When it comes to social media advertising, Facebook reigns supreme with Instagram a close second. These are ideal platforms on which to raise brand awareness, bring customers down funnel and generate leads.

For dealers, a presence on Facebook and Instagram is essential, because quite simply, this is where your customers are spending their time. Check out these usage stats for different age groups.

- 80% of adults age 18-49 use Facebook
- 73% of Facebook users check feeds 5-6 times daily
- 55% of adults age 50+ use Facebook
- 40% of adults age 30-49 use Instagram
- 57% of adults age 25-29 use Instagram
- 78% of adults age 18-24 use Instagram

As you can see, having a dual presence on Facebook and Instagram provides you with a broad reach to social media users in every age range

I have heard from dealers who have tried advertising on these platforms with varied results. Some see the ROI but many don't. If you haven't seen the ROI you have hoped for, make sure your marketing vendor's strategy incorporates these five keys necessary to creating successful social ads campaigns.

1) Focus on your business objective

Before you start any campaign, decide what your objective is. Do you want to build awareness of your brand, generate more leads or complement your other marketing objectives by increasing reach? Don't expect to accomplish all of these with one ad campaign.

If your marketing vendor is still using social metrics such as likes, shares and comments to justify your marketing spend, beware. It's fine to keep track of those but your goal is not to have 1,000 fans. Your business objective builds a frame for the rest of the ad campaign.

2) Plan with target audience in mind

Facebook and Instagram users are real people, not proxies or bots. Because of this, these platforms offer very precise targeting with an accuracy of 85%. You can choose from many different parameters including demographics, interests, lifestyle, life stage, psychographic and geographic.

Perhaps best of all, you can upload your customer database and Facebook and Instagram will match those customers with users on their platform. This allows you to serve personalized ads and videos that greatly expand reach and frequency.

Once you are getting good results with your target audience, Facebook and Instagram can create lookalike audiences to discover potential new customers in your geographic area.

3) Ensure media best practices align with your objectives

Depending on what your objective is, your social ad campaigns are designed as high funnel (awareness), mid funnel (consideration) or low funnel (conversions).

If you're running a low funnel campaign, the amount you're willing to bid for a conversion will be higher than what you want to bid for high funnel campaigns. Know what a conversion is worth to you, or let Facebook/Instagram decide the best bid for you.

Select an optimization goal that meets your business objective. Use Facebook Pixel codes on your website to track activity and actions. This allows you to track user behavior on your website and also to tie specific activities, such as scheduling a service appointment or submitting a lead, back to a social ad campaign.

4) Think about creative for a mobile world

The majority of Facebook and Instagram impressions are delivered on mobile screens. Your goal is to develop creative that will stop people as they scroll through their news feeds.

Create ads with simple, stunning and clean images. Keep text to a minimum and ensure that text size is optimized for mobile so you can read it on a small screen. Design ads for sound off.

5) Measure effectiveness

Before you launch a campaign, define the KPIs you will use to measure your objectives. If your goal is consideration, your KPI might be website visitors. If your goal is conversion, it might be leads. If your goal is to increase service revenue, your KPI might be the number of service appointments scheduled online, or monthly ROs.

Note your baseline KPIs before the campaign starts, then again after it ends. Was there an increase? An effective social ad campaign should have a pretty immediate impact in just 30-60 days.

If your campaign didn't move the needle on your KPI, don't give up. Re-evaluate.

Start with your audience. Are you reaching the right audience? If you're using your own first-party customer data, it's hard to go wrong.

If your audience is good, look at reach and frequency. You want to ensure a 50 to 70 percent reach of your target audience at all times. As far as frequency, it typically takes four to seven impressions to drive a customer to take action.

Finally, look at resonance. Is your message relevant? Don't create an ad for an oil change and serve it to customers who have recently been in for an oil change.

Does the creative appeal to them? One strategy to increase resonance is to segment your target audience by their expressed interests and create different ads for each segment. For example, if a portion of your audience is interested in technology, create an ad with a technology focus. For nature lovers, include stunning visuals of the outdoors.

