We are in a new era; one in which dealers make most of their money on the service side and not in new vehicle sales. Yet, as an industry we still spend far more money marketing the sales side of the business, and on conquest marketing, than we do on service marketing and customer retention.

Some dealers justify this by saying that sales drives service business. I would argue that equally, service drives sales business. When customers service with you, they are two-and-a-half times more likely to buy their next vehicle from you.

Yet, service is where most customer defection occurs. If you can plug the holes in your service bucket, you won’t have to pour as much water in the top. Here are a few strategies that will help.

Invest in the Relationship

We all know the goal is to develop a relationship with every customer, but what does that mean?

Your relationship with your customers is not defined by how you treat them. At the heart of every relationship is communication. How well are you communicating? Even more important, how well are you listening?

Effective communication is a two-way street. As dealers, we send out communications all the time. But, how much communication do you receive from your customers? Do you ask their opinions? Do you pay attention to which offers they respond to? Do you track how and when they are consuming your messages?

In any relationship, you must learn how to communicate. I believe in Omni-channel, using all available channels to relay messages. Studies in advertising have shown that it can take four or five impressions before the message sinks in and the person responds.

The same thing happens with personal communications, too, right? Your spouse may ask you to do something once, but you don’t do it. After hearing it several times, however, it begins to sink in that this may be important and you should probably do it.  

Perhaps more important than the means of delivery, is the message itself. When you do communicate with your customers, don’t always try to sell them something. A relationship is not all about you!

Customers want information and they want to feel appreciated.

Keep your customers informed about their vehicle and their service needs. Educational messages will generally be better received than a 10 percent off coupon. Tell your customers how to reset their clocks, how to use the features in their vehicle, how to pre-set their seats.

Also, be sure to thank them for their business. Some luxury dealers do a great job at this; I know one BMW dealer that sends their customers movie tickets as a thank you for service. If a customer brings their car in twice a year and you are not showing your appreciation in some way, that customer is vulnerable to defection.

These are not difficult things to do; not that time consuming or expensive. Invest in your relationships by investing in communications.

Improve the Customer Experience

A good experience is a smooth, efficient experience. When a person shows up in the service lane, be prepared. If you have a scheduling system, you have the opportunity to know what your customers’ needs are before they show up.

The check-in process should take no more than two to three minutes, and it should be entirely focused on the customers’ needs.

As a dealer, you have the opportunity to create an experience that’s better than an independent chain. You have a more comfortable waiting room, better amenities and loaner cars. Don’t think of loaner cars as an expense; think of them as a strategic asset. Loaner cars are not expensive, what’s expensive is not getting the service.

Focus on value over price. Somehow, in your communications and during the in-store experience, you must find a way to sell value over price. Your dealership may be a little more expensive but your technicians are trained. Your manufacturer parts will last X months longer than a non-OEM part. Better parts and service lower the average cost of ownership, over time.

Only Sell What Your Customers Need

When I was at AutoNation, we estimated that we only captured half of the average customer’s service needs. There is enough work to be captured and done on vehicles without selling gimmicks.

By gimmicks, I mean things like radiator flushes and nitrogen to fill tires. Customers don’t need that. They need tires, brakes and windshield wipers. I realize these jobs don’t produce a lot of revenue. But it’s not all about today. Keep the big picture in mind. Earn your customers’ trust and when they do need engine and transmission work, they will bring their vehicle to you.

It really comes down to getting to know each customer and showing them respect. Do your service advisors view each customer as a welcome friend, or as a means to get their monthly bonus check? Focusing on monthly revenue goals can hurt long-term revenue potential.

These strategies can help plug the holes in your service bucket and prevent customer defection. You’ll find that by investing more in your current customers, you won’t have to spend quite so much trying to attract new ones.

Affinitiv CEO & Executive Chairman Scot Eisenfelder explains why single attribution is a fool's errand in this video blog.

So much of the conversation in automotive marketing today is focused on how to leverage technology and data to precisely target consumers. While this is important, it’s just as important to remember that creative still matters.                 

