With 1.44 billion monthly active users as of March 2015, Facebook gives small businesses a remarkable opportunity to generate new business online. However, it’s no longer the free-for-all digital space it once was. Auto shops looking to take advantage of the site for marketing purposes can no longer stand out from the crowd just by creating a business page and posting haphazardly (or even diligently). These days, abstaining from social advertising will leave your digital marketing in the dust.
Facebook advertising, though, can be overwhelming for owners preoccupied with the day-to-day operation of their shops. At best, learning the intricacies of the Ad Manager on your own can eat up hours of time, and, at worst, you can waste thousands of dollars targeting users who will never actually walk through your door.
Fortunately, while you may still earn a few minor battle scars from creating some ineffective ads at first, digital marketers have developed a wealth of best practices you can follow to ensure you make the most of your budget. Like with your other marketing efforts, following a social advertising strategy that’s akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks just won’t cut it when your shop’s reputation—not to mention your livelihood—is at stake.
Use your existing customer data
How much time and effort have you already devoted to building your customer database? Likely, you’ve spent years collecting emails addresses, phone numbers and other personal data from customers already frequenting your shop. If you’re actively marketing your shop with direct mail pieces and email broadcasts, then this data is already benefiting you handsomely.
Still, you can further compound the value of the legwork you and your staff members have put in by using your database to refine your Facebook Ad targeting. Facebook’s Ad Manager allows you to upload your database to create a Custom Audience, which matches subscribers on your email list to active Facebook users.
(In addition to using your email database, you can also build a Custom Audience based on traffic data captured by a conversion pixel installed on your website or usage data pulled from your mobile app.)
While targeting your current customers with Facebook Ads has tremendous value—for example, inspiring retention and generating return visits—I’m sure you want new customers to walk through your door as well. Most likely, your target customers are similar in age, income, habits, interests, desires, wants, needs, fears and frustrations to your current customers. In effect, your Custom Audience is helping you define your ideal customer profile.
From here, you can create a Lookalike Audience: Facebook will scour its user base for individuals similar to that ideal customer you just defined and then show them your ads.
Facebook boasts that these advanced targeting features can produce results many times more profitable than options available via other ad channels. Our team here at Moving Targets has found using Custom and Lookalike Audiences produces significantly better results than solely relying on Facebook’s less advanced targeting options for our auto shop owners as well.
Don’t forget the basics
While these features are fantastic for honing in on users who are a good fit for your business, they don’t automatically account for segments within your customer base. So, don’t dismiss Facebook’s core targeting options, especially if your database isn’t already segmented by age, sex, location or other demographic criterion.
The best ads are precise and purposeful, and what appeals to a 42-year-old father of three will be different than what appeals to a 24-year-old single woman. They have different pain points. You’ll always want to answer the question, “What’s the problem we can solve for him or her with our services?” Facebook’s core targeting will help you drill down with that necessary degree of specificity, so you can create multiple ads, each designed to interest a particular user type (i.e., “buyer personas”).
For example, if you have a Ladies’ Day special, layer on a sex-based parameter to target only the women in your Lookalike Audience. Similarly, you can target by interest—say, motorcycle fans—and behavior, such as new residents in your community, for more individualized ads.
Show off your best self
Once you’ve optimized your targeting, you’ll need to address the content of the ad itself. With an unrelenting stream of content forced into the News Feed, shops need to work harder and smarter than ever to really stand out. With only a fraction of a second to capture the attention of a user, you must rely on eye-catching images.
Your image should reflect your shop’s personality, be of a high resolution, be relevant for your audience and may not include more than 20 percent text. Many users will be viewing your ads on small mobile screens, so the simpler and more striking the image, the better off you’ll be. Also, study after study concludes that humans respond most strongly to others’ faces, so we suggest featuring your team and customers over generic stock photos, whenever possible.
Regarding the copy, don’t forget a strong call-to-action! Sure, a beautiful, relevant ad is great, but your prospective customers may not know what to do next—unless you flat-out tell them!
Optimize for your ideal outcome
As such, there are several objectives within Facebook’s Ad Manager designed to produce specific outcomes. Which ones you choose just depends on your goals. These are the most common objectives we use for our shop owners:
- Page Likes: Those looking to build their audience on Facebook should use this objective. Especially with many pages seeing drops in organic reach, it’s more important than ever to build a core audience base that you know finds you interesting and relevant—in short, you know they want what you have to offer.
- Post Engagement: This objective is best for owners running contests on their pages, since the ad will help them get post likes and comments.
- Website Clicks: Many of the shop owners we work with invest heavily in their website and want to promote their appointment-setting features. This ad objective will help drive traffic there. (You can also optimize for website conversions.)
- Offer Claims: One of the most telling “hard” metrics for measuring an owner’s return on investment is tracking redemptions. Owners running these ads can see how many users are viewing their offer online and then compare it to how many redemptions they see in-store.
What’s on the horizon?
From driving lead generation to the more amorphous goal of building brand awareness, social video is set to take the content marketing world by storm. If you haven’t yet experimented using short-form video to help promote your auto shop on Facebook, you may be missing out on an opportunity for wider visibility and more shares.
More than 70 percent of marketing professionals report that video converts better than any other medium. In fact, a recent Nielsen study scrutinizing more than 300 Facebook video ads revealed that 73 percent of them had a significant lift in ad recall, with an average lift of 86 percent!
To make the most of your video ads, focus on quality storytelling and put particular emphasis on the first second or two to capture the attention of users absentmindedly scrolling through their News Feed. For those new to Facebook video ads, keep in mind that your ads will auto-play with the sound off, so don’t rely just on audio to tell your story—the visuals, be they live action or motion graphics, are what must hook your viewers.
