Every day, we talk to dealers who tell us that they’re frustrated with their staff. The employees come in for a few weeks, make one sale, and leave. Even if the dealerships spend thousands of dollars sending them off to sales seminars, the staff still leaves.
Turnover on the sales floor is near 100% for most dealerships. The sales people seem to be constantly looking for greener pastures. Or at least ones where the sales are more reliable.
So here you are:
The problem is that most dealerships approach sales training as a one-off event. Maybe four times a year, everyone goes to a sales webinar.
The rest of the time, they sit in the showroom texting their girlfriends or boyfriends, floundering when customers come in, and complaining that they’re not making any money.
Learning to sell is like every other skill; you have to teach it every day for your staff to truly understand it.
It sounds like a lot of work and a hassle, especially for a staff that’s unlikely to stick around. But they’re guaranteed to leave if they stay with you and make no sales.
Even the most money-hungry salesperson wants to be able to take pride in their accomplishments. If their accomplishment is that they got the base in their paycheck, it’s not going to take long before they’re gone.
Role playing, training, morning meetings, Q&A sessions, and group brainstorming is vital for your team to succeed.
Consider having everyone arrive an hour early. Spend thirty minutes every morning teaching a new technique, discussing what people are struggling with, or asking the veterans how they succeed. Your staff will be well-informed and every day will be an accomplishment, even if they don’t make a sale that day.
There are two answers to this question:
The best part is that this technique doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. It’s a low-cost, time-based idea that allows you to tap into your own experience and that of your existing team.
The first thing to teach is your expectations. What do you expect your staff to do when someone arrives at your lot? How should they be greeted? How fast should they be greeted? Should they “pressured” or left to wander? How long should they wander?
Here’s a suggestion that one of our customers came up with: Watch your three best salespeople and make a model out of what they do. There are no rules. Every town and every dealership is different. If you’re most laid back salespeople are successful, you can use them as a model.
It’s a bit like what Tony Robbins teaches: Watch people who are successful and do what they do.
Just like going to school when you were younger, right through college, repetition is the key to success. That’s why you need to make sure that you train your staff every day.
Not that long ago, we had only one fast way to talk to customers that weren’t right in front of us – the telephone. Today, we have multiple ways: phone, email, chat, text. Each of these methods serves a purpose, but only one has been ignored by auto dealerships and could open the door to a whole new customer base.
Let’s look at each tool in your toolkit and see what we can learn.
Calling customers is still a useful way to talk to customers, but it has lost its appeal as a way to initiate contact. Less than half of phone calls get answered. That number drops, even more, when the person doesn’t recognize the phone number.
Can you still use the telephone to reach out and make sales? Yes, definitely, but it’s harder than ever. The telephone should be considered a last resort for contacting customers. If you use the phone, expect to leave a lot of voicemails. Make sure that you have a voicemail script written.
If you’re calling about something of personal interest to the customer, like the car they wanted is on the lot, don’t be coy. Tell them in the voicemail. Otherwise, it’s just another unheard voicemail along with robocalls and marketing attempts that everyone gets every day.
Incoming calls are still a powerful way to make sales. If the sales team takes that ringing phone seriously, they’ll find themselves making more sales. The phone should be seen as an asset, not a nuisance, every time it rings. At least a significant percentage of the time, it’s going to be someone looking to see if the car they want is available.
If you’re already corresponding with someone or they are expecting to hear from you, email is a great way to communicate. The customer can get the message when they’re ready and can respond to it anytime, day or night.
Email marketing, outbound marketing, is a lot more difficult. The best way to make sure that you get your emails read is to offer value. Don’t just offer discounts and give sales pitches, but give information that can be useful to your potential customers. For example, tax information for businesses that buy a company car this year instead of next. A look at auto loan rates for consumers is another way to add value.
For the money, email is still a fairly great way to communicate and make sales, but it’s getting harder to be heard above the noise.
This is 100% in-bound from your website. A great chat function on your website can capture sales as people are looking at cars.
All the customer has to do is click the button and they’re on the line with someone from your dealership. It will be helpful if the person they’re talking to has information, like prices, monthly payments, details on the car, etc. It’s a lot less helpful if it’s someone from the Business Development Center who is in the dark about what’s on the lot and what things cost.
Your chat function, like your phone, can be a huge asset. If one person is assigned to it for the day, they can convert those contacts into sales and really give great customer service.
One major downside is that you have no contact information unless the customer gives it to you. You have no way to get back to them unless they want you to.
Text is the most effective way to communicate for auto dealerships, but most dealerships don’t use it effectively. In many cases, the salespeople will text with contacts from their personal phones. This is convenient, but a salesperson will take all of your contacts with them if they leave your business.
A company text number can be used to capture the texting market. It can pop up on multiple phones at once or can be sent to a shift phone that one person is assigned to. You can also send texts to a desktop of someone who is in their office all day. This makes it easy to respond.
For outbound marketing, texting is awesome. Depending on the study you find, 94% to 98% of all texts are opened and read. In fact, most phones will keep a text unread until you consciously open it. That’s powerful. Your message will pop up instantly in their pocket, and it won’t go away until they click it.
There are lots of online services that will let you do bulk texting and help you grow your business. Working with a marketing team to develop your message can create a lot of loyal contacts that will buy from you.
All of the communication methods are great for what they do, but text message marketing and interaction with customers is the big-untapped resource that most auto dealerships are missing.
“The website is down again!”
How many times have you heard that? If you hear it more than once or twice a year, you might have a problem.
If you have an older site, it might be located on a single server. That means that if it gets too many hits at once or there’s a problem in that one location, your website will go down.
That was the old way of putting up a website. Some smaller companies will still offer you “on-site hosting”. It’s usually inexpensive and they push it because then they can have it right there in front of them.
With the advent of cloud computing, websites can be set up to be redundant. This means that your website can be repeated all over the globe.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and many more have cloud servers all over the world. The goal for these servers is to shorten the distance between your site and the end user. For example, if you have a website hosted only in Florida and someone in Seattle wants to take a look, they might have difficulties if there’s a lot of traffic in between. Also, if the server in Florida is down for maintenance or lost power or is simply overwhelmed, the consumer might not see your site.
With cloud computing, your site is copied on servers everywhere. The person in Seattle is really looking at a complete copy of your site on a server in, say, Seattle. Every day, the cloud system will go out and look at your website to make sure everything matches. Also, every time you make a change, the cloud system will send out a message and new copy to all the servers.
Every day, you’re contacted by big dealer website companies that want your business. They can set up a site in a few days and might even make it seem less expensive.
The problem is that many of those companies haven’t updated their infrastructure. They aren’t using cloud computing to store your site. They still have everything on the server they installed in 2001. This means that if they have a problem on their server, you’re out of luck.
Almost every dealership has tried working with these companies once or twice. It all sounds so awesome and easy, but you’re just a number. You’re one of thousands of other dealerships that have hired them to make a cookie-cutter website that looks exactly like everyone else’s.
The cost savings is not worth it. The hassle is definitely not worth it. There’s a better answer!
Instead of taking what looks like an easy path, talk to your local website design companies. They’ll help you build a great website and they’ll put up on the cloud systems for you.
Smaller companies don’t generally have their own services to put the website on. Instead, they build on cloud systems that will automatically install redundancies. There will be copies of your website everywhere, making it easier for consumers to access it from anywhere, instantly.
Service outages aren’t necessary any longer with websites. That’s all very 1999. Today, with the massive cloud server systems, your website should be up and available every day, all day.
If you have any problems or aren’t sure what to do, contact us. We’ll help you find a great vendor for your website.
