Introduction
Whether you are starting a new business or you are already running one from a long time, going social and marketing your firm online is the way to go in this century. Facebook is among the most-used social networking sites in the world and on an average day also, millions of people are logged onto this network, the world over.
What makes Facebook so great is that you have more control over who sees your ads and you can control the geographic selectivity of ad-display. As a marketer, it gives you a greater control of how you interact with your potential consumers. It gives you a platform to address all phases of the shopping process – right from surveys, queries, meeting, and the actual decision making, sometimes, even post-purchase decisions.
The best decision is to use Facebook in conjunction with another marketing strategy – offline or online to boost sales and drive engagement. Your ads need to be seen by the right people if you are to derive any impact from it at all.
The reason why other social media networks cannot be used as widely as Facebook is because Facebook is designed in a manner as to encourage businesses to find solutions to existing problems. By creating Facebook Page for your brand and viewing the Page Insights, you can keep track of the metrics in your investment. What’s more, you can increase the reach of selective ads that have done well – this will boost them to people who may have an inclination towards automobiles. There’s organic reach and boosted results – one is natural and you may not find many conversations happening but when an Ad is pushed out to all the target consumers – the results will be tremendous.
Why Should You Opt For Facebook?
The targeting feature of Facebook helps you to streamline your target market after identifying all the parameters that you would base your decisions on.
Automobile industries have also got a huge advantage and this e-book contains all the examples that you need to know about it.
Some of the top Automotive campaigns conducted by the best Automotive leaders will give you a perspective on how you can leverage social media to be your life saver. Take Nissan for instance, they built awareness about their new cars on FB and increased consumer interest. By building brand awareness you reach out to more people.
You should start by creating a Facebook Page for your brand. Choose the appropriate name and ensure that you include this web address in all your contact details whether it’s on a website or your business card. This makes your business venture more discoverable to people. When people look for the name and find it on Facebook, it lends a different type of credibility to the whole venture. However, just having a Facebook page is not enough, you have to drive interests and conversations among people. If anyone likes your page, you must make it a point to remain connected by posting interesting stuff that will get people talking. It works incredibly if people like, share and comment on your photos and posts. Perhaps one of the best parts of having a Facebook page is the insights that you can obtain through it. You will be able to get a deeper understanding of your customers and your marketing activities too.
If you look at the automotive brands present on Facebook, you will get an idea of the sheer number of reach that it can ascertain. The highest number of fans for these pages are in the following order: Volkswagen(25819335), Mercedes-Benz(20,099,416), BMW(19,160,604), Ferrari(16,207,607) and Nissan(15,680,999). What’s more, you can also divide your FB page to have sub-pages for different locations too!
Engaging With People Matters
As you go about creating a Facebook page, you should think along the lines of your consumers. What ticks them off and what interests them. You can start off by experimenting with different kinds of posts. You can do a combination of text or photos or even videos. Whichever gets a higher engagement will tell you what you ought to focus on. Some of your posts could be focused on external links as well. You will get an idea of where to focus after checking out the Facebook insights.
To sum it up, here are a few tips to help you get started at the soonest!
1. Stay Genuine
You do not have to share posts about things that you as a brand do not believe in.
2. Respond to Queries
A lot of people may like and comment on your posts and when they do, you must ensure that you listen to them and interact with them. If people have asked a question and you do not answer to it, communicate to them and assure them that you will get back to them. For personal queries, you could direct them to the Inbox so it will allow them to remain anonymous.
3. Consistency Is Key
It won’t do to have a Facebook page that only posts occasionally. You have to be regular to keep your fans hooked. Use every opportunity you get to build a better rapport with your existing customers and create new bonds with the new people that you can target. One of the easiest ways to do this is to find important days of the year and create posts around it. These can again range from simple visuals to complex stories or video ideas. You can even set a schedule for the posts so as to maximise your team’s efficiency and prevent delays.
Once you figure out which post works and which does not fare well, you can replicate the success stories on new stories. Another tip to help you fare better is to promote the posts that are successful. Promoting posts help it reach a wider population.
