Host Dane Saville dives into the details for creating diverse new and used car campaigns for your dealership's paid Facebook strategy.

Don't forget to subscribe: http://bit.ly/2lAyOMK

—— Topics Covered ——

The 3 Pillars of Intelligent Social (0:30)

The 2 Challenges to Stimulate Market Interest (0:44)

The Details of Diverse Dealership Facebook Campaigns (1:13)

Preview of the Next Episodes: Retargeting Strategy (2:30)

Host Dane Saville conjures up the power of Hulkamania to talk about a remarkable paid social media strategy that speaks to varied audiences with tailored ads and messaging.

Don't forget to subscribe: http://bit.ly/2lAyOMK

—— Topics Covered ——

How Dealership Can Stimulate More Consumers into the Shopping Funnel (0:44)

The Main Issue Many Dealers Face with Paid Social Media (1:15)

The Solution to This Issue (1:44)

How This Solution Influences to Your Retargeting (2:53)

Due to a technical error, we had to delete and repost the latest KPI Cafe -- but it's back!

Host Dane Saville brings back Reunion Marketing's CEO Dave Spannhake to share the results (CPC, CTR) of dealerships using the Intelligent Social approach, which is a strategy built on these three pillars: ad variety, tailored messaging, and actual inventory.

Don't forget to subscribe: http://bit.ly/2lAyOMK

—— Topics Covered ——

Aggregated Results of Dealers Using Intelligent Social (1:33)

Recap of Aggregate Results for CPC and CTR (2:18)

Top Performing Dealerships Using Intelligent Social (3:05)

Clarification of the Retargeting Strategy (5:46)

The Dual Benefits of an Intelligent Social Approach (7:06)

Comparing Intelligent Social to Common Dealership Ads (7:56)

Why We’re Sharing These Results (9:26)

Host Dane Saville gets Macho to break down some of the most important questions for paid search in automotive retail. From confusion over bounce rates to conversions to quick tips, dealers will be able to ask the right questions to get the right answers.

Don't forget to subscribe: http://bit.ly/2lAyOMK

—— Topics Covered ——

What Should You Think About High Bounce Rates on Paid Search Campaigns? (1:22)

What is a Healthy Conversion Rate for Your Paid Search Ads? (3:37)

Most Effective Strategies to Help Improve a Dealer’s Paid Search Conversions (6:10)

Final Quick Tips for Paid Search Conversions (7:46)

Host Dane Saville harnesses the energy of Ric Flair to power through a discussion about website conversions, including tips and benchmarks that your dealership, no matter the size, can use.

—— Topics Covered ——

Things You’ve Done to Establish Your Dealer’s Site (0:38)

Introducing Macro-Conversion Tips (1:20)

Tip #1 About CTAs (1:27)

Tip #2 About Merchandising (2:34)

Healthy Website Conversion Rates (3:35)

Discrepancy Between Leads and Dealership Foot Traffic (4:25)

—— Connect With Us ——

Website: https://www.reunionmarketing.com

Email: dane@reunionmarketing.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/reunionmktg

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reunionmarketing

Each month, most American consumers aren’t in the market to purchase a vehicle. When they do enter the market, their journey is dominated by a variety of digital channels – 19 touchpoints out of a total of 24 touchpoints. The legwork they put in doesn’t often yield a final choice; in fact, only 1 in 3 are certain of the specific car they want. It is, of course, important that you have SEO and SEM strategies in place to capture these low-funnel, in-market shoppers.

But if your strategy only attacks those actively looking for a vehicle, what about the consumers who haven’t entered the market?

Your dealership can stimulate interest in your actual inventory by leveraging social media. Not only can a paid Facebook ad approach powered by variety – and supplemented with smart targeting – help undecided shoppers narrow their options, it can also help push more consumers into the shopping funnel.

This does two things for you: (1) it helps people recall your ads while (2) avoiding creating ad fatigue.

AD RECALL = REACH + ATTENTION * FREQUENCY

It’s simple. You must understand audience needs and intent to create ads that capture their attention (aka brand awareness). When ads resonate, your dealership’s name – your brand – fosters a positive influence on those in-market shoppers. This is really important because the average shopper will see thousands of ads every month.

Mobile device. Radio. TV. Computer. Magazine. T-shirt.

Advertising is ubiquitous.

You need to keep your dealership top-on-mind without stepping into the dangers of ad fatigue.

AD FATIGUE (N) — THE CONDITION THAT ARISES WHEN CONSUMERS HAVE GROWN TIRED OF VIEWING THE SAME ADS

*Courtesy of The Drum

When you run only a handful of ads, your local market will see the same message over and over again, creating the very real potential of making your local buyers resent your brand. The ads become a nuisance instead of be helpful and interesting. This ultimately affects the performance of your ads and the Facebook campaigns’ return-on-investment.