If you take a moment and Google “auto sales process,” you’re going to find a lot of different answers.
Everyone breaks the sales process down to steps. Three, 5, 10, 15…everyone talks about the process that they use and how many steps they can break the process down to.
Who’s right? Everybody.
Consider something you do every day without thinking about it, like tying your shoes. The process of tying your shoes can be broken down into about 15 discrete steps. And you do that without thinking about it. Imagine how many steps your drive to work would need to be broken down into and you probably barely remember doing it.
Back to Google. Let’s google “the sales process dead”. Here’s what you get:
Those dramatic statements don’t really mean what they say. When you read the articles, you find that they don’t think the sales process is actually dead, as if things will sell themselves, but that the process has changed.
The change that has happened is that the salesperson no longer controls the sales process. The customer is in control. They have all the tools they need in their hands to put them in the power position.
For example, they can buy a car from a vending machine. They can have a car delivered. They can see how much the car is worth, if the car is a deal, and what they should be asking for in the deal.
Back in the good old days, the dealer had the power. She was able to control the flow of the process from start to finish.
“According to AutoTrader.com’s 2015 Automotive Buyer Influence Study, more car buyers have already decided on the vehicle they want to purchase when they first visit a dealership. In 2015, 72 percent of recent car buyers reported that they purchased the vehicle they had in mind when they first visited a dealership.” – AutoTrader.com
Think about that. That means that three-fourths of all the people who come to you to buy a car know what car they want. They don’t need to walk the lot. They don’t need to get to know the salespeople. They might just walk up and ask for a test drive.
This means that the old ways of selling might have changed.
Get over yourself.
That’s the whole thing. You might think that the lot walk is the second step, but the customer might want to do it after the test drive. You might want to discuss financing at the end, but the customer might make it the first thing they do.
As dealers, it’s time to understand that the customer is in control of the whole process. Some will go along for the ride with you as you go through the 143 steps of the sales process. Many simply want to get to what they came in for.
Here’s an experience that some friends had recently. The couple went to look at a Volkswagen that they really wanted. They called and set up a test drive. They had the car looked at and it was a mess.
When they went back to the dealer and said so, instead of being redirected to other cars or even having a conversation, they were accosted by a manager they had never spoken to about what a great car it is and how dare they have it looked at.
Needless to say, they went somewhere else. In fact, less than two hours later they had purchased a Fiat for less money, fewer miles, and in perfect condition.
What happened was that the sales process as it is “supposed to go” was interrupted by a customer who was in charge. The dealer lost the sale and the customer. Oh, and their parents bought a car a month later from the place they bought the Fiat. The parents didn’t even go to the first dealer.
The sales process is still there, but as the family recipe for spaghetti or fried chicken, it’s just a guideline, not a hard set of rules.
Be ready to make changes because the customer is in charge now and they have more information and resources than ever before.
What is relationship marketing and how is it different from transactional marketing?
How can internet tools, like social media, email, and text messaging, help with both but particularly relationship marketing?
In this blog, we’ll take a look at how you can use these tools to grow your business and make more sales.
“I’ve got a guy.”
“You’ve got a guy?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a guy.”
Everyone wants to be able to say that.
Everyone wants to have a person in the right places to help them get through whatever they need.
Every auto dealer wants to be someone’s “guy”. We all want the phone to ring with someone saying, “Hey, <insert your name>, it’s <insert their name>. I wanted to schedule a time to come down and look at trucks.”
That’s the call we work hard for.
So, how can internet tools help us make that happen?
First, we should look at the differences between relationship marketing and transactional marketing.
Relationship marketing is marketing that’s designed to create long-term bonds between a vendor and a consumer. It’s not about a single sale, but about the relationship that’s built in trust and familiarity. Here’s an observation: Until recently in all but the very largest cities, all sales were based on relationship marketing. Everyone knew everyone else, so of course, they knew who their car dealer was and asked for him by name.
Transactional marketing is marketing based on a sale. That’s the goal. When you see an ad for a cheeseburger, they aren’t asking how your kids are or how you might like your burger cooked. They want you to buy the burger as they serve it. The auto sales industry, these are the dealerships that simply stand around waiting for someone to show up and then sell them a car. Once the sale is made, that’s it. There’s very little contact.
The answer to that is simple: Would rather sell one car to a customer or a new car every three years? Do you want to have one member of a family come and buy a vehicle or have an entire family referred to you for their transportation needs?
The answers are obvious.
Relationship marketing takes longer, but it lasts longer. It’s there to make sure that you have business going into the years ahead.
There are a lot of ways to use email, texting, and social media to build a relationship.
Social media – Posting surveys, fun contests, and even just useful information will forge a relationship with your customers, even if you don’t know who they are. They’ll see what you’re doing and refer to you as a business they trust.
Email – Sending a message to someone’s inbox is an excellent way to bring to personalize the relationship. You can send them longer, more in-depth things that they need to know. You can also customize your message for them. For example, if you have your CRM track everyone who clicked on an ad for pickup trucks, the emails you send them will feature pickups, not economy cars. You can also email personal messages to people to inspire action.
Text messages – The most intimate way to contact someone is through text messages. You can reach out with messages that ask how they are, how their car is running, or if they’d like to stop by. You can send messages inviting them to a BBQ at your dealership or any of a thousands other things. Your messages can be signed personally and help to build that personal relationship.
SimpSocial makes this all very easy. With the help of SimpSocial, you can have ads that inspire people to contact you and then those leads can be put directly into marketing messages.
The tone of the messages is up to you, but our team can help you get it all set up.
Even more important, everything someone does, from the first click on a Facebook ad to buying a car is tracked in a CRM so you never forget what you know about someone. When someone makes an appointment, you can look up their name, their kids’ names, know what type of vehicle they’re likely to want, and much more.
Building relationships takes time, in life and in business. Using the modern tools that are available, it’s easier to do than ever!
The Federal Communications Commision made a ruling about the use of text messages for marketing. It was prompted, they say, by monthly calls and complaints from consumers about unwanted calls and text messages.
“Month after month, unwanted robocalls and texts, both telemarketing and informational, top the list of consumer complaints received by the Commission.”
The new ruling is an enhancement of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The goal of the new ruling was to provide protection for wireless consumers who might be paying per call and for whom text messages are very intrusive.
The TCPA was passed by Congress in 1991. Not only is the bill designed to protect consumer privacy where robocalls are concerned, but it’s designed to prevent robocalls to public safety phone numbers, like 911 and police station non-emergency numbers.
“The TCPA and the Commission’s implementing rules prohibit: (1) making telemarketing calls using an artificial or prerecorded voice to residential telephones without prior express consent; and (2) making any non-emergency call using an automatic telephone dialing system (“auto dialer”) or an artificial or prerecorded voice to a wireless telephone number without prior express consent.”
Here’s how this works for those of us who are following the rules: If a consumer opts into messages with you from a Facebook ad, you can, legally, send them text messages. If they opt out or if they never granted you permission in the first place, you can be fined by the FCC. While they have the ability to jail you, they’re unlikely to, but it can get very expensive to have them come after you for abusing texting systems.
If you use Facebook ads, there will be a record of consent there. There will also be a digital record of the consent in your CRM that Facebook sends it to. This means that if you’re asked, you’ll be able to show the date and time that the person opted in.
This is part of the importance of maintaining great records. While you’re unlikely to get into trouble with a single person, if there’s a pattern of abuse, you might find yourself talking to FCC investigators.
The addition and clarification in July of 2015 was promoted by autodialers or robo calling software. This was made even more important with the advent of VoIP (voice over internet protocol). This technology has been around for over 20 years, but in the twenty-teens, they became inexpensive enough that everyone was able to access them.