Volvo went a step ahead and combined Facebook advertising with traditional media ads, thus reaching out to a larger user base.
You could use ‘Facebook Offers’ to ensure that your targeted consumers can get discounts. You can decide which vehicles you want to sell faster – thus enabling you to clear out stock.
Facebook has a ‘Broad Category targeting’ that can help reach people who may be interested in new cars. By choosing ‘Custom Audiences’ you can narrow the target to people who already have a connection with your brand, either through your customer database or the website.
A lot depends on building excitement for your new phone much before it arrives.
Case Studies
Here’s a collection of various cases about how mega brands used social media and went the Facebook way to attract consumers and to drive sales.
1. Nissan’s Enhanced Power with Facebook
Let us take the case study of how Nissan used Facebook to improve their marketing activities online:
Nissan used the logout experience feature of Facebook to increase awareness of its new car – the Nissan Leaf, in the Australian market. Other tools used included Facebook Adverts, Page Publishing, and Pages itself.
They started by launching the Nissan Facebook page as it was their core marketing asset for connecting consumers and creating awareness. When the car was launched, they posted a footage of the video – World Without Petrol, which was actually a combination of offline and online engagement. They then used the Logout Experience to drive home the video of the event, This was effective for the brand as they could convey the concept through the use of video.
The logout experience basically enables one to feature your message on the logout page. Since this is placed at the end of Facebook, people can actually engage and spend a moment learning about the product being advertised.
The results of this were that there was a 20% increase in awareness with the core demographic and more than 31,500 videos played during this campaign.
2. How did Toyota win the Aussies?
Toyota is one of Australia’s most popular car manufacturers and they used Facebook video ads to connect with cricket lovers, driving awareness of its sponsorship activity and reaching 1.9 million of the sport’s biggest fans over 5 months and 1.3 million views were recorded on videos. What’s more, 76% of the people were mobile users.
They connected or rather partnered with Cricket and leveraged sponsorship to connect with a majority of cricket lovers. They took advantage of the fact that many people prefer to view sports over their mobile phones, they built a rapport with cricket and sports fans across Australia. Toyota Australia created a series of videos and distributed them across Facebook’s mobile and desktop News Feed. Most of these videos were humorous videos and they featured well-known Australian cricketers such as David Warner, Shane Watson, Ryan Harris and Michael Clarke. The theme was centered around Toyota’s ‘Oh what a feeling!’ tagline and multiple ads were created so as to showcase ‘Celebrating Celebrations’ including greetings like ‘Fist Pump’ to the ‘Man Hug’ and ‘Chainsaw’. They made extensive use of the Adverts and the news feed. The engaging content allowed them to get the right people on board.
While this was the scene in Australia, the landscape in Taiwan was slightly different. Toyota Taiwan wanted to rejuvenate a brand.
3. How Benz Became the Leader In Japan
The next brand that we discuss would be the car manufacturer run video ads alongside its TV ads to encourage its target audience in Japan to visit its dealerships.
In May 2014, Mercedes-Benz launched GLA 180, an entry-level compact SUV and to encourage sales of the same, they targeted people in the age group of 25- to 40-year-old. They wanted to motivate people to visit their local dealership. They created a video featuring music and images from the popular 90s video game Mario Kart, which was designed to appeal to nostalgic 30- to 40-year-old. This was distributed on video as Facebook video ads, which ran at the same time as traditional TV ads. Two campaigns were run and the impact of these ads on people’s intent to visit a dealership was studied using Millward Brown’s AdIndex study. The goal of this project was to raise the brand awareness of Mercedes-Benz by motivating drivers.