After all, you can serve up the exact right message to the right person at the right time, but without a compelling image or copy, the consumer will simply ignore it, or scroll right by it on their phone.

When it comes to creative marketing, I find that most dealers fall into one of two categories: (1) the dealer who is content to ride on the manufacturer’s creative coattails, and puts very little time and effort into creative campaigns for their own brand, and (2) the dealer who loves to be creative and comes up with cute or funny campaigns that, unfortunately, may stray quite a bit from the manufacturer’s intended brand image.

Striking a balance between these two extremes is the key to successful marketing at the dealership level.

So, what’s the best way to achieve this balance and how can you differentiate your brand to capture consumers’ attention? Here are some tips.

Less is More

No matter where your marketing message is seen today, you have a very limited amount of time to get your message across. Don’t cram two messages into one ad, or overly use adjectives. Don’t tell the consumer what you want them to feel. Your ad should make them feel it.

The same rule applies to photos, videos and other images. If you are displaying a photo of a vehicle, there’s no need to add starbursts or other special effects. The vehicle is enough. Keep your images and messages simple and clean.

Maintain Brand Integrity

There’s a reason why auto manufacturers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on focus groups and research, and hire really expensive ad agencies to help them create their brand images. They are the experts, so trust their expertise.

If you’re a Porsche dealer, you’re not going to send out Christmas cards with puppies on them, right? While nobody can debate the cuteness of puppies, they just don’t fit with Porsche’s image.

So, before you decide to shoot that TV commercial wearing a giant Stetson cowboy hat, consider if the image you are presenting is an appropriate representation of your manufacturer’s brand, and whether it would appeal to your intended audience.

Stand Out

As a dealer, you definitely want to emphasize what you can offer that differentiates your store from others. Whether it’s free loaner cars, experienced staff or a smooth process, give local customers a reason to buy or service with you.

Just make sure that what you’re advertising is genuine to the experience that customers will have when they visit your store. There’s nothing consumers hate worse than a bait and switch.

Stay Local

If you want to get creative with your campaigns, try incorporating local nuances to engage consumer attention. Local imagery can evoke feelings of pride and loyalty.

If you’re in Brooklyn, a picture of a vehicle parked with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background may be the right choice. If you’re in southern California or Florida, sun and palm trees may be the perfect backdrop. If you live in Hawaii, wouldn’t it be odd to see an ad featuring a vehicle on a snowy mountain road?

Tailor Your Message to the Medium

Let’s say you want to promote a seasonal sale event. Because you’re a savvy marketer, you leverage your data and you decide to create an marketing campaign that includes radio, direct mail, email, display ads and social media.

Your creative message should be cohesive across all channels, so your intended audience knows exactly what you’re promoting. Yet, how you deliver that message is going to be quite different depending on the channel.

Facebook has canvas ad that allow for multiple images. Videos also play well on Facebook. For social, your images have to be thumb-stopping stunning. With ads, a simple image or a few words may be the best approach. On a postcard, you may want to incorporate spot gloss to help your piece stand out.

When it comes to building your store’s unique brand, do not underestimate the importance of creative in marketing. Remember that the quality of creative in a campaign is far more effective than strategy alone at raising brand awareness and driving sales.

Scot Eisenfelder shares what he believes the right marketing budget for service should be for dealerships.

Recently Facebook announced that it will stop using data from third-party data aggregators to supplement its own data that it uses for ad targeting. What does this mean for car dealers?

Until this announcement, Facebook collected data from three sources which it used to accurately target its users with ads. These sources were:

• Facebook’s own data, which it collects from user activity and profiles. For example, Facebook can track which users visit or “Like” certain auto manufacturers’ pages. So, if a Facebook user visits a competing dealerships’ page more than once, you may want to target them with an ad to raise awareness for your dealership brand.
•  Your dealership’s data, such as customer emails in your database and loyalty programs. For example, you have a list of all your customers coming off-lease in the next three to six months. Facebook can match customers on this list with its users, allowing you to target them with ads promoting lease renewal options and specials.
• Data from third-party services. For example, Facebook had access to vehicle registration data so it could identify all owners of Toyota Scions. This was helpful to dealers who might want to target all Toyota Scion owners in a defined radius so they could serve up ads and special offers for service and repairs.