There was a sudden explosion of their use by all kinds of companies, including some of the country’s biggest firms. It’s an inexpensive way to reach thousands of people every day. Using a sequential dialer, the software will simply call every number, one after the other, without any input from humans.
Never text someone who hasn’t given you permission. It’s possible to buy lists of phone numbers, but not only are those usually a waste of money, it’s a violation of law.
It’s really that simple. If they didn’t say yes, it’s not allowed.
Using Facebook and Instagram ads, you can invite people to share their mobile numbers and grant permission to receive occasional messages.
Make sure you’re not messaging them every day. Be polite about how often you message them. If you’re in an active conversation with someone, that’s different, but for marketing messages, once every week or two is plenty.
Don’t send videos and rarely send photos. Images take up a lot of bandwidth. While many people have unlimited data, not everyone does. If you send a video, you can crush someone’s data allowance for the month. Even photos are too much.
If you want to share a video or a photo, invite them to click a link that will take them to the internet to see the image. You can also have a link that requires them to click it to download what you’re sending. Either way, they’re in charge of how much data your message uses.
If you’re not sure what to do, let the experts at SimpSocial help you. We create messages for you that will nurture your leads and grow your business. Our Facebook ads are designed to inspire people to give you permission.
Be respectful of the privilege of being allowed to communicate with people and you’ll do fine.
Also, if someone contacts you and says that they have a ton of people in the area who’ve said yes to receiving messages from you, politely decline. Those people have no idea it’s you they’ll hear from and they’re probably not even your target audience.
Everybody has a smartphone. It seems that they’re all on their phones all the time. Oddly, you don’t see people talking on them. You see them tapping out messages.
Texting is how the majority of all communication is happening. “US smartphone users send and receive five times more texts than they make and receive calls.”
Consumers don’t pick up the phone to ask questions anymore. The first thing they do is search the internet. When they don’t find what they need, or if they want more information, they look for a way to get it without having to talk to someone.
Let’s face it, car salespeople are famous for being high pressure and provide very little information. If you call a dealership for information, you’ll often get someone who’s not terribly forthcoming with information. Either they don’t know it or they are pushing for you to get down there so they can shove keys in your hand.
They also have a reputation for being poorly trained at using the telephone to sell. Most are used to face-to-face interaction and don’t really work well with a phone on their ear, at least not from someone just looking for information.
Customers considering buying a car might just need a simple question answered, like “Are you open?” or “Is the Fiat in your ad still on the lot?” Most expect that when they call a car dealership, however, they’ll get a ten-minute interrogation into their needs and wants with a strong push to “talk to me when you get here.”
Auto dealers are still just discovering the power of texting. There has been a very slow move toward allowing customers to text dealerships, probably because it feels like you can’t then sell to them.
Since your customers are sending and receiving five times more texts than phone calls, why wouldn’t you make texting part of your marketing?
Including texting on your marketing materials will quickly increase contacts from customers. “Call or text 888-829-1110,” will get you lots and lots of texts to ask questions. The customer doesn’t feel like they can be pressured that way, but they get the answers they need.
Your sales team can answer many more questions via text than they can phone calls. It takes a few seconds to answer a text, but a single phone call to answer a single question will often take three or four minutes.
There are a huge number of text messaging management systems available. Most will allow you to send out text marketing messages on a schedule.
Importantly, they will also show you messages that are coming to your textphone number. You can use a computer to answer questions.
Both Android and iOS have message-to-web applications built-in. These will allow you to display the messages to and from a phone number on a computer. You can set up the manager’s phone, or a company cell phone on the manager’s computer, or for someone else who is in front of their computer all day. They can answer questions, send photos, and do anything else you can do with texting, all from their PC.
Another way to manage text messaging is to have a company phone that is passed around to an assigned person on every shift. There should be someone who is responsible for answering texts. That person keeps the shift on them for the day.
It’s not a great idea to allow your staff to use their personal cell phones to handle company texts. There is no way for you to track what has been sent and what has been responded to. Also, you’re not later able to use those numbers to market to.
With just a little effort and a change in your ads, you can add text messaging to your toolkit. Your customers will love it, since they’re texting already. Your staff will get more customers and more sales because they are now responsive without being pushy.
Best of all, it’s cheap to do. There are viable solutions that cost no more than a single cell phone line each month. Even a text message marketing platform is about $30 a month for unlimited use.
Turn this “new” way of communicating into your secret weapon.
SimpSocial empowers modern dealerships with two game-changing solutions: precision-targeted social media lead generation tied to live inventory, and a powerhouse engagement platform that responds, follows up, and books appointments automatically.
It’s been 63 years since the field of artificial intelligence (AI) was first introduced as an academic discipline, but put the term in front of the average person – regardless of what industry they work in – and you’ll typically get a glazed look and a mutter of something about computers or robots.
While we’re still lacking the advancements in AI of visionaries like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, AI itself is very much alive and well in multiple industries, and has been for close to a decade. One of those is advertising, where AI processes have been battering down barriers for years, doing amazing work in the form of processing and analyzing big Data to find patterns that might take a team of employee’s months or years to uncover, if they could so at all.
This form of AI, more commonly known as Machine Learning (ML), isn’t taking human jobs, it’s augmenting them, and getting them away from the monotony of bureaucratic jobs and back into the free space of developing campaigns and making big-picture decisions on the best way forward.
Mark Zuckerberg’s social network king might have seen some bumpy back roads the past couple of years over how much data it is collecting and what it is doing with it down the road, but trying to deny the power of social media advertising means you’re either blind of in denial at this point. Until recently, most of the work done by AI in the social media niche was limited to three categories:
The first, was great for things like tweaking emails, web content, and mobile content: Notching the correct keywords, and using the right tone for the right audience are tasks made possible by ML. Testing is also done quickly thanks to the Big Data capability involved. What would take days or weeks to coalesce is whittled down to seconds.
What’s previously escaped social media advertisers with AI has been the social part of things – we’re talking about individual relationships and real-time interactions, not the colder scientific aspects of ML.
That’s before the current round of breakthroughs, which will allow digital marketers to customize messaging in social media advertising to the look and feel of every individual user, not just the customer segment niche they fall into. These will be true one-to-one campaigns, like if your TV could view everything you’ve watched, read, and shopped for in the last 20 years and play you a commercial accordingly.
This type of social media AI is nothing short of a golden goose come home to roost for the auto sales leads industry. Internet advertising has painted with a broad brush when it comes to pairing customer segments with automobile ads. Geography, income level, and gender have always topped the list of what ad to send across that screen.
This sort of AI involvement means it’s time to dream bigger and be bigger than that. Let’s run through an example or two to really grasp the scope of this new tech. The first is Daisy, a young, single professional woman who is ready to move past her clunker from college and invest in a vehicle that fits her station in life. She’s not tied down so she’s looking for something sleek but fuel-efficient.
When the new AI crawls her Facebook and Instagram profiles, it picks up on her age, where she works, and what places she’s frequently checking in to. They are mostly restaurants in the area where she works and fun places like karaoke bars and baseball games on the weekend.
Her pictures feature friends and coworkers, not significant others and children. Even her typical outfit color choices can be read by the ML interface.
The pictures and posts let the ML churn out that Daisy is not married and has no kids, meaning safety and space available for “stuff” are minimal concerns for her when considering a new vehicle. Her outfits trend more towards conservative and fun then outgoing and flashy, so a sports car doesn’t seem like her type of ride.
