Motor Trader The award-winning and longest running UK magazine for car retailing professionals. Your first stop for News, Jobs and Reports for the motor industry.
When most people go to buy a car today their first instinct is to turn to a laptop or mobile rather than their local dealer for guidance. This creates a great new opportunities to get in front of customers at a critical stage. We at Facebook looked at the path to purchase, the process people go through when they buy a new vehicle, and found that 64% of car buyers check Facebook while conducting auto research.
As 97% of people take this online-first approach, I’m often asked what the change means for dealers. Can Facebook actually help us to sell more cars?
Here are three tips to make sure the answer is yes.
People spend just a couple of seconds looking at each piece of content on Facebook. We call this the 3-Second Audition – three seconds to convince people that you matter and stop the scroll.
The content you create needs to be impactful from the first frame to give it a chance to pass that first audition.
Content designed for TV won’t necessarily work on mobile or desktop. Always ask yourself, does this work for the platform we’re using it on and is it bold enough make someone stop scrolling? If you’re creating an ad for mobile, check what it looks like on mobile.
When you start an ad campaign on Facebook, you can choose from eleven different objectives for your campaign. Use these to find what ad works best for your audience. This can be really powerful in driving sales.
For example, BMW UK switched to lead ads on Facebook. These are ads that let you quickly follow up with leads, and saw a 2.8x increase in the volume of leads generated. Maybe you want more people to come to your showroom. For this, look at the store visit objective.
For more advice visit the Facebook for auto site: facebook.com/business/industries/automotive
By Dan Robinson, UK Group Director, Facebook