How To Prospect Buyer & Seller Leads For Car Dealerships With Facebook Ads

If you’re a car dealership (or even any independent automotive retailer), the idea of increasing your monthly buyer leads might seem like a difficult task.

You may have bought expensive leads before from a lead provider (expensive and not unique to you) or indeed invested a lot of cash into platforms like Autotrader, only to find that they are expensive and your car inventory gets lost in the noise.

Many of our car dealership clients had fallen into these two buckets, and it’s a normal (and frustrating) place to be.

But there is a way to prospect car buyer leads on autopilot, at a fairly cheap cost. And that is with Facebook.

Facebook is one of the BEST platforms for generating buyer leads for your car dealership.

Why?

Because the targeting assets are very detailed, your target audience (car buyers) will be using the platform every day, you can get leads much cheaper than other platforms and you have an opportunity to build your brand as the leading dealer in your area.

In addition, we can showcase cars that you want to sell faster, drive traffic to your inventory pages through offering promotions, and capture customer information to be able to remarket to later on, and drive higher Life-Time-Value (LTV) from your customers.

Facebook Ads Strategy For Car Dealerships

STEP 1: LEAD RESEARCH ON FACEBOOK

You need to find out who your ideal prospects are, where they hang out, what demographics they fall into, and importantly, what their needs, wants and concerns are.

Our goal here is to find what their needs, wants and concerns are to buying a new or used car, as we want to position your dealership as the best solution to their problems.

You’re not selling cars, you’re offering solutions to their needs or wants and helping them overcome any concerns.

As an example, we ran a research campaign for a new client of ours and had over 50 local questionnaire responses in 2 days. That is a goldmine of information!

And the best bit? We identified clear buckets of common Needs, Wants and Concerns of the targeted customers… and they were very different to what our client had originally thought.

We address all those Needs, Wants and Concerns in all promotional content going forwards.

STEP 2: RAPID FIRE AUDIENCE TARGETING

Where do your ideal car-buying leads live, what are their age groups, genders, interests, yearly incomes, jobs and behaviors?

Well, we need to find out before we allocate budget towards your campaigns. The aim here is to find your ideal targeting audiences, whilst not wasting any money.

We group audiences into age, gender, location, behaviours and interests and spend a small amount of budget on seeing which groups provide the best engagement, website traffic, or leads.

STEP 2: RAPID FIRE AUDIENCE TARGETING

It’s so important to get this part right, but it is a common step that is messed up.

STEP 3: CREATING A LEAD MAGNET

Why would people buy a new or used car from you, over your competitors?

A lead magnet is something that brings traffic and creates interest around your car dealership and brand.

It could take the form of an informational video, a case study or a free guide.

Within your lead magnet, you communicate value and show off your offer and unique selling points (USPs).

When creating this piece of content, think about what benefits you can offer your car buying audiences.

For example, a case study showing how you got a client a great deal on low rate finance, on a 3 year old used car.

This will be the primary piece of content that we use to target potential car buying leads for your dealership and will include several specific ways that people can get in touch with you.

STEP 4: POPULATING YOUR CAR DEALERSHIP WEBSITE’S PIXEL

It still shocks me how many businesses still don’t use the Facebook Pixel correctly.

Surprisingly, a lot of businesses (and even some websites used by those self-proclaimed Ad “experts”) do not even have one installed at all.

t’s an absolutely vital (and free) tool that you need to be thinking about how to utilize when creating Facebook Ad campaigns for your car dealership.

What is the Facebook Pixel?

For those of you who haven’t heard of the Facebook Pixel or don’t know exactly how it works; physically it is a piece of code that you install on your website.

But it has several functions that are super important:

–        It tracks users on your website, such as:

o   What pages or web categories they visit

o   Frequency of page visits

o   Time spent on your car dealership’s website

o   Valuable actions carried out by visitors, such as Lead-Fill Forms or View Content clicks.

But probably the most important function of the pixel is not really thought of or articulated often.

It stores data, based on individual users, for up to 180 days. You can then use this data to optimize your ads to have the best outcomes possible (of your choosing) and later on (with enough data) you can create Look-Alike-Audiences (LLAs).

LLAs are often the most profitable type of audience that you can use, as it means that your Pixel has enough data from similar valuable actions on your website for it to be statistically significant in order to optimize your ads.

But it also has one other awesome use.

You can use it to re-target users on your website.

For example, it remembers those who viewed your New or Used cars for sale website category but didn’t get in touch. With the Pixel, you can create ad campaigns specifically to target these “warm” users.

Re-targeting groups of people immediately, up until 3 days after they visited your website, often brings a really profitable Return On Investment (ROI).

It is pretty awesome.

STEP 5: OPTIMIZING YOUR FOLLOW UP

Have you had car buyer leads come in before during your out-of-office times, only for that lead to be stone-cold the following morning?

(We have).

But there are ways around this so that every single lead that comes in is followed up on.

We connect your calendar to an application that sends a text message to a new lead. It then asks them a series of specific questions to qualify them, based on their responses and then books them in for a call/appointment/test drive with you when you’re available.

This works VERY well as people respond to texts more than emails or calls. It is convenient and fast.

AND BOOM, YOU HAVE AN AUTOMATED SYSTEM OF LEAD GENERATION FOR YOUR CAR DEALERSHIP!

We are currently offering a free strategy call for car dealerships, so get in touch today and let’s see if we can help grow your monthly revenue.

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