?

Third Party Auto Sales Sites

For a while, the third party sites had control over the entire auto sales market. You couldn’t search for a car or even a car part without suddenly getting an ad from a third-party auto sales site.

That has relaxed a little as Google has realized that they aren’t doing the thousands of dealerships any favors by giving every search response to four or five third party sites. Facebook never had this problem since their ad service is much more geographically-based. 

Lead Generating Ads on Facebook for Dealerships

“Lots of people want to hear from your business, but filling out forms can be difficult on mobile. Facebook lead ads makes the lead generation process easy. People can simply tap your ad and a form pops up—it’s already pre-populated with their Facebook contact information and ready to be sent directly to you.” – https://www.facebook.com/business/ads/lead-ads

That’s the most powerful explanation that you can give for what makes Facebook lead generating ads so powerful. Since Facebook already has a user’s email address and probably their phone number, their ads can fill out a contact form for them.

The ad shows up in the user’s newsfeed. As they scroll through pictures from their friend’s birthday party and funny cat memes, there, in the middle, is a photo of a gorgeous car or truck. You can include the price, the monthly payment, and anything else that you want. 

When the user clicks the ad, it will take them to prefilled contact form. One more push of a button and a message is sent to your dealerships that someone is interested in that vehicle. 

This is a radical change from Google ads that require that you build a form, a landing page, or that you send them to your website. Everything is just two clicks away and you have a new lead. 

Because you only pay per lead, not per view, it can be a very low cost per sale. You’re only going to hear from people who are really interested in buying a car. 

A Little Too Good

There is a problem with these ads when they’re well-designed and well-placed: dealerships get overwhelmed with too many leads. 

That might sound like a fantasy, but there have been a number of dealerships that have found that the volume of leads exceeds their capacity to contact and handle everyone. In that case, you can dial back the amount your spending, thus the number of leads you get in a day or you can simply bring in some new staff to help.

Not a Saturated Market

Unlike Google ads, the Facebook lead generating advertisements aren’t saturated with dealerships. It has been a slow move among dealerships that are used to getting leads the old-fashioned ways, whether that’s newspaper ads or through Google, the new Yellow Pages. 

The idea that a social media website can generate quality leads organically is a bit hard for many advertising managers at dealerships to grasp. That’s good. That means that if you use these ads, and you’re among the first in your area, you’re going to end up with a lot of leads that your competitors are still sitting on Google looking for.

Advertise where people are

There are no billboards on the tops of mountains or the bottom of the ocean. Why not? There’s no one there. You want to put your ads where everyone is and where they go all the time. 

69% of US adults are on Facebook. – https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about-americans-and-facebook/

That means that nearly 70% of everyone you meet has a Facebook profile and everyone is checking it every day. That’s why you want to be advertising on Facebook. 

Using lead generation ads on Facebook for auto sales is a match made in heaven. Facebook even has a whole page dedicated to success stories of auto industry businesses and Facebook ads: https://www.facebook.com/business/success?categories[0]=automotive&categories[1]=lead-ads#

Make Facebook lead gen ads a major part of your business and you’ll see it grow fast.

Facebook Ads Success Story – Hub City Ford

  • 154 leads generated in 60 days
  • 34 cars sold in that time
  • 22% of Facebook leads result in a sale

December, 2017, Number One sales month ever!

There are a lot of Facebook ads success stories that you’ll hear if you surf the internet. Many of them are a bit dubious. You aren’t given a lot of facts and the sources might be a bit questionable.

The story of Hub City Ford in Lafayette, Louisiana, comes directly from Facebook. The numbers above are impressive. Consider that there isn’t really any other lead pipeline that delivers a 22% sell-through rate in 60 days. 

Hub City is a 40-year old dealership that had served its community well in that time with sales and service. 

The 2-Step Facebook Plan

Hub City accomplished their sales in two stages. 

Step One

The ads were targeted to lookalike audiences from their website and based on the vehicles that people were interested in. 

These ads were targeted with ad sets that spoke to the interests of that group. Ads were divided by car model. This way the contacts saw similar cars again and again in their Facebook feeds. 

Facebook offers dynamic ads. These ads are built by the Facebook ads artificial intelligence (AI) from a catalog of images and models. The AI sees what the user is interested in and customizes ads just to them. 

Because the dealership’s inventory was linked to Facebook, it only showed vehicles that were in stock. 

By using carousel ad designs, they were able to show a series of images, each with a different but related model. For example, if someone loved Ford muscle cars, they would see a series of those cars in the carousel. They were less likely to see a truck or an economy car. 