Mercedes-Benz reached its target audience with 99% accuracy with Facebook, which proved to be a highly efficient way to shift the mindset of potential car buyers. The campaign resulted in:
• 10.6-point lift in intent to visit dealerships among people who own a car worth less than 3 million yen
• 17.7-point lift in intent to visit dealerships among people considering buying a car in the next 3 years
• 99% accuracy in reaching the target audience (men and women age 25 and over)
4. The Mini Magic
MINI is a modern icon with a rich heritage, distinct design, and unique personality. It has been on the road since 1959, first as part of the British Motor Corporation. Today, it is owned by BMW. Their goal before launching was to raise brand awareness and increase in-store sales. Mini Australia was looking for an efficient way to engage with potential buyers and invite them to register their interest in receiving more information about the new car. Their goal was to increase brand awareness and increase in-store sales.
They developed a targeted media strategy for this campaign and also engaged with people based on specific demographic information to reach both male and female Australians across 5 income brackets. Because people who weren’t necessarily in the market for a car would see the advertising, the team infused the creative with a more emotive message.
They used mobile News Feed and lead adverts to deliver a fast, efficient, and cost-effective lead generation campaign.
MINI used Facebook’s lead ads and managed to generate 5.4X its target leads in just 6 days and almost 98% of the information in these lead ads was accurate. The entire process costs per lead can less be than $25.
5. Hyundai’s Promotional Activities
Hyundai Motor America wanted to resort to new ideas to engage with its consumers over social media. They wanted to specifically reach those consumers who are likely to be in the market for a compact or mid-size vehicle.
They wanted to promote and deliver marketing messages for the Hyundai Sonata and Hyundai Elantra.
Hyundai used Facebook’s Datalogix-Polk Partner Category Segments to reach potential Hyundai consumers that are predicted to be in the market for a car. The campaign ran from December 21, 2012 – December 31, 2012, followed by a 30-day measurement window. The automotive company worked closely with their media agency and agency trading desk to build out an effective lower-funnel strategy that would reach and resonate with in-market shoppers. Hyundai ran domain ads on Facebook that drove offsite to the Hyundai website and reached 3.6 million households identified as being likely to buy a car within 6 months.
They used a whole lot of Adverts to increase in-store sales.
Targeting in-market shoppers on Facebook proved to be an effective way to reach the right people at the right time, delivering:
• 55% lower cost per site conversion than stated goal, highlighting the effectiveness of Facebook media
• 2.1x more new Hyundai cars were sold to the exposed audience, demonstrating accurate targeting of in-market shoppers through Facebook’s Datalogix-Polk Partner Category Segments.
6. Audi in Hong Kong
Audi used Facebook video ads to target its audience in Hong Kong and reached 72% of the total population in just three days. It ran an estimated total of 153,000video plays in 14 days. Each video play was for approximately 23 seconds.
The specialty of this Audi car besides its sporty car design and technological innovation was that it features driverless technology and can reach speeds of 240 km/hr. So the company planned to showcase the RS7 at a racing event in Germany and live-stream it to Hong Kong. Their goal was to create a buzz and build excitement around its racing event. Using Facebook video ads has helped Audi reach the right people—digital natives in Hong Kong.
Audi’s global team produced 3 videos of varying lengths for online consumption. The first 2 teaser videos were 30 seconds long and 15 seconds long respectively. The teaser videos gave people a sneak peek at the lead-up to the racing event and created a sense of mystery and anticipation. Audi followed the teasers with a longer video that demonstrated the RS7’s driverless technology in action.
Audi used targeting and then zeroed in on custom targeting to find people who had already watched the teasers, showing them the final longer video towards the end of the campaign.
Conclusion
Now that you have perused this blog, you will have a better idea of how automotive brands can use the multiple tools offered by Facebook to ensure that their brands have been in the limelight and performed well.
You must always start by analyzing your brand before jumping to make decisions that will impact your brand at many levels. In the case of any confusion, do visit the Facebook Help Centre and confer with the automotive marketing experts of Turbo Marketing Solutions by calling 1-800-262-0081.
------ Sean Cassy is co-owner and digital marketing strategist at Turbo Marketing Solutions. You can contact him if you have any questions regarding the article or how to use videos to generate more leads and sales for your dealers.