Recipe for Success with Social Media for Dealerships
Similar to baking a cake, developing a successful social marketing strategy for your dealership requires a number of components to be accurately prepared, weighed, mixed, and baked together. To put it another way, there is a lot of opportunity for error. Since not everyone is skilled in baking (or marketing), we thought we’d share with you four ingredients that can make or break the social marketing recipe for your dealership.
Time to Prepare: Audience Lists
You do realize that cleaning your hands is the first step in preparing a cake? Your social marketing should start with clean data, which is a similar idea.
Dirty data clogs up your plan without taking this critical first step, which can waste your time and money and limit the success you can observe right away.
Let’s use the following instance: Let’s say you want to market to people who are in a particular period of life, like perhaps recent college grads. You compile a list of shoppers in their early to mid-20s for this audience. Now that your records have been cleaned up, you may send targeted social ads to youthful vehicle purchasers (easy peasy), but while your records are dirty, the age range of those who see your messages is much greater; for example, your college graduate message may now be seen by persons in their 20s, 30s, and possibly even 40s. Your message is probably meaningless to the majority of the people who view it because it is being seen by such a diverse group of people.
Quick Tip: Cleaning data every few weeks is fine; cleaning data every week is excellent; and cleaning data every couple days or even every day is optimal. Any information that doesn’t fit into one of those three categories is bad information for correctly segmenting and targeting consumers.
Picking a Taste for Your Message
We need to talk about your messaging now that you have an immaculate list of potential customers.
A customer may become thrilled when you mention cake (or vehicles), but they will ultimately be dissatisfied if you give them chocolate when they expected strawberry (or a truck when they wanted a sedan). Picking the correct message is similar to picking the proper cake flavor.
How do you ensure that your message is pertinent to the group you are trying to reach? There are a few options you can explore:
Test again and again because, as with baking, practice makes perfect. Nobody mandated that your dealership pick just one advertisement. Run a few different iterations and see what sticks. Make use of what you learn as you go to get better.
Find an individual or individuals within your target audience that you can rely on for candid and helpful comments, and gather information directly from them. Request feedback and ideas from others on how you can make your ads better.
Consider using layered targeting, which reduces your audience based on several targeting characteristics rather than just one. We’ll agree that this one can become quite specific, but if done correctly, hyper-focusing your target can raise your engagement rate and ROI. Here are a couple of illustrations in case you’re curious about what this looks like in practice:
Identify clients with small children who enjoy the newest technology. Show them automobiles with updated safety equipment.
Identify middle-aged homeowners and high-earning positions in the finance sector. Show them high-quality vehicles, perhaps ones with luxurious brands or high trim levels.
Identify clients who enjoy traveling and actively support environmental causes. Show them dependable, fuel-efficient cars, perhaps even hybrid or electric ones. Bonus points, if you provide a service package aimed at keeping their car, maintained and ready for road trips.
Quick Tip: Try to select images that are appropriate for your target audience while developing your message. Don’t forget the influence of visuals. This can help customers understand that the communication is directed at them.
Your Tone Is the Secret Ingredient
We haven’t yet revealed the secret ingredient—your tone—so it’s time to combine the components and bake your dealership’s social marketing recipe (exciting, right?!).
You can’t say the proper thing unless you’ve thought about how to say it. Your dealership should not only have a brand voice; it should also be engaging and honest. Finding the right combination can be challenging, but these suggestions can help:
Share a tale; customers prefer a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. By adding a narrative structure to your content, you can keep readers interested and waiting to find out what happens next.
Avoid seeming like a salesperson; many of your customers will perceive buzzwords and filler language as hollow. Not only is a message that is precise and succinct less misleading, but it is also more interesting.
Be approachable; clients appreciate learning that a company is made up of people just like them. By employing conversational (relatable) language or even adding a little joke here and there, you may give your business a little personality.
Quick Tip: Sprinkles are similar to emoticons. Nobody likes a cake that is all sprinkles, but adding one or two can significantly improve the tone of your dealership.
Presentation: Your Choice of Media
The final phase is the presentation. If you’ve ever watched a baking competition, you know how important presentation is. Even if a cake with shoddy decorations may taste good, we all prefer cakes with tasteful decorations. Your social media marketing demonstrates the same thing.
Even if your dealership’s marketing plan contains all the necessary components, it still needs to be executed well. Your dealership can also run a variety of ads, including image ads, carousel ads, video ads, lead ads, story ads, and so on.
So which format is ideal? The answer is based on the particular objectives of your dealership.
Consumers find video commercials to be by far the most entertaining, but they perform even better when included in wider marketing strategies. For illustration, let’s say that your dealership begins by using Automotive Inventory Ads, which post advertisements for your available inventory on Facebook. These could support retargeting efforts for your car dealership. Then you could sprinkle in a few image and text ads for a campaign your dealership is undertaking. Add a video ad to this, and your dealership can anticipate a solid return on investment.
Quick Tip: Timing is an essential (but frequently overlooked) component of presentations. In general, dessert is served after dinner. Make sure to approach customers when they are ready to make a purchase, not when they are just starting to consider appetizers.
The beautiful thing about marketing (and baking) is that you never have to start from scratch. Using a mix of the appropriate target, message, tone, and medium can be a terrific start to creating the perfect recipe for your dealership’s specific social marketing needs. Expert assistance is a fantastic method to achieve sweet success at every turn, without the hassle or mess.
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