So, what happens now that access to the third-party data has been eliminated?

First, initial reports suggest Facebook third-party audiences won’t be removed until September 30th. This gives dealers time to refine their strategies (and time to enjoy results from targeted summer service campaigns).

The good news is that you can still use the data collected from both Facebook and your own database to build new audiences and increase engagement with the best audience that you have—your own customers. Collectively these are referred to as first-party audiences, because your data and Facebook’s first-party data is used to target them. 

First Party Audiences on Facebook
This is your most captive audience and one worth paying special attention to. If you effectively take advantage of its value, you won’t bypass countless opportunities to connect with, retain and even win back customers. There’s a reason that more than 65 percent of marketers believe that first-party data provides the best path to understanding customers. This data is a gold mine, and that advantage can not only make an impact to the success of your marketing efforts, but to your bottom line.

The data to target these audiences is collected from actual interactions that customers have with your dealership across a vast array of touchpoints, both historical and in real time. This data can also be used to predict consumer behavior with a high degree of accuracy; for example, as customer interaction wanes, the likeliness of defection increases. Campaigns targeting these customers based on specific behaviors can help increase customer retention rates.

Not only that, but you own this data, so it doesn’t cost you anything. This makes advertising more cost-effective than advertising with third-party data. Finally, and most importantly, due to privacy debates currently taking place and the questionable future of third-party data, your first-party data is safe.

This data can be used to target several categories within first-party audiences, including:

Custom Audiences
A custom audience created from a customer list is an audience made up of your existing customers. You can target ads to this audience via Facebook, Instagram and Facebook’s Audience Network, a display ad network that allows you to extend reach by displaying mobile ads through a number of apps and websites.   

Communicating with this group, which could include people who are in your database or who have visited your website, helps you stay top of mind as well as build trust and customer loyalty.

Lookalike Audiences
By focusing on this powerful segment, you are able to build audiences based on people similar to your customers. This is particularly helpful when your strategy focuses on building brand awareness and introducing new prospects to your business and capabilities. If your goal is a conquest strategy identifying target consumers across Facebook and Instagram, this is the way to go.

Unique insights are gained from other marketing efforts across Facebook, greatly increasing the chance of your message resonating with the right people who are most likely to take action.

Core Audiences
No one knows your customer better than you, but by segmenting your audiences based on distinguishing factors, you’ll discover those most likely to be responsive to your messaging.

Core audiences are created using the following data types:

• Demographics – age, gender, relationship status, education, workplace, job titles and more
• Location – target key local areas or set a radius around your store
• Interests – drill down into hobbies, preferences or favorite activities
• Behaviors – purchase behaviors, device usage, etc.

The ability to identify core audiences allows you to further refine your custom and lookalike audiences, as well as a strategy to target them. This greatly increases your ad campaign engagement and results.

So, be wary of marketers that downplay the importance of Facebook. The good news is, there are still ample opportunities to use Facebook to be heard by your most important audiences and drive key, responsive customers to your door. Best of all, Facebook provides you with detailed metrics for all of your ad campaigns, so you can measure ROI and determine how well it’s working for you.

If you have flown recently there are two inescapable and related facts: (1) nearly every seat is full and (2) nearly every seat is priced differently. This is because airlines realize that planes taking off with empty seats represents lost revenue that will never come back. Our service bays and technician time are pretty much the same – idle time is revenue lost forever.

So, what can we learn from the airlines?

First, airlines focus on revenue yield, not average price (aka “effective labor rate” in our lingo). Airlines are keenly aware of how many seats are unfilled at any time and understand the general relationship between unfilled seats, time until departure and price. 