CMS Wire conducted a study that showed ad fatigue can set in as soon as three days post-launch of the ad campaign. They reviewed the results of various campaigns, finding a decrease in click-through rates and an increase in costs-per-action.

You can combat this with ensuring variety of the ads’ messaging:

Audience-Specific Ad Copy

Carousel Image

Punchy CTAs

And you must — yes, must — have clear audience segmentation.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

As competitive as modern advertising has become, your dealership needs to overcome two obstacles: Ad Recall and Ad Fatigue.

The way to overcome them both is to do two things effectively:

Have unique messaging

Understand your audiences

Facebook Is Your Dealership’s Perfect Opportunity to Overcome

Remember the question posed earlier in this piece?

“What about those consumers not currently in the market?”

The answer was to stimulate interest — push that majority of shoppers not in the market into the market — using social media. Users sign into Facebook 13.8 times per day, totaling 30 minutes per day. But you cannot approach paid advertising on this platform with just a few ads running.

If you run just a few ads, you’ll not be able to hit a frequency that affords your market the proper brand awareness for recall. 

If you increase your spend to hit a greater frequency, you’ll create fatigue — unless you want to undertake changing the ads every three days and never built any statistical relevance for what works by allowing Facebook’s machine learning to make automatic adjustments based on consumer actions and inherent feedback.

So we must keep in mind the two elements necessary to overcome these obstacles when we went to “Connect the Dots” just a few moments ago.

Unique Messaging

Audiences

Facebook’s targeting offers a variety of options that help narrow the scope of shoppers. From interests and affinities to life events and page likes, there is plenty to mine and create a variety of audiences. If you want to supercharge your efforts on this platform, you can — which we offer and recommend to our dealership partners — select a data partner like Oracle. This data will help inform your decisions and dig even deeper into the wealth of data Facebook collects.

When you start digging into this data, a picture comes into focus. It shows you how sedan buyers are different from SUV buyers — and they are different than van buyers and truck buyers. They are all distinct audiences.

An Example: Say You’re a Toyota Dealership

Not only do you have SUV buyers, but you’ll also have a 4Runner buyer, a C-HR buyer, a Highlander buyer, a Land Cruiser buyer, a Rav4 buyer, and a Sequoia buyer.

Each model appeals for different reasons — but remember that only 1 in 3 buyers know the exact model they want.

That means you’ll want to hit your SUV audience with ads for each model and an ad for the entire lineup, and they’ll all have different headlines, ad copy, and inventory (your creative).

Your Toyota SUV audience will not continually see the same ad while you spend your allocated budget to achieve the right frequency. Then, as the campaign runs, Facebook’s machine learning will begin moving money to the most effective ads. 

Keep in mind that this applies to the other segments of vehicles that your dealership will carry inventory for — and your actual inventory is what will populate the creative of the ad in the form of a carousel to show different colors, trims, et cetera.

Audiences and Ads Are the Keys

This approach means that, depending on the number of models that 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 and 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.

KPI Cafe's Dane Saville brings back Reunion's CEO Dave Spannhake to further the discussion about SEO and SEM by covering the biggest opportunities dealerships have in each strategy.

—— Topics Covered ——

Setting the Stage for the Conversation (0:40)

What Dealers Can Do to Best Leverage the SEO Strategy (1:12)

Emphasizing SEO is for Used Cars, Fixed Ops, and More (2:30)

Biggest Opportunities in Paid Search (3:00) Emphasizing SEM for Used Cars (4:00)

Reiterating the Importance of SEO and SEM Synergy (4:45)

Previewing the Next Episode (6:20)

I'm excited to introduce the second season of our original education video series, the #KPICafe. We've compiled questions and feedback from actual dealers -- our clients, prospects, and KPI Cafe viewers -- to make the content relevant to your current needs. This yielded a specific focus for our second season:

The Importance of Digital Synergy

And if you haven't yet, please be sure to subscribe to our Youtube channel: https://bit.ly/2DtHz2a

It should come as no surprise that sales are down this year, per sales reporting from the manufacturers like the “Detroit 3”, Toyota, and Nissan. This makes an efficient, lean marketing budget more important than ever. If your marketing cost per car sold is at or above the industry average of $629 for mass-market vehicles and over $700 for luxury vehicles, ask yourself a few questions.

Question #1: Am I spending investing in programmatic media?

Programmatic media are channels — such as Pandora, video pre-roll, and social media — where bids are automatically adjusted as a campaign runs to create the most effective spend possible. That isn’t the only advantage: these channels have targeting capabilities that other channels cannot match. In addition to demographic and specific geographic data, you can also leverage behavioral and contextual signals that help you truly understand your audience.

