One of the biggest perks of social media has been the opportunity to use it for marketing and increase lead generation. Many people use Facebook every day, but not everyone knows that it goes beyond “social” as they actually have a marketplace to sell personal belongings that are no longer need. In addition, Facebook also makes it available for users to create their own advertisements that run on websites and apps.
Having these options available to you, make it much easier to sell your things instead of just posting to your feed which only reaches a certain number of people, including car shoppers. An area that this is used a lot, however, is automotive marketing as part of the campaign to offer the right content to more potential customers and, ultimately, sell more cars. Have you ever had a car you weren’t using and wanted to sell it online?
Maybe your kid just turned 16 and you’re looking into getting a cheaper car for their first vehicle. Whatever your intentions, today we’re going to let you in on a few marketing strategies that you can use on Facebook to make selling cars online as easy as possible.
Age Range Matters
The predominant age range that uses social media is people 18 to 22 years old, though it is expanding exponentially. People in this age range are already much less likely to shop for much of any kind of product in stores, let alone go to a car dealership to browse for a vehicle. You’re much more likely to reach this demographic by advertising on Facebook.
Opening up your demographic and using the platforms they use the most can be a great way to increase sales when using social media marketing. If you’re trying to sell to an older generation, they’re less likely to be on Facebook. Look at your target market, make the most of lead generation tools, and use social media to your advantage. There are even specific times and dates that people are more likely on Facebook which could maximize audience reach.
If you run a dealership and only sell new vehicles, your target age range won’t be 18 to 22 years old. You’re more likely to have customers in their 30s to 50s. You can easily find out when that age range uses Facebook the most and advertise accordingly.
Placement
When using Facebook to market your vehicles, it isn’t necessarily all about the person looking at your ad. It can be about the platform itself that you’re using to do the advertising. Where you advertise on the site itself will impact the costs you have to put into it.
The default setting for Facebook when it comes to running ads will place the advertisement on newsfeeds on Facebook, certain apps, messenger, and Instagram. When you're looking at the placement for your advertisement, take your time since the CPC can reach 550%.
Hyper-Targeting
When trying to figure out which age ranges work best for the vehicles you’re selling, consider doing what’s called “hyper-targeting ads.” What this means is that you’re gearing your ad to a specific demographic and advertising where that demographic is most likely to see it.
Doing this can increase your relevance score, helping you market auto sales even easier. Hypothetically, this means you're able to bring in more money by selling cars without needing high traffic to reach your ad. If you're able to present your auto marketing advertisements to your target market, you will end up selling more cars while spending less money.
You can do this by writing articles or ads that are for specific certain target markets:
Vehicles That Are Great for Families
The Best Hatchbacks for any Terrain
Gas Efficient Cars for the Road-Trippers out There
Doing this will increase the number of viewers who are actually interested in purchasing a car clicking on your article or ad and are more likely to purchase.
Sales Funnel
If you’ve been in auto marketing, or any marketing at all for that matter, you have probably heard about sales funnel. This is probably one of the most important strategies on this list to help benefit you in terms of sales. The cycle goes as follows:
Awareness (Webinars, How-Tos, Checklists, Tip Sheets)
Evaluation (Case Studies, Demo Videos, FAQ Data Sheets)
Purchase (Coupons, Free Trials, Estimates, Consultations)
Doing things in this order is extremely important for your advertisements on Facebook or any other inbound marketing you’re using. Use the sales funnel before you put your next ad up on Facebook. When you have an ad you’d like to post, ask yourself how your specific ad will be for the people seeing it. Doing this can help you decide which audience to market toward, the placement to use (that we mentioned earlier), the best format to bring in the most sales, and more.
Keep Learning
If you want to really get the most bang for your buck, you can take classes or learn from others who’ve successfully sold cars online and teach others their tips and tricks. Doing this can help you learn all the ins and outs whether you’re a dealership trying to sell a lot full of vehicles or if you just have a couple used cars that you’re trying to offload.
They will teach you how to advertise through more than just Facebook and how to increase your sales as quickly as possible. You can learn how to curate ads for specific audiences, targeting the right audience, and more. It’s something worth checking out if you’d like to increase your automotive sales.
Final Words
There are several ways to increase vehicle sales on Facebook. The site makes advertising fairly easy to do straight from home or while at the office. The harder part is actually making those ads work for you.
Hopefully, in this article, you've found a few ways that will help you when it comes to auto digital marketing. Remember that targeting your audience and using a sales funnel are some of the most important things you can do to increase those all-important sales.
If it ever seems a little overwhelming, be aware that help is at hand. There are classes online that make learning about auto sales marketing far easier and give you all of the information you may need to push into new sales territory. They dive deeper into the topics we covered today and can help you and your business grow.
Melissa Cadieux is the Social Media Manager at Turbo Marketing Solutions and you can email her here or reach her at Turbo Marketing