Step Two

The second set of ads were retargeted ads to people who had visited the website. This is possible because Facebook will put a small cookie on the customer’s browser that tells the system the customer had visited the website. The AI then sees the cookie and creates ads targeted at that customer. 

The fact that over 70% of all Americans are on Facebook, this retargeting effort can be very successful. 

Offline Tracking

One important aspect of understanding whether you’re getting a return on your investment is offline tracking. When someone crosses the threshold at your dealership, you need to know how they got there. It’s important that you and your staff ask every time. If you don’t then there’s no way to know how they arrived there.

A hint that a customer has been targeted by Facebook ads would be if they come in asking for a specific car in the inventory or a very specific model. This tells you that they’ve seen your ads or have been to your website. 

During the sale of a car, there’s always a lot of time to talk. Your sales team needs to be trained and held accountable for asking all the right questions. 

  • “Did you visit the website?”
  • “How did you find the website?”
  • “Are you on Facebook?”
  • “Did you get one of our emails?”

Since the customer is usually sitting there for a while for financing and paperwork, there’s lots of time to ask without sounding strange. 

Some dealerships will actually simply come out and say what they’re doing. “We want to make sure that we’re able to find more great customers like you. How did you find us?”

The Key to Success

The biggest key to success for Hub City Ford was planning and a clear understanding of how Facebook ads can work.

Often, people will simply create ads and let them run, but Facebook has created immensely powerful tools that can deliver customization, targeting, retargeting and deep analysis to the ad campaign. The old days of buying newspaper ads or paying thousands of dollars to be in the Yellow Pages—with no idea if it’s working—are gone. 

Make Me More Profit Now

Building a New Marketing Funnel for Auto Dealerships

A look at an old funnel

Back in the good old days, just about anytime before 1999, every dealership created its own funnel. They put ads on the radio, TV, in the newspaper, they even sponsored Little League teams, all in an effort to be “top of mind” when the customer thought about buying a car.

The manufacturers ran ads that inspired emotions, sold the safety and economy features, and generally built the brand. 

There was a system in place that had worked well for everyone for a long time.

Then Google came along!

The new funnel

There was a new place to market vehicles: Google and other search engines. 

This was easy. Someone would go on the internet, type in what they were thinking about, and results would pop up that were relevant to their thoughts. If they wanted a small economy car, they typed that in and, in microseconds, they got a bunch of responses. 

Google began selling ads on its search engine. The manufacturers and the new group of third-party sellers jumped on that. After all, what could be better than paying to have the answer to the customer’s question be, “Our cars!” It was awesome. 

Rather than needing to build the entire funnel from brand building to sale, companies and even dealerships were able to simply raise their digital hand and capture the sale.

And it worked. In fact, it worked too well!

Everyone started buying Google ads. And with Google’s massive market penetration and nearly complete coverage of the internet search game, the big boys began buying all the ads. They outbid the local dealerships. 

Sure, you might be able to find a way to pay for ads that would be for “local Fiat dealer near me,” but why would you? If you’re the only game in town, your website and Google My Business listing will pop up anyway.

All of this created so much competition on Google ads that most dealerships were simply priced out of the market or, at least, they weren’t getting the ROI that they need to make it worth doing.

Building the new dealership marketing funnel

If Google is no longer the place to advertise and the old funnels aren’t delivering the returns that they used to, where can you go? Where are the eyeballs and wallets that you need to keep the doors open?

The short answer is Facebook.

The longer answer is Facebook ads. 

Because of the highly local nature of Facebook, ads on the platform are still offering a return on your investment. 

With the right Facebook ad campaign, dealerships are able to target their area, retarget people who have already visited their website, and keep their ads right where the customers are looking – several times a day. 

Because you’re not competing with the manufacturers and the big third-party sites, the prices are still relatively low and well within reach. 

Using Facebook ads, you can hit every part of the funnel, from the top where you’re building your brand to the bottom where the customer is ready to buy. 

Facebook ads allow you to refine your targeting to the point that you’re only reaching people who are likely to buy from you and are in your area. With a television ad, you’re broadcasting all over the place, even if your dealership is on the other side of the city from the potential customer. Facebook ads will let you narrow your ads down to a specific distance from your business. This keeps the focus directly on you. You won’t find yourself advertising models that are on your lot but end up getting sold by the dealership on the other side of town.

The sales funnel still exists, but the good old days of Google handing dealerships the bottom of the funnel are gone. Facebook makes it easy to recreate the funnel. All it takes is some planning and a little experience.

To do this right, it makes sense to enlist the help of experts. There are entire books dedicated to using all the tools that Facebook ads provide you – and all of the books are out of date by the time they get to print. Let a team of experts in auto dealership marketing build the right ads, the right funnel for your business.