The biggest challenge dealers face RIGHT NOW when it comes to Facebook marketing is ATTENTION.

Take a look around the next time you’re waiting in line somewhere:

• DMV

• Dentist office

• Waiting for the movie to start at the theater

What are people doing?

Scrolling their Facebook feeds.

As marketers, our #1 job is to funnel people’s attentions to our dealership website.

We can do this through a number of channels, like organic social media, a blog, or Youtube channel, but a large part of your target audience is already on Facebook.

That’s why a Facebook ad is your best opportunity for conversion.

Statistics show us that ad spend on social media is rising every year.

So how do you create and execute a successful Facebook marketing campaign?

The first thing you need to understand is how to DAY TRADE ATTENTION.

1. Day Trade Attention

The concept of day trading attention comes from Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary has built a huge following on social media, and runs a successful marketing agency Vayner Media which is built on this premise.

When you’re an attention day trader, you understand that people on Facebook have a finite attention span.

Take out your phones right now, open up Facebook, and start scrolling. There are so many things vying for your eyes right now.

You’ve got pictures of your neighbors’ kids, to commentary on Trump, to local and national news, to videos, with a bunch of ads mixed in.

There’s a lot to parse as you’re scrolling through everything, so what should you focus on first?

That’s where this concept of Day Trading Attention comes in.

Your number one priority should be capturing and holding your target audience’s attentions just long enough for them to take the action you want them to take.

And that starts with an attention grabbing image or video for your ad.

You can write the most brilliant copy for your ad, or get super-targeted with your audience, or have a valuable Call To Action…but if your image doesn’t catch people’s attentions, they won’t click.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

a. Use Canva.com to create these images. With Canva, you can create templates for your ad images that stay in line with your dealership’s brand, and ensure that you have consistency each time you create an ad image. Canva is a free tool.

b. Split test 3 images with each ad campaign. Try 1 ad with a person or people facing the camera, another ad with a value proposition written in text (remember to keep the text less than 20% of the image area to keep within Facebook’s guidelines), and the third image could be a funny image. You could even test black & white images vs color.

2. Objective

Some advertisers fall into the trap of boosting their page posts, instead of running ads. What’s the difference? When you post something onto your Dealership’s Facebook page, only a small portion of people who like the page will actually see that post. That’s because Facebook has limited the organic reach of posts from brand pages so that Facebook users can see more posts from friends and family. When you boost a post, you’re allowing a larger number of your dealership’s Facebook fans to see that post.

The problem with this method is that you can’t set an objective when you boost a post. You’re hoping that people will see the post and take action.

When you run an ad, you’re able to choose an objective for the ad that meets your requirements.

There are lots of objectives, but they fall under 3 main categories:

a. Awareness

b. Consideration

c. Conversion

I recommend you stick with the ad objectives of video views, post engagement, and conversions.

When you launch a Facebook ad, you may want to build up that ad’s social proof. This is where Post Engagement and Video Views objectives will help you do that. You’ll get likes, comments and shares on that ad (just like a regular Facebook post), and then once you have all that engagement, you can switch the ad objective over to conversions.

3. Budget

When setting up your Facebook ad, it’s important to know that there’s a period of time during the beginning that Facebook will be learning how your target audience responds to your ad. This amount of time varies, but you don’t want to spend a lot of money during this learning period. I recommend $5- $20 per day to start. If you are testing 3 ads within a campaign, set the daily budget on the higher end of that scale, around $20 a day.

4. Measure

How do you know whether your Facebook ad campaign is profitable or not? Remember you chose an objective when you set up the ad. If you chose “Conversions”, you’ll want to measure the number of conversions, as well as Cost Per Conversion.

If you’re trying to send traffic to a lead capture page on your website, you can track Click Through Rate (CTR) and Cost Per Click (CPC). If you’re interested in measuring how your video ads are performing, you can track Video Views, as well as Cost Per Video View.

There are a few options with these video views metrics, including Video Watches at 50% which can help you identify whether people are watching your videos.

5. Scale

After you measure and track your Facebook ads, you should assess which ads to scale, and which ones to kill. This is a very important step, because you don’t want to waste money on ads that aren’t producing an ROI. As you’re split testing your ads, you’ll find people engage with certain images, or long form copy vs. short form copy, or even videos vs. image based ads. When you run your split test ads for a length of time where you can clearly identify a winner, shut off the other 2 losing ads, and scale the ad spend on the winner. I recommend scaling up the daily ad spend on your winning ad by 10-15% every 3-5 days. That way you won’t throw too much money at single ad (so your audience won’t burn out too quickly), and you’re incrementally reaching more people with an ad that you know works.

Remember that the AD is only half the battle. Once someone clicks your ad and ends up on your dealership’s website, there needs to be alignment between the landing page and the ad (meaning what they clicked in the ad is what they get on the website). The goal of the Facebook ad is to “sell the click” through to the website.

QUESTION: What's your biggest struggle with Facebook advertising? Post it in the comments below...