Social advertising can be an incredibly effective complement to your marketing strategy. But there's a lot more involved than just coming up with a cool ad campaign. Facebook and Instagram give you the tools for success; all you have to do is find a marketing partner that knows how to properly leverage them.

For car dealers, the opportunity to create loyal customers might start with a sale, but true loyalty is created in the service department. According to a 2017 IHS Markit study, the average length of car ownership is nearly seven years. That's a long time to maintain a relationship with someone until the next sales cycle.

So, the focus must be to keep the customer coming back for service. How is this best accomplished? Let's look the four types of loyalty and what drives customers to choose your dealership versus another dealership or an independent repair facility (IRF).

1) Relationship. This is where your customers get to know and like a service advisor and other service employees.

2) Needs are met. This is when the customer feels that every time they bring their vehicle in, the problems are identified and solved. They don't have to worry about something going wrong after the fact.

3) Convenience. Some customers are loyal to dealerships based on location or hours.

4) Value Proposition. You might believe that cost is a major factor in loyalty, but this is actually not the case. I personally drive past five or six IRFs every time I drive to my dealership to get my car serviced. I know I could get an oil change for cheaper somewhere else, but I like the fact that my dealership uses OEM parts and I can wait in a comfortable waiting room.

Some, if not all of these factors contribute to customer loyalty, but the common denominator in all these types of loyalty is trust. Trust is a sacred bond in any relationship, and once broken is not easily rebuilt.

What's the best way to build trust with your customers?

There are three steps involved: engagement, relevant messaging and omnichannel marketing.

Engagement starts in the dealership, but only 30 percent of customer interactions with your dealership actually happen in the dealership. Once the customer leaves, how do you continue that engagement? You must be able to engage your customers with relevant, consistent messaging in places where customers spend their time.

When it comes to service marketing, relevancy is critical. If you tell a customer in the service lane that they need new brakes, but then send the a coupon for an oil change, that doesn't make sense.

The frequency of your message is also important. In marketing we have something called the Rule of 7, which states that a customer needs to "hear" your message at least seven times before they take action to buy a product or service.

That's why omnichannel marketing is the most cost-effective means to deliver your message. Omnichannel marketing combines the power of customer data, vehicle service history, online behavior and predictive analytics to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time.

These days, it's especially important to include social media in your service marketing strategy. The average person spends 135 minutes a day on social media platforms and even more time on the Internet. Are you service messages being delivered to customers via social media? If not, you're missing out. Take a look at these response rates using different marketing channels.

• Direct mail campaign alone - 6%
• Direct mail + social display - 20%
• Direct mail + email - 27%
• Direct mail + email + social display = 37%

The more channels you add, the higher lift you will see in ROs and the more service revenue you will generate. For example, adding social channels alone to service marketing adds an average 3.9% lift in ROs and nearly $300,000 in RO revenue per year.

To achieve these results, start with your manufacturer's owner retention program (ORP). Make sure you maximize everything your OEM is offering.

Then, look for a digital marketing provider that can add social display, display advertising, additional email campaigns and PPC for service. Make sure the provider can align their messaging with your ORP messaging.

Additionally, leverage the power of triggered communications. Based on mileage or vehicle service history, these automatic reminders are sent to customers when it's time to bring their vehicle in for service. Because they're so personalized, triggered communications are most cost-effective when delivered through email and social media.

Finally, consider a customer rewards program. Programs that allow customers to accumulate points that can be redeemed towards additional service or aftermarket products are ideal, because they encourage multiple visits to your dealership.

Building trust with your customers requires continuous engagement, consistent messaging and an omnichannel marketing approach. Generic service offers that are sent via email and direct mail aren't compelling enough to keep customers returning to your dealership for the next seven years, until they're ready to buy again. Does your service marketing program leverage these strategies to build loyal customers?