When you use programmatic media, you’re selecting the exact car buyers that you want to reach instead of also paying for people outside of your primary marketing area and outside of your demographics, which is an unfortunate reality of traditional media like television and radio.

Furthermore, you can already see the evolution of television to becoming a programmatic channel (e.g. HBO Now, AMC Premiere). By investing in programmatic, you're creating a better return on investment for today's channels, as well as preparing yourself for tomorrow's.

Question #2: Has my internal team or agency partner created an effective paid media strategy?

If you're not prepared for responsive search ads, you have fallen behind the curve. Google's AI selects from among 15 headlines and 4 descriptions (43,680 combinations) that you craft, with some automation, to deliver ads that have 3 headlines and 2 90-character descriptions that best match search intent.

The more granular that you create your ad groups, based on hundreds or even thousands of keywords, the better you can align ads with car shoppers’ search intent. By doing so, you’re also helping to boost your Quality Score, which can help save money on every single click by requiring a lower bid price to be competitive for the top spots in paid SERPs.

Also, are you deep linking on those ads to take consumers to highly relevant landing pages that satisfy the expectations they had when they clicked on the ad?

Question #3: Am I implementing a data-driven strategy to drive highly qualified organic traffic to my site?

By leveraging tools within Google Analytics, you can cut your dependency on third-party sites that cost you money for traffic you can earn yourself. Google Analytics provides insights to understand what people are shopping for and how they’re shopping for it.

This information will allow you to examine content across all your digital assets, starting with your website, to ensure that you’re ranking for low-funnel searches that have intent modifiers like “near me” and “for sale.” This helps you take up organic SERPs at the top of page one for the types of searches most vital to your digital strategy.

When you start analyzing the right channels and strategies to implement within them, you can start chipping away at that marketing cost per car sold to combat those falling gross profit margins and weaker market demand.

“What is negative priming?”

If you ask that before you opened the article, you wouldn’t be the only one. It’s a term that you don’t often hear in today’s discussion about marketing, yet it’s vital to avoid creating hesitation in a consumer’s mind.

Negative priming is defined as “an implicit memory effect in which prior exposure to a stimulus unfavorable influences the response to the same stimulus.”

So — Our history dictates how we react to current circumstances. If it was negative, we have a negative feeling going into it.

Unfortunately, for many industries like car sales and dentistry, there’s a historical precedent of a bad experience. That means we’re not off to a great start. Still, many marketing specialists and content writers for small businesses make the mistake of compounding this by using negative priming words. You’ll never see major corporations fall into this trap because the advertising industry has been positively priming consumers, particularly since the 1957 publication of The Hidden Persuaders. In it, the author states that “Priming refers to the incidental activation of known structures, such as trait concepts and stereotypes, by the current situational context.”

Again, that sentence should ring some bells for people who work in industries with a stigma.

You still might wonder how the memory of a prior stimulus is related to written or verbal communication. American Express actually conducted a great experiment that I’d like to use. I’m going to give you two lists. Tell me which one is the good person and which one is the bad person.

Giving. Helpful. Others. Selfish. Taking.

Taking. Selfish. Others. Helpful. Giving.

You likely said that the good person is #1 and the bad person is #2. That’s because of the context of the words — the way we learned what they mean — that influenced our decision.

The same can be said for words that I often see used on automotive and dental sites. There are terms that, because of our understanding of the word, creates a subliminal aversion and negatively influences our purchasing decision.

Here’s another example that used visuals and words (sounds a lot like a website):

Some participants in a University of Minnesota were primed with the word “money” and visuals of money that accompanied it. Others weren’t. The people who were primed about “money” donated less to a request for charity than the others (39% vs. 67%).

The subjects of the study primed about money had the notion of dollars and cents in their conscious, so they began thinking about finances and other expenditures and were less likely to give it away.

So to the point of my article here. Negative priming words that I see on a lot of dealership and dental websites. It’s very simple and subtle, but this is terminology that negatively influences people as they make decisions on where to purchase a car and where to receive dental work.

Dentistry — Pain-free

Automotive — Hassle-free

The intent is to communicate that prospects will not feel pain and will not feel hassled, respectively. But by using those terms — our understanding of which is a negative consequence — we immediately begin to think (just like those primed about money) about the “pain” and “hassle” that we want to avoid.

We want to think of alternatives that positively prime customers.

Dentistry — Gentle

Automotive — Smooth or Enjoyable

There are, of course, other options. There are, of course, other terms that may be on your site that are negatively priming consumers. Check over your site. See what you find. Make adjustments.