Then there’s all those check-ins on social media at local restaurants. ML uses Google Maps to plot a course of everywhere she usually hits for lunch and works up a list of dealerships that she regularly passes by to and from lunch, heck she probably sees their dealer names so many times she could probably tell you all the names in her sleep.
And when those names start popping up on Daisy’s social media pages advertising sedans and small SUVs that get solid mileage at an affordable price, they’ll be right in her wheelhouse. It’s not just a blind stab at her business based on where she lives, it’s an efficient use of data analysis to touch on precisely what the customer wants.
Our other example is Oscar, a married father of three who is retiring this year and who is about to start helping his daughter get her toddler to daycare three times a week. Oscar’s been a sports car guy his whole life, loving the American muscle cars of his youth and their modern-day equivalent: Camaros, Vettes, Chargers, you name it, he’s owned it.
He has a few magazine subscriptions to niche publications, has a Hot Rod group he’s been a member of since the early 1990s, and buys the accessories – wheel covers, driving gloves, you name it. But crawling Oscar’s latest posts and inquiries paints a different picture than the middle-aged speed demon. Now he’s joined a grandparents’ group and is asking questions about the different models of car seats for two-year-olds, and is far more interested in rear-seat legroom than torque and horsepower.
He’s gauging safety standards like never before and joining Facebook groups that are full of suburban enthusiasts. Chewing up Oscar’s search patterns and posts reveal that he’s out of the sports car market and will soon be toting around someone who weighs less than 40 pounds and needs to be facing the rear to maximize safety. That means an SUV with plenty of room for playpens and strollers.
The analysis becomes a lead for dealerships in Oscar’s neighbrohood – remember he’s retired and no longer takes that long commute – and next time he logs onto Facebook he has the pleasant surprise of ads geared towards the needs of himself and that beautiful first grandbaby.
SimpSocial empowers modern dealerships with two game-changing solutions: precision-targeted social media lead generation tied to live inventory, and a powerhouse engagement platform that responds, follows up, and books appointments automatically.
In today’s world, it’s no secret that businesses need to learn how to leverage the power of social media to help ensure that they achieve the growth goals that they’re striving for. Social media has proven to be a valuable tool for businesses looking to grow because it provides a window of opportunity, behind which a massive new lead pool awaits.
From there, your goal is to connect with the right target audience, at the right time, and with the right content. Once you’ve mastered the art of connecting with your audience through social media, it’s time to convert your new leads into paying customers.
As a car dealership, you might not fully understand the benefits of the reach that social media offers. More than likely, your typical leads come in the form of a local buyer who is interested in paying you a visit to take a look at a particular car that you have in your lot. And in fact, you’ve probably built your business around this exact type of client.
However, think about the world of possibilities that await you when you extend your reach, pull from new locations and target audiences, and begin to give your competition a run for their money. This could be your chance to achieve the market growth that you’ve been searching for.
The clearest advantages when it comes to social media marketing is the fact that you can quickly and immediately engage and connect with a pool of potential customers. You can push content that targets those interested in particular car brands that you service, and you can be sure that your content appeals to a wider audience spread out across a wider geographical area.
But what about lead generation? Sure, you can push content all that you want with social media. But how can you be sure that your lead funnel is doing its job?
Remember, any advertising or marketing strategy is only as good as the leads that it can generate. With that said, you need to do a little bit of work to ensure that the connections you make with your target audience through social media actually make it into your lead funnel as quality leads that you can work to convert.
For example, when a potential customer clicks on your ad, you can use a simple feature that captures their email address. From there, you have a new point of contact where a member of your sales team can reach out to that connection with some more information related to a particular car or sale that they expressed interest in.
From there, that connection becomes a lead that your sales team can work until they convert. In essence, social media was the direct catalyst that attracted a new potential lead to your business. Once you’ve made that connection, the sky is the limit.
If you’re ready to learn just how to leverage social media to grow your automotive business, Simpsocial would be proud to help. Our state of the art AI enabled customer contact center will make it easier and more automated than ever before to ensure that the leads you create through social media advertising are effectively managed by our AI technology.
Free your sales team up to convert – our AI technology will handle your leads. Learn more today.
Most car dealers still use traditional methods of advertising, like newspaper ads, radio, and television. These are tried and true methods of driving sales and have their place.
But online advertising, especially on Facebook and Instagram, is targeted, cost-effective, and agile. This is the new way to communicate with your potential customers.
Let’s look at each of the above claims as they relate to Facebook and Instagram advertisements:
Using the power of artificial intelligence (AI), such as the kind we use at SimpSocial, you’re able to show potential customers exactly the car their looking for or one that meets their criteria. What we mean is: when they search for 4×4 pickup trucks online, their computer will track that information. When they next go on Facebook, they’re shown ads of the actual inventory you have on the lot.
Since you’re only paying for the people who actually see the ad, you’re going to get a better ROI (return on investment). With a newspaper ad, you pay for the total number of people that buy or read the paper; the publisher has no idea how many people actually read your ad.
With AI and Facebook/Instagram tracking, we can see exactly how many people saw your ad, how many clicked to call you, and how many visited your website. We can even make it all VIN-based to make sure that everyone who searches for your exact vehicle will find it on your lot.
Because it’s all digital, you can change your inventory in real time. Sold a car? It comes right out of your ads. Brought in a truckload of cars? They will be automatically added to your advertisements. Everything runs through our exclusive CRM (customer relationship management software).
For there, you’re able to see everything about the customer and track every step of the sales process. Or it can be loaded through your CRM, as well.
Have you ever seen the movie Minority Report? As the main character, played by Tom Cruise, walks around, the advertisements in the shopping mall change to speak to him, by name and based on his prior purchases. That’s dynamic advertising.
We can do that for your potential buyers online – minus the iri scans that are used in the movie. As soon as they start searching for vehicles online, Facebook, using a cookie tracker that the customer authorized, knows they’re doing it.
When they log into Facebook to see what’s going on or for a good laugh, they’ll see your ad. As soon as they click on it, the Facebook user can become a lead for your dealership.
Generating leads is the key to sales, especially big ticket items, like cars. Using Facebook and Instagram ads, we can help you generate more leads than any other form of advertising. It doesn’t require that the customer or any more than click on your ad.
Once they’ve done that, they enter our CRM and become part of the sales process.
In essence, we’re able to integrate social media in the front to the backend CRM through an AI portal. The artificial intelligence processes everything to your CRM with all the data and lots of guidance.
Your staff can spend a lot less time chasing after weak leads. For example, when someone steps on the lot and had no idea what they want, your salespeople can spend hours going through the cars with them just to help them narrow it down.
Using Facebook Lead Ads, you’ll not only know exactly what vehicle they clicked on and were interested in, but their information will be populated into your CRM and show as a new lead.
These are essentially “self-vetting leads.” The customer is telling you exactly what they’re looking for before you even begin a conversation with them. Hours of guesswork are eliminated. Even if the client changes their mind, they’ve started with an idea so you have some of their preferences to start with.
If you buy a $2000 newspaper ad or a billboard, you have no idea if that’s the thing that brought the customer to you. Of course, those things are great for marketing, the process of building a name in your area. They aren’t great for targeting that one individual with just the right ad at just the right time.
Using Facebook/Instagram ads, we can target the right search words and present the ad to the prospect. More importantly, we can see how many people saw the ad, how many clicked, and how many decided to call you. You will have proof that the ads are working. This information includes the date and time that they clicked on the ad.
Here’s a scenario that you might find interesting: Imagine we find out you have more people clicking on ads on Saturdays at 2 pm than any other time. We can run an ad that invites them down to your business on Saturdays for a special discount or a free item for a test drive or whatever you want to do. We can tell when people are looking so we can adapt your marketing efforts to that information.