Similarly, service departments need to predict excess capacity far enough in advance to act. To accomplish this, an appointment culture is needed with consistent reminders to reduce unscheduled downtime. For each appointment, be sure to load advisor and technician capacity, so you can understand potential leakage. This allows you to analyze the relationship between scheduled visits and actual work performed a week or more in advance. Over time you will learn which leakage points are chronic, happen nearly every week, or episodic, unique to a particular week.

When airlines forecast unsold seats their first effort is to expand reach by advertising in more channels bringing on distributors with lower net revenue yield or higher cost per impression. Dealers should do the same.

 You can redouble efforts to reach inactive customers or missed appointments or use more expensive, higher response rate channels such as phone calls to chase non-respondents to fill specific open slots. Be willing to spend a little more to fill forecasted unused capacity because the cost is small compared to an unutilized technician hour. Expanding reach should be used for chronic and episodic unused capacity.

As the departure times approach, airlines start discounting more aggressively and very selectively. In general, I am not a proponent of heavily discounting service, because for most new vehicle owners, convenience trumps price. Therefore, I would recommend offering loaners, Uber vouchers or concierge service to entice consumers to service at less convenient times.

Discounting may be more effective to fill chronic unused capacity, for example late midweek afternoons; thereby creating a “blue plate special” for consumers with more flexible hours. Discounting can also be effective to drive new behaviors, such as supporting expanded weekend or evening service, until new habits are formed.

Maximizing revenue from your UIO, also means maximizing revenue from your available capacity. We all have some opportunities to learn from airlines regarding yield management.

When consumers search for vehicle service options in your area, does your dealership’s website appear on the search engine results page (SERP)? For most dealers, ranking organically for search terms is difficult because their websites are optimized for sales and not necessarily for service. Additionally, it’s difficult to compete with aftermarket service centers that have websites filled with pages of service-related content.

The best way to ensure that your dealership appears in search results is with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns designed to rank for service search terms. If you’re wondering whether display ads may be a better option, it depends on what your goal is.

PPC vs. Display
Search/PPC campaigns capture customer attention at the exact moment they show intent. Campaigns are optimized to pull consumers into the business. Meaning: the customer seeks out your company in an online search.

Display advertising pushes content to the user and is better suited for brand awareness. In our experience, display ads seem to work best as part of an omni-channel approach and can significantly boost response rates for the overall campaign. For example, if you’re promoting a spring service special using email, mailers and social media, adding a display ad campaign will improve overall campaign results.

Ideally, a strategic display campaign will fuel your PPC advertising efforts with people converting from general awareness to intent. But, if you're just starting your digital service marketing strategy, we recommend starting with PPC and applying any remaining budget to display. After all, PPC campaigns connect you with your customers that are closest to their purchase decision.

Setting up your PPC campaign
PPC service campaign management works best when coordinated with your sales PPC efforts. When running search marketing for service, negative keywords should be applied in the sales strategy to prevent bidding against yourself, thus driving up the cost.

Before you start running PPC campaigns, check with your website and marketing vendors to ensure you don’t have any current PPC campaigns running that might overlap with new campaigns you set up. It's against Google's policy to let you run two campaigns going after the same search terms.

To ensure your ads show up in all relevant searches, your service PPC campaign should include search terms for services, brand services, parts and accessories.

Your ad content should be straight to the point. Consumers need to see your dealership name, the name of the service they were searching for and a price. Include a statement encouraging consumers to check out all your service offers and to schedule an appointment online.

Prepare for Landing
Link the ad to a landing page that features appealing visuals and your service department’s value propositions. One effective strategy is to create a chart comparing all the benefits that you offer and independent chains don’t.

It’s also helpful to have three or four strong service offers for the consumer to select from. Think beyond oil changes to wheel alignments, 20 percent off coupons and A/C performance checks. If your goal is to fill service bays on Wednesdays, include a “Wednesday-only” offer.

Be sure to include a link to your online scheduler.

