5 automotive Facebook advertising strategies to drive sales
Social advertising has an endless number of options to choose from. While powerful, its difficult to know what to prioritise. In this post, we'll take you through 5 Facebook & Instagram automotive ads strategies that generate results to add to your media plan today! We'll cover tactics from brand awareness through to second purchase, and beyond.
Drive enquiries and test drive bookings using lead ads
Facebook Lead Ads, and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms work incredibly well for generating low cost enquiries and test drive leads with social. They are designed to make it easy to fill out a form on mobile, with the form fields pre-populated with your profile info. This drastically reduces the cost per lead. Most of our clients see a 50%+ reduction in cost per lead.
You can customise Facebook and LinkedIn lead forms easily to use for both hand raiser campaigns, brochure requests or test drive bookings. For EU automotive, it's possible to add GDPR-friendly opt-in consent, and custom disclaimers to ensure people are aware how their data will be used.
Here's an example, with Driftrock's lead sync and downstream optimisation technology:
Read more about Facebook Lead Ads here!
Messenger Lead Generation
Facebook Messenger helps bring your sales team right into Facebook.
There are a number of ways you can use Facebook Messenger for automotive lead generation.
- Facebook Page - You can load Messenger from your Facebook page.
- Click to Messenger - Try running Facebook ads that drive customers to your Messenger team or a chatbot assistant to take the customer on the next step towards buying a vehicle.
Messenger Chatbot assistants
Chatbot assistants are a powerful way to communicate with customers when your team is not around but also act like a helpful, fast virtual assistant.
Conversational lead generation is the new buzzword in lead gen marketing. It's a surprisingly enjoyable way to interact and fill out an otherwise boring form.
You can create them using a number of chatbot builder tools, or simply install Driftrock's automotive chat assistant for Messenger to start capturing more leads right away.
Instant Experiences (Canvas ads) for an interactive brand experience.
Most rich branded content on our websites is built for a desktop world. With mobile accounting for the majority of time spent online, this makes for a clunky experience. Enter Facebook Canvas ads!
To tackle this problem head on, Facebook launched Canvas ads. Canvas ads offer an easy to design experience specifically built for mobile, which makes the most out of your existing brand assets.
There are all sort of interesting creative treatments we can deliver such as showcasing a specific model, range, or perhaps even a tour of a local showroom.
Intent-based retargeting to capture in-market customers
Now that you're familiar with Facebook Lead Ads, a simple extension of this strategy uses the Facebook pixel to reach in-market customers.
As an automotive brand, you have rich information on in-market customers, simply through targeting your website visitors. Facebook's Pixel allows you to create Custom Audiences using your web traffic.
One simple, but essential automotive targeting audience created using your Facebook Pixel is from specific pages such as a car configurator. Anyone who takes the time to configure a car is deeply engaged, and ready to book a test drive. Make this easy for them by retargeting them with a Facebook Lead Ad.
Increasing lead conversion rates with nurturing
It can take 2-6 months to convert auto leads, so make sure you are communicating to the customer over this critical period so you don't lose the sale to a competitor.
Facebook Custom Audience Lists make this possible. You can upload hashed emails and phone numbers who have submitted a lead, but not converted yet. Facebook matches these records to people on Facebook for targeting.
With the audience ready for targeting on Facebook, you can use any of Facebook's ad formats to keep them engaged. For example, a Facebook Video ad showcasing what it's like to own the vehicle, or a Facebook Canvas ad, which doubles up with physical brochures.
It's hard to run this strategy at scale, as pretty soon, you'll be uploading hundreds of CSV's from your CRM each day. This is also a potential Data Protection and security challenge, especially if customers unsubscribe from communications.
To solve this problem, Driftrock can securely onboard the records to Facebook for you automatically. We keep these audiences in constant sync, so if customers unsubscribe, we'll remove them from the audiences. Learn more about Driftrock's Facebook Custom Audience Sync here.
BONUS TACTIC! CRM, after-sales & repeat purchases using Custom Audiences
Just like the lead nurturing, if you use Facebook Custom Audiences, you can also deliver relevant ads over their lifecycle, after the purchase.
Here's a few powerful examples to drive revenue and loyalty after the initial purchase:
- Service or MOT reminders.
- After-sales offers such as winter tyres or air conditioning checkups.
- 3 months before their finance plan comes to an end, you can showcase the latest model and generate a second purchase. By extending email to social ads, some of our customers have seen as much as a 50% boost in repeat sales.
Let us know what you think, and if you have any other automotive strategies we should add to the list!
Driftrock powers lead generation for 15 brands and over 500 dealerships. Learn more about our automotive marketing tools.