Of course, you don’t want to pay for people in Duluth to see your ads. Facebook and Instagram let us set up audiences that can be restricted by location (and gender, income, interests, and much more). This lets us make sure that everyone who sees your ad is someone who might actually buy from you.
These ads will include vehicles that are actually in your inventory, but it doesn’t force you to allow people to purchase online. It will let them see the ad and push a button to call you. They might call and say that they saw the red F-150 and will be right over to test drive it.
That’s okay. We get our information from whatever you’re doing right now or through our exclusive CRM program. You take photos, enter the basic data, and our artificial intelligence takes over. It creates the perfect ads for you and posts them to automatically online. Our team reviews performance regularly and fine tunes the system when needed.
Using Facebook and Instagram ads for your auto dealership is one of the most cost-effective advertising techniques you can use. Best of all, there’s tracking data that proves that it’s working.
Multi-vendor reports are a pain, right?
If you sit down and look at all the reports that you get from multiple vendors, the total sales they take credit for exceeds the total sales you had in that time period.
So, what’s happening?
ROI (return on investment) with marketing and advertising is difficult to track. Unless you have customer who tells you what prompted them to show up at your showroom, you have no idea if it was the newspaper, the billboard, the radio ads, or the text messages that prompted them to come in.
Here are some of the things you need to do track your marketing ROI:
The last contact gets the credit – You can look at the billboard and the radio ad as branding if the last thing to get some in the door was an email they got that morning. When you track ROI, whatever the customer recalls seeing last is the vendor/outlet that gets the credit.
Talk to your vendors – Sit down with each of your vendors and let them know that you’re changing how you track their success. You’ll be looking at only giving credit if the customer recalls their particular outlet. If the outdoor signage company doesn’t get any credit in a month, they might not be around the next month. These might be hard conversations, but in the end, you’ll be a lot happier and making more money from your marketing and advertising dollars.
Track what you can – Some things, like Facebook ads, text messages, and emails can all be tracked right though your CRM. If someone got a message on Sunday afternoon and they show up on Tuesday morning, you can attribute that sale to the latest message.
Ask the customers – This is a shocking idea, but it’s important. “What brings you in today? Did you get a text message from us or see an ad?” Most customers don’t mind you asking. If they don’t remember, you can move on. It’s important to ask the customer what they remember and to track it.
Add tracking – Have you ever noticed those TV ads that say to text a word to their number? Did you ever notice that the word changes? That’s tracking. If I want to know if overnight Saturday ads, which are cheap on TV, are really working, run an ad that has tracking built in. The same for a newspaper ad. Include a texting number and have a special word in the ad. Use a word that’s easy to remember, not some strange code only you understand. When you get those messages, you’ll know exactly where they come from. Even a billboard or a bus stop bench can have a special code that says, “Text TRUCK to 12345 to get a special financing offer.” You’ll know precisely where the customer came from and what they responded to.
The days of “tens of thousand people a day drive past it” are gone. There are far too many ways to track exactly who saw what and when and what they did about it to accept the old idea that eyeballs on ad justifies its price.
Don’t bother with newspaper ads that aren’t trackable. As we noted above, it’s not hard to put tracking into these advertisements, but you need to plan ahead and do it well.
If there are multiple vendors under a single contract, simply assign them a portion of the sale each. If there are four vendors under a single contract and you can’t figure out which one helped make a sale, they get ¼ of a sale each.
At the end of the month, add up each source to figure out where you’re getting the best ROI. The number of sales credits should be less than your total sales for the month. If it’s more than your sales, someone is getting credit they shouldn’t.
This process might take time, but it’s worth it. Eventually, you can narrow down where your sales are coming from and invest more money there. This increases your ROI and reduces your cost per sale. And isn’t that the goal of all advertising? A great ROI?
From the Silent Generation (1924 to 1942) to the Millennials(1981 to 1996), there are a lot of people who have very different ways of communicating.
The Silent Generation can remember party lines and payphones. The Millennials have always had cell phones and can barely remember flip phones.
So how can you market to all of these generations with one simple communication channel? Texting or SMS.
Text messaging is the number one way to communicate on cell phones.
They’re Already Here
With almost everyone who owns a cellphone using it to text, it should make sense that texting is a great way to sell cars. More than that, they’re already using their phones and tablets to research cars. “More than half (53%) of automotive internet shoppers use a mobile device in their quest for automotive information.”3
With more than half of auto shoppers already using mobile devices and all of them texting, it’s time for auto dealerships to start using text messages to sell cars.
If you’re not sure what’s going on with your customers, look in the repair waiting area, look around Wal-mart, take a walk in a park. Everyone is looking at their phones, young and old.
How to Make Texting Work for You
There are a few steps you should take before you start using texting for your dealership.
Get a sales floor cell phone. This is the number you will publish online and in your print ads.
Your sales team will take over your text messaging if you let them. This will present a whole bunch of problems for you. First, you won’t have access to those numbers later to market to. Second, you have no idea what was said by any salesperson to a customer. Third, if they’re busy, the text will go unanswered.
Remember: Over 95% of texts are read and most of those within five minutes. (If you don’t believe those statistics, consider your own phone use). People expect a quick response from texting. Be sure they get it.
You will want to get your messages onto a computer screen where they’re easier to manage. There are a lot of services available that will let you send and receive messages on your computer. Both Android and iOS have free applications that will do it right from your texting app. Most other applications will let you send bulk text messages to market your dealership. Again, over 95% of text messages get read. There is no other way of contacting your customers that’s more effective.
Have the computer application where someone can watch it, on the manager’s computer, or the receptionist’s, or on a shift phone that someone is assigned to carry around every shift.
Build a text marketing strategy
Using an online service to send bulk messages, create a text marketing strategy. Look to use those text messages to promote specials on the lot or to remind customers when it’s time for an oil change.
You can increase your brand loyalty through text messages by being consistent, not texting too often, and giving good information that everyone can use.
Be sure that any incoming texts are responded to quickly, within five minutes, and that your outgoing texts are professional and informative. Keep it short and don’t hard sell via text. Through text messages is not the time to start asking a thousand questions and doing the “Come down and we’ll show you,” tactic. Be cool and responsive. That’s what people who text are expecting and need.
Text messaging as a superpower
Text marketing has not been adopted by many dealerships, in spite of the number of people using it and how easy it is.
If your dealership starts doing text marketing, you have a good chance of dominating your area and building a whole new group of loyal customers.
The world of selling vehicles has changed a lot.
The classic car salesman (and they were mostly men) waited for the customer to hit the lot. The customer usually arrived because they knew the make of the car or the dealdehip was the “best one in town.”
As soon as a toe crossed the line, the salesman would ask the question, “How are you today?” Oddly, everyone knew that he didn’t care. It was a formality that really meant, “How fast can I get you into a car and earn a commission?”
That’s all changed. Today, the buyer is in charge. The world is different and sales people are finding that they need to adapt.
Recently, we sat down with one of our long-time clients, Oliver. He discussed why he was using SimpSocial and how it affected his business.
SS: Why did you choose to use SimpSocial?
O: Well, I realized that everyone around me was using social media. My kids, my grandkids, my sales people – everyone is social media all the time. I asked my adult daughter how often she went on Facebook and she told me that she looked at it about five times a day. That convinced me that I needed to look at using social media to promote sales.
SS: How did you decide to use SimpSocial?