Data Analysis is Key
Once your campaign is underway, analyzing performance is important. There may be keywords that trigger a lot of impressions but not very many CTRs, and vice versa. Knowing how to optimize your PPC campaign is critical for keeping costs in line.

• With PPC campaigns the primary metrics to monitor include:
• Number of clicks
• Impressions
• Average Daily Impression Share
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Average cost per click
• Average position
• Conversions

For each of these metrics, your service marketing vendor should be able to provide you with average benchmarks for your location and your brand. Metrics vary widely depending on a number of factors.

The vast majority of consumers search for vehicle services using their computers or mobile phones. Dealers can’t afford to sit back and let aftermarket service centers claim the top positions on SERPs. Claim your digital real estate and move from lost to found with a targeted service PPC campaign.

As new vehicle sales profits become more difficult, it is important to increasingly turn your attention to growing your service business.  Dealers are rightly interested in finding new service customers to replace lost customers. However, service conquest is very difficult because you must overcome three challenges: reaching current driver, determining service need, and unhooking customer from a current service relationship.

While there are many potential databases and approaches to locate service conquest prospects, each has limitations that need to be explored to prioritize their use and extract the most potential, as follows:

1. Unaddressed Units in Operation.  Review your current marketing program business rules to assure all known UIOs are being addressed. The customers most often overlooked include older or non-CPO used vehicles; appraised vehicles not won on trade; same brand sold used vehicles sold within the group; fleet sales; and retail parts customers. For most of these customers dealers have a recent contact and the consumers have done business with or expressed interest in doing business with the dealership.  Furthermore, if actively managed from the beginning, service needs and timing can be predicted on equal footing with new vehicle sales.
2. Re-engage “lost souls”.  While not technically a conquest, lost souls represent a chance to grow the service base. Dealers usually know nearly as much about these customers as loyal customers, often including defection reasons.  Most dealers assume lost souls are non-responsive to previous marketing, when in fact they may have been unaware or uninterested in the offer provided. Given today’s fragmented media, it could be the message was not seen or that the type of offer presented was not compelling.  Before writing off these customers, vary the media, particularly by adding digital or social media and move from discount to convenience-based offers. If defection reasons are known, address early and directly before engaging in more marketing.
3. SEM/PPC.  Consumers responding to service-focused SEM/PPC ads are almost assuredly in market and open to new service relationships. Unlike new vehicle clicks, these are not service “tire kickers” and they are not wed to a particular service provider, or they would have googled them directly.  So even when “loyal” customers are captured through SEM/PPC, they are cheaters-in-waiting. Because service SEM/PPC is the true battleground between independents and franchise dealers, clicks can be expensive, so each click most be carefully nurtured by ad copy closely tied to each search term and compelling landing site content closing linked to scheduling. 
4. CRM No Sales.  While less is known about “No Sales” than active customers, it is known that many bought the same brand vehicle elsewhere and expressed an interest in doing business with the dealership. In addition, unlike other lists, the store already paid for the contact and knows the contact information quality based on previous dialogue.  In addition, many of these contacts will include appraisal information which can serve as another conquest source. Some consumers may feel funny returning to a store they rejected, so welcome back messaging and offers will likely enhance results.
5. Third Party Lists. There are several services which provide owner lists and contacts.  Lists vary significantly in quality due to challenges in following title transfers, differences between owner and operator and frequent contact changes.  Generally, lists are improving in quality, but few provide insights required to understand needs and media/message preferences.  I encourage dealers to review any list against their own database to check quality and derive insights which may change communication approach – e.g. whether a 5-year old vehicle has had one owner or more.  As a default use an approach that treats independents as the primary competition with messaging that promotes dealer services and addresses services typical for the vehicle cohort.  While such lists often provide low response rates, selecting the right media and message produces a solid lifetime value ROI, particularly if care is taken to rekindle the relationship.
6. Defectors.  Among third-party lists are those which provide insights into consumers who defected to independent service providers, sometimes including which services were purchased.  In aggregate, these provide valuable feedback on selling effectiveness, particularly for tires and other routine maintenance programs.  Realizing value from individual records is more challenging because the immediate need was just serviced, and you must re-establish the relationship.  Therefore, you may need to engage in a multi-step communication strategy, reminding the consumer of the dealer brand proposition while promoting additional service items, not covered by the most recent repair order.

