By Dane Saville, Co-Founder, Reunion Marketing
Most consumers aren’t in the market to purchase a vehicle during each month. When they start looking, they use digital channels — a total of 19 of some 24 total touchpoints. Even after all of that legwork, just one in three knows what model he or she wants. That’s why your dealership needs a presence for those people who’ve become in-market shoppers by using strategic, data-driven SEO and SEM efforts.
But what should you do about those people not currently in the market? Your dealership can stimulate more interest in your inventory with another channel: social media. With the right approach, you can achieve two goals: 1) push more consumers into the shopping funnel; 2) reach those who’ve begun their search and help narrow their options. This helps combat two harsh truths about modern advertising: ad recall and ad fatigue.
Ad Recall = Reach + Attention x Frequency
The equation is simple. To help people recall your ad, you must understand their needs and intent, then you create something attention-getting. This is your first step toward creating brand awareness because you deliver compelling content to the right people — your buyers.
When ads resonate, your dealership builds brand equity with a positive influence on those shoppers. This equity is important because shoppers see thousands of ads every month: on their mobile devices, on billboards, on TV, on the computer, in magazines, on shirts — and so on.
While you want to deliver your ads frequently enough to be recalled, you don’t want to create ad fatigue.
AD FATIGUE (N) — The condition that arises when consumers have grown tired of viewing the same ads
When you deliver the same ads repeatedly to your local buyers, you risk creating a negative sentiment toward your brand. The ads become an unwelcomed nuisance instead of helpful and interesting. If your campaigns evoke a negative feeling, it will hurt your ad’s overall performance and ROI.
CMS Wire conducted a study that found ad fatigue can start within three days post-launch of a campaign. What were the signs? A decrease in clickthrough rates and an increase in costs-per-action.
Your dealership can fight this with changes to the ad’s messaging:
- Audience-specific ad copy
- Carousel images
- Punchy CTAs
Connecting the Dots
Modern advertising is competitive, which makes overcoming our two obstacles — ad recall and ad fatigue — necessary. You do this by focusing on two things, which we’ve already covered but must emphasize:
1. Unique messaging
2. Understanding your audiences
Facebook Is Your Dealership’s Perfect Opportunity
Let’s back up a second. Remember this question: “What about those consumers not currently in the market?”
The answer was to stimulate interest in the majority of shoppers not in-market with social media. Users sign into Facebook 13.8 times per day for a total of 30 minutes per day. You cannot approach paid advertising on this platform by running only a few ads because you won’t hit a frequency that will create brand awareness for recall.
Here’s the trick: if you increase your spend to hit a greater frequency, you’ll create fatigue — unless you want to make changes to the ads every three days and never build any statistical relevance for what works by giving Facebook’s machine learning to make automatic adjustments based on consumer actions and feedback.
You need to keep in mind the two elements to overcome these obstacles, which we covered just a moment ago when we went to “Connect the Dots,” through unique messaging and audiences.
Facebook’s targeting options can help you create audiences, which will afford your dealership the ability to create greater ad variety. Though there are targeting limitations, there’s still plenty of data to mine to speak to individuals. If you want to supercharge your efforts on this platform, you can consider working with a data partner like Oracle.
When you dig into this data, a picture comes into focus. Keep in mind, however, that you don’t want to over-target. Facebook is a stimulus channel, so you want to cast as wide a net as possible but still have clear audience segmentation. After all, a sedan buyer is different from an SUV buyer, who also differs from van buyers, as well as truck buyers.
Variety Is Key
This approach means that, depending on the number of models your brand has, you could have anywhere from 20-50 ads running. None of them say the same thing or have the same exact inventory. It’s a strategy that models the same granularity that you apply in your SEO and SEM efforts to diversify your messaging and attack those low-funnel, in-market shoppers referenced at the beginning of this piece.
The crux is to understand who your shoppers are and build out a campaign with content that speaks to them as individuals, which gives you a wide swathe of ads that don’t require additional work. And, thus, you’ve set your dealership up with paid Facebook advertising that pushes more shoppers into the buying funnel that offers the proper brand awareness for ad recall without risking ad fatigue.
If you would like to read more articles on this topic, visit digitaldealer.com/dealer-news