O: When I started, I had no idea what to do. I gathered my sales team, a group of younger men and women, and asked them what they thought. I don’t really use Facebook or Twitter or any of those other platforms, but I know that they all did. “What do you think we should do?” I asked.
They told me that we should do social media advertising, then use text messaging and emails to develop a relationship with the lead.
One of my salespeople, Kelly, showed me some messages she got from a competitor. They were interesting.
SS: Then you started looking for the right service?
O: I asked my sales manager to bring me some recommendations. He came to me with three different companies. We chose SimpSocial because it was the right price, the right services, and is oriented specifically to auto dealers.
We looked at a couple of other companies, but they didn’t specialize in what we do. I’m sure they can do a fine job, but I don’t want to have to explain our goals and priorities. SimpSocial was the answer.
SS: And how has it been?
O: Great! SimpSocial created Facebook Lead Generation ads for us and linked them to the CRM. They helped set up a communication system that pretty much runs itself. My sales manager assigned someone, Kelly, in fact, to keep track of leads and sales.
The leads we get have been very productive. Kelly tracks leads from the time they first fill out a form to the time they buy a car or truck. We’ve been well into the 30% success rate and that’s just in six months. I’m told there are leads that might not pan out for a year or so, but that they’re moving through the sales process and will buy.
Since I don’t have to pay per lead and I don’t pay someone to sit and make calls all day long, it’s a great return on investment.
SS: What do you say to dealers who are thinking about their advertising and sales?
O: I would say, look at social media. Everyone is doing it. I’m an old guy and it’s not my thing, but it doesn’t have to be. The best part about hitting SimpSocial is that I didn’t have to learn to do anything but read a screen on the CRM. I can see what the lead has been doing, what they clicked on, and if they’re active.
Once in while, I just open the CRM and make a couple of [one calls. All I do is introduce myself.
SS: How has it affected your advertising budget?
O: Honestly we’ve gone ahead and cut out most of the ads that we used to do. No one buys the paper, the phone book is a thing of the past, and billboards were never all that great for us. SimpSocial and my team have turned this new technology into a really great tool for our dealership.
I’ll tell you the truth. I was dragged kicking and screaming to this idea. I know I make it sound like I was relaxed and happy about it, but in reality, it was something I resisted until my daughter convinced me that it was probably the easiest way to reach people.
Like I said, I’m not young, so these ideas are not foreign to me, but I’m glad I listened to her and to my team.
Salespeople are notoriously hard to manage. Auto salespeople doubly. The industry has a high turnover, lots of rookies, and a bad reputation as a place to work. There are some things that a manager can do to change that climate, keep their staff, and improve their business.
The high turnover on the sales floor has a huge impact your business. Many dealerships have simply learned to deal with it, but it hurts your business.
Your customers come to your business to work with experts to buy a car. Today, they can buy a car online without ever speaking to anyone, why should they come to you? They look to someone to answer all their questions. If that person can’t, because they’re new to the company or even new to selling, they might find themselves going someplace where people know what they’re doing.
Many dealerships have a core of salespeople who stay for years. They might joke about it, but the constant turnover is taxing. There’s always someone new to train, someone else that has to be broken in. They waste time teaching someone enough to get them on the floor and that person is gone in a few weeks. It’s exhausting and dieting.
You’re wasting time hiring someone new all the time. The resumes, the paperwork, the training, the schedule – everyone comes to you with their own life and you have to accommodate. You find yourself needing to get used to a new person every few weeks, follow them around to how their doing, and retrain them in the ways of your business.
Plus, you’re responsible for their performance. How can you meet your goals if half the people who are supposed to be selling for you have been here a week?
Every new employee costs your money. The cost of the ad. The cost of the processing and paperwork. The cost of training. There are a lot of costs associated with bringing someone new on.
There are three major changes you can make that will help you keep your staff.
Take the time to train your staff and retrain your staff. Look for new tools, new techniques, new information to share with them. Rather than seeing their work as a job, help them to see it as a career.
Training the “old guys” will be tough. They often walk into a room thinking they know it all. They’ve been selling cars since Edsel was a baby. You will need their buy-in to pull it off. The best way to do that is.
Explain to the old guys why training is important for keeping the new people. Explain to the new people how training will help them make more money. Explain policy changes and new structures to everyone so that they can see how the change makes the company better.
If you can, bring your staff into the decision-making process when changes are needed. If you can’t, at least respect them enough to tell them why the change.
Hold everyone accountable equally. There should be a set of expectations for the team and everyone should be held to those expectations. If someone doesn’t meet their goals, hold them accountable.
Part of accountability is retraining and teaching. If someone is struggling, take the time to not only tell them what they’re doing wrong but to teach them the right way to do it. This will create loyalty. You’re not just yelling at them and expecting them to figure it out. You’re helping them to improve.
There’s a myth that Millennials are snowflakes who want to be coddled and aren’t willing to work hard. The reality is that they, and almost everyone else, understands that most companies aren’t loyal to their employees and that there are a lot of people who just skate by. “Why work hard if that guy doesn’t have to?”
Times have changed. The old days of seeing salespeople as endlessly replaceable are over. It’s expensive to replace them and many are willing to make working for you a career, if they have the guidance and respect they deserve. You get a team you can count on for years. They’ll not only help you meet your goals, but will make it their goal to impress you.
According to the National Auto Dealers Association (NADA), over 56% of all dealer advertising dollars went to the internet. Some of the old staples, like TV, radion, and newspapers, have fallen off a cliff.
While we lament the loss of great local papers, business must continue.
So the big question in 2026 is: Where should I put my internet dollars?
Website – You must have a great website. Period. Many people won’t even visit a business that doesn’t have a great website. It’s like the front window of your business.
You don’t need a big fancy website, but it’s wise to have one that makes it easy to search your inventory and to ask questions.
Social media – Check out these numbers from Hootsuite:
All of these numbers indicate one thing: You need to advertise on social media.
YouTube is the number one social media platform. Yes, it’s considered a social media platform because you can comment on things, leave information, and read what others think. However, very few people open YouTube to communicate with their friends.
The number one social media platform that’s real platform is Facebook. Almost all of the 69% of Americnas who have a social media account have a Facebook account. It’s that simple.
What about Instagram? Instagram has over 1 billion active users. Facebook, by contrast, has over 2.45 billion users worldwide.
So why’s that important? Facebook owns Instagram. When you set up an ad on Facebook, you have the option of showing it on Instagram without having to create another ad.
Here’s the thing: There seems to be no limit to how many leads you can generate using Facebook Lead Generation ads.
On average, dealers spend about $20 per lead.
So if you want leads, you just need to figure out how many times you can afford $20 for a viable lead.
Facebook offers some success stories on their website:
“Hub City Ford reached auto shoppers in the market and drove purchases over a 60-day period between November 2017 to January 2018.
Hub City Ford generated qualified leads, resulting in:
“Camping World improved its shopping experience and connected with shoppers showing purchase intent. Between January 24 and April 17, 2018, Camping World’s ongoing campaign delivered:
Even Facebook’s own direct numbers indicate that they generate leads that buy cars.
Even if you low ball the average price of Ford at Hub City Ford to $25,000 per vehicle, they made $850,000 in sales in two months. There’s no way to spend that much on ads in the same amount of time.
Their ROI was massive.
Again, if we consider the average auto is $25,000 and the average lead on Facebook costs $20, Hub City only spent $3000 on ads. The other $847,000 they made was ROI.
In more competitive areas, you’ll end up paying more than $20 per ad. You might pay less. Either way, it’s nearly impossible to not get your money’s worth. Particularly since Facebook charges you for the lead, not for the impression. If someone doesn’t click on your ad, you don’t pay for it.
As long as you’re setting the ad up correctly (and we can help if you need it) and you have a follow-up plan (we can help there too), you should start at $1000 per month. See what results you get and how you might improve your process.
No matter what you do, you’re going to get a more traceable and provable return than you ever will with a billboard, a newspaper ad, or a radio ad.
Try it and see if you can generate all the leads your team can handle. We’re betting you can.
SimpSocial empowers modern dealerships with two game-changing solutions: precision-targeted social media lead generation tied to live inventory, and a powerhouse engagement platform that responds, follows up, and books appointments automatically.
Facebook lead ads are a unique tool that is more than simply an advertising system. Facebook has created ads that are designed to specifically generate leads. One of its biggest strengths is the ads are created to capture leads on mobile devices.
Everyone is on Facebook. Seven in ten (69%) Americans are on Facebook. The vast majority of them go on Facebook every day.
That means that Facebook is one of the most reliable places to advertise. In fact, only YouTube has more visitors in the world of social media. Yes, YouTube is considered a social media platform.
Facebook allows you to keep your ads very localized. You can reach out to people at a specific distance from your dealership.
The ads on Facebook mobile are unique. The viewer taps a single button and a form pops up. The form is pre-populated. All the person needs to do is confirm that the information is correct and it’s sent to you.
Because this system is as simple as possible, there are many fewer lost leads. Facebook users are able to reach out to you with just two clicks and no typing.
Using the Facebook audience defining system, you can target people who are looking for a vehicle, either actively or passively.
This audience function is the hardest part of the job. You must define your audience well and completely.
One of the major advantages to the Facebook contact forms is you can add your own questions. This allows you to start the qualifying process well.
Start by asking questions that build trust and help you understand the lead. The questions shouldn’t go straight to trying to sell a vehicle. They need to be more subtle and help you build a profile of what that person needs.
After that first round of questions on the contact form (no more than 2 or 3), you can send messages or emails to learn more about this person and their needs.
Facebook ads integrate directly to your CRM. All the data, including the day and time, are delivered directly to your customer management system.
This is the most powerful part of their system. Having this information in your CRM instantly, you can trigger everything. Send a text. Launch an email. Schedule a call. The sales process isn’t delayed waiting for data to be downloaded.
Your lead ads can be designed to do a lot.
The choice is yours as to how you want to entice your lead sto click the button.
Once you’ve created the pipeline and started to get leads, you will start seeing those soft leads turn into sales. The process can be almost entirely automated, so that the leads arrive in the showroom ready to buy.
Marketing has a major issue, an issue that has quickly become its Achilles heel: most of the information that marketing agencies give to their clients means nothing.
The KPI Problem
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are the numbers and metrics that show how an ad campaign has been performing.
Most lists of KPIs include a lot of numbers that mean very little:
All of these jargons dance around the real issue. The thing that every business—especially an auto dealer—needs to know is how much money did they make from the money they invested.
Return on Investment (ROI) is the one thing that everyone needs. How much money are you making from the marketing and advertising you’re paying for?
Make the Change
If you’re a dealer, you should require your marketing agency to help you calculate ROI. In the age of everything being trackable, they will be able to help you figure out exactly how much you’ve made from every advertising dollar.
If you’re an agency, you need to create an ROI pathway for your clients. Show your clients how you can make them money by tracking each client from initial contact to purchase. This change for agencies, especially digital marketing agencies, will bring back credibility to a field that has gotten a lot of money in the recent past, but has left some companies feeling taken to the cleaners.
Go Big or Not at All?
There are a few really big advertising agencies that outsource work to smaller agencies. They will get big contracts from businesses. The agency will then hire a smaller agency to do the work, usually for much less than the work is worth.
Many of these big agencies overcharge for their services, selling a lot of “pie in the sky” and not a lot of actual performance.
These agencies don’t have the clients’ best interests in mind. They are there to grab as much money as possible and leave the contractors holding the bag.
Smaller agencies have struggled against these big agencies. They try to make inroads, but many dealers and other businesses will opt for BIG, instead of local.
How to make the change
The most important changes that need to happen are:
Making a Difference
At SimpSocial, we work on ROI, not just KPIs. Our job is to deliver sales, not just a lot of clicks and follows.
Social media is a place where you can get a lot of activity, but not all of it is productive. Knowing how to get the most from your social media marketing is a matter of experience, training, and understanding.
We can show you how marketing can drive sales, not a “general” concept, but in numbers and facts.
Back in the day, every dealership set up a Facebook page and invested a lot of money and time in getting “fans” or likes to their page.
It didn’t take very long before they realized that all those likes weren’t translating into sales.
The marketing guys start talking about “Facebook is for branding, not sales.” While branding is important, auto dealerships live and die on sales.
That’s when it got worse. Many dealerships paid someone a few hundred dollars a month to maintain their Facebook page. Usually, it was a low level employee who had no power to make anything happen and wasn’t looking for creative ways to engage people. They were just putting up posts to keep the page alive.
The next stage was Facebook ads. At about the same time, Google ads became a thing and everyone stood around confused as to which to use.
It took a while for everyone to figure out that Facebook ads and Google ads did two different things.
Then, Facebook changed their ads and created Lead Gen ads. These are ads where a person can click a button that takes them to a contact form. The form is prefilled. If they’re on a mobile device on the bus, they don’t have to type in all their information on a tiny keyboard.
These customers are still “high funnel”, meaning they aren’t necessarily ready to buy right away, but they’re prompting the contact. They’re ready to talk to someone about something.
The leads generated this way are people that you’ll nurture to the sale. Take your time, provide them with information and contacts, and help them make a decision about buying a vehicle.
One of the best ways to do this is to use text messages. Craft texts that are low-key, don’t push sales too hard, but keep the lead informed about what you’re doing and how they might be able to get a vehicle soon.
The strength of text messages is that over 90% of them are read and about 70% are responded to. Make them personal, speak to what that person might like, and you’re likely to get a sale sooner rather than later.
There needs to be change in how your salespeople approach these contacts.
Many Facebook leads aren’t ready to buy just yet. They need to be approached with a bit more of a delicate touch.
Salespeople need to build a relationship, ask questions, and even talk about the person’s personal life.
The difference will be that they should work on really getting to know the contact rather than pushing to get the sale immediately.
Make sure that everything is put into a CRM so it’s there for the next person or not forgotten by the salesperson.
While the Facebook pages didn’t work, Facebook Lead Gen ads are great for auto dealerships. They allow you to target the right area, the right demographics, and people who are really interested in your vehicles. They might not be ready to buy yet, but they’re ready to learn about what you have to offer.
SimpSocial empowers modern dealerships with two game-changing solutions: precision-targeted social media lead generation tied to live inventory, and a powerhouse engagement platform that responds, follows up, and books appointments automatically.
There are two types of buyers in the world of automobiles: transactional buyers and emotional buyers.
A transactional buyer is a haggler, a competitive shopper, who isn’t swayed by the beauty of a machine. They want to know that they got the very best deal on a vehicle. They see paying more than the next guy as an insult.
An emotional buyer is exactly the opposite. They don’t care as much about the price they pay as they do about getting the car that makes them feel a certain way. You can sell to an emotional buyer with the feeling of the drive, the way that everyone will see them behind the wheel, and how much pleasure they’ll get from the car.
Auto dealership marketing – now and then
Throughout most of the auto industry’s history, the only people that most dealerships saw were the in-market customers, people who are ready to buy as they stepped onto the sales lot. Most of these people were emotional buyers, people who were inspired by an ad to purchase a car.
Traditional advertising operates almost entirely on the emotional level. TV commercials that show people driving cars on mountain roads, along beaches, and with lots of beautiful people in the car are emotional images. Most will end with a shout-out to the transactional buyers with a list of costs, rebates, and more.
Once the social media revolution arrived that changed. Dealers began advertising for in-market transactional shoppers, people who were ready to buy based on the price they could get.
This new customer base is somewhat problematic. These are people who expect the very lowest prices. This causes a rush to the lowest price by all of these dealers. Many were within a few dollars of losing money. While dealers were making sales, they were barely making money on a sale.
Using Social Media to market your dealership
One of the most powerful aspects of social media marketing is that you can market to both types of people. With Facebook advertising, dealerships are able to run multiple ads to multiple audiences. This allows dealers to speak to each type of buyer in their own language.
Emotional Buyer Marketing
For the emotional buyer, the key is to try to get them to imagine themselves behind the wheel.
The power of social media to use images, videos, and more to set the emotional hook. Then you can convert them and get them in the door at the dealership. This makes Facebook incredibly powerful and probably the ideal way to market an auto dealership.
Selling to emotional buyers requires an emotional buy-in from the salespeople. Salespeople need to love the cars that they sell and be able to convey that. Now this is a problem for dealers as most are set up to handle transactional shoppers, those looking for great deals, not for those who are buying for the experience of the vehicle.
How to Leverage Facebook Ads to the Two Types of Buyers
Facebook ads can bring both types of buyers to your auto lot, but each type of customer needs to be treated differently.
For the transactional buyer, the logical way to get started is to simply pull out a calculator and start crunching numbers. Get to the bottom line, talk about financing, and keep everything aimed at how much they’re going to spend.
With emotional buyers, salespeople need to learn to take their time. This is the time to get them into the car that they saw in the ad or into an upgraded vehicle.
This will be difficult. If you’ve ever walked onto an auto lot, you’ll get the breathless feeling that the salespeople need you to sign on the dotted line and make way for the next person. With emotional buyers, they’ll want to slow down, take their time, and love the cars with the buyers.
Where to Start
The key to getting these two types of buyers in your door is to setup two separate Facebook ad campaigns, one for the emotional buyers and one for the transactional buyers. Use the audience information to retarget those people with type of ads that will keep the conversation going.
Using the specificity of Facebook ads, your dealership can work to bring both types of buyers to the table. Once there, you can adapt your selling style to the customer’s approach. You’ll end up with more closes and have loyal, new customers who feel heard and appreciated.
The sales funnel for vehicles has changed. One of the most significant changes is that potential car buyers are entering the funnel earlier.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Choosing between google ads vs facebook ads is one of the most important digital marketing decisions an auto dealership can make. Both platforms dominate online advertising, yet they work in fundamentally different ways. Understanding how each channel captures buyer intent, influences decision-making, and drives showroom visits is essential for maximising return on ad spend.
In this guide, we break down the real differences between Google Ads and Facebook Ads for dealerships, explain where each performs best, and show how modern platforms like SimpSocial help dealerships turn paid traffic into real sales – automatically.
At a high level, the debate around google ads vs facebook ads comes down to intent versus influence.
Both can work—but only when used strategically and supported by the right engagement technology.
Google Ads place your dealership in front of people actively searching for vehicles, dealerships, or related services. When a user types a query into Google, ads appear above or alongside organic results.
For years, Google Ads were the primary driver of online automotive leads. Dealerships could dominate search results and generate consistent enquiries.
The challenge with google ads vs facebook ads today is cost efficiency. As more dealerships, OEMs, and third-party marketplaces bid on the same keywords, competition has intensified.
Key issues include:
Industry data shows that nearly 80% of automotive search traffic flows to third-party platforms, while only around half reaches dealer websites. Even more concerning, research indicates that a large percentage of paid clicks are for dealership brand names—traffic Google would deliver organically anyway.
In effect, many dealers are paying Google to act as a digital phone book.
When comparing google ads vs facebook ads, Facebook operates in an entirely different mindset.
People do not visit Facebook to search—they visit to browse, consume content, and engage socially. This creates unique opportunities for dealerships.
Facebook users spend an average of 30+ minutes per day on the platform, often checking it multiple times daily. This makes Facebook an ideal environment for repeated brand exposure.
One of the clearest distinctions in google ads vs facebook ads is how ads are triggered.
Facebook allows dealerships to place inventory, offers, and branding in front of potential buyers long before they actively search.
Marketing research shows that buyers rarely convert after a single exposure. Studies suggest it takes 12–15 impressions before a purchase decision is made.
This is where google ads vs facebook ads diverge sharply.
Each scroll is an impression. Each impression reinforces brand recognition. Over time, this familiarity drives trust—and sales.
Many dealerships assume posting regularly on Facebook is enough. While organic posts are important for credibility, their reach is extremely limited.
Every minute on Facebook:
Organic posts are easily missed. Paid Facebook ads, however, are placed directly into high-visibility feed positions. Users must scroll past them—guaranteeing impressions.
This makes paid Facebook advertising far more reliable than organic posting alone.
A common concern in the google ads vs facebook ads debate is lead quality.
The key is what happens after the lead is captured. Without fast, consistent follow-up, even high-intent Google leads go cold.
This is where technology becomes the deciding factor.
SimpSocial ensures that no matter where a lead originates—Google or Facebook—it is instantly engaged and nurtured.
SimpSocial turns every lead into a real opportunity. Its AI assistant, Sarah, instantly engages enquiries, sets appointments, and follows up post-sale. With built-in lead generation, a Power Dialer, automated messaging, and 24/7 AI engagement, dealerships never miss a lead, call, or sale.
This solves the biggest weakness in both platforms: delayed human response.
Facebook ads work best when leads are contacted immediately. Delays of even 10 minutes can drastically reduce conversion rates.
SimpSocial enhances Facebook performance by:
This transforms Facebook from a “top-of-funnel” tool into a full sales engine.
Google Ads still have value—especially for:
However, with rising costs, Google Ads must be paired with intelligent engagement to remain profitable. SimpSocial ensures Google leads are worked instantly, preventing wasted spend.
While costs vary by market, dealerships consistently report:
Facebook’s ability to deliver thousands of local impressions daily for minimal cost gives dealerships an advantage that search ads cannot replicate.
One of SimpSocial’s biggest advantages is precision-targeted social media lead generation tied to live inventory.
This allows dealerships to:
Combined with AI engagement, this creates a closed-loop system from ad to appointment.
The real answer to google ads vs facebook ads is not choosing one—but integrating both correctly.
Best Use Case Strategy
This multi-channel approach delivers the highest lifetime value per lead.
As consumer behaviour shifts further online, platforms that rely solely on manual follow-up will fall behind. The future belongs to dealerships that combine:
SimpSocial represents this future by unifying ads, engagement, and sales workflows into one platform. One system. Endless ROI.
The debate around google ads vs facebook ads is ultimately about timing and influence. Google captures buyers at the moment of intent. Facebook shapes intent before it exists.
In today’s crowded digital marketplace, Facebook advertising—supported by AI engagement—often delivers higher ROI, more consistent lead flow, and stronger long-term brand impact. Google remains valuable, but only when used strategically.
For dealerships serious about growth, the winning formula is clear: intelligent advertising paired with instant, automated engagement. With platforms like SimpSocial, every click becomes a conversation, every enquiry becomes an opportunity, and every opportunity moves closer to a sale.
The question is no longer Google or Facebook. It’s whether your dealership is equipped to maximise both.
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.
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.
Hub City accomplished their sales in two stages.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