There is no silver bullet for service conquesting.  I recommend that dealers continuously invest in building their actionable database, realizing the limitations with each data source and devising a communication strategy that recognizes the needs of each segment.

By many historical measures, service opportunities have never been greater for auto dealers. In the last decade auto sales have boomed, creating an unprecedented service opportunity tailwind for the next decade. More factory scheduled maintenance programs are driving initial service visits. Increased CPO volume has created more reconditioning and used vehicle service business. Additionally, a rigorous recall environment is driving many customers back to franchise dealers.

So why are dealerships losing service market share?

From 2010 to 2017, one- to three-year-old units in operation (UIO) increased 48 percent, yet franchise dealership service and parts sales increased just 41 percent. Today, franchise dealers only capture 20 to 25 percent of the revenue potential from their UIO.

Of the vehicles that are brought in for service work, less than half of the potential service revenue is captured. This can be attributed to many factors, including:

• Too much focus on maximizing revenue with “dealer recommended services,” which undermines consumer trust
• Inconsistent inspection processes
• Slow service initiation and delivery
• Failure to match independent service centers in operating hours and product and service offerings
• Failure to offer loaners and other incentives to increase value
• To increase revenue per UIO, the focus must move from a scheduled maintenance mentality to one that provides customers with complete vehicle care.

This requires the ability to identify, communicate and capture all service needs. To accomplish this, dealers may need to review and make some changes to the following processes:

Write Ups
The importance of write ups cannot be underestimated. When the future success of your dealership hinges on its ability to analyze and use data, the data has got to be good. During the write up process, the more information that can be entered, the better.

The use of mobile tablets in this process is critical. Many dealers complain tablets take too much time, but the reality is, a paper process is no longer acceptable. Instead of measuring the process as fast vs. slow, measure it as informed vs. uninformed.

Here’s a good guideline. If your process is poor, it will take more time to complete it using technology than it did with paper. If your process is good, it will take less time to complete it with technology than it did with paper.

The Multi-Point Inspection (MPI)
In addition to a MPI, advisors need to check the following, every time:

• Is there an open recall?
• Are there declined services from last time?
• What are recommended services/repairs on a vehicle like yours?

The answers to the first two questions can easily be found using a mobile tablet integrated with your DMS and OEM communications.

The answer to the third question is a bit tricky.

As an industry, we rely heavily on MPIs to identify necessary repairs. The problem is technicians aren’t paid to do MPIs, they are paid flat rates per job. Is it any wonder they don’t always take the time to perform a thorough inspection?

As a result, technicians rely on their learned knowledge base and memory to check for repairs commonly needed for your vehicle brand, based on mileage. However, their knowledge base isn’t as helpful when servicing other brands.

Today you should be leveraging data to provide customers with recommended repairs in a vehicle similar to this. It’s possible for techs and advisors to receive these types of notifications right on their tablets, regardless of the year, make or model of the vehicle. This greatly increases upsell opportunities.

Service Recommendations
Dealers can no longer expect to see customers every 3,000 miles. Today’s average length between service visits is closer to 10,000 miles. When your customer leaves, plant the seed for the next visit.

A complete MPI process will identify potential service opportunities within the next 10,000 miles. Before your customer leaves, email or print out and hand them a list of service recommendations for the next 10,000 miles.

Additionally, ask the customer is they’re planning any trips with their vehicles, which may shorten the expected time of their next visit.

Leverage Data
At every step of customer interaction, the data you collect and store should be integrated into a marketing strategy designed to drive the customer to the next stage.

From needs notification, you should have the ability to track how many customers scheduled an appointment. During the scheduling, write-up and in-service notification processes, customer interactions and preferences are gathered.

All this data can be used in the post service follow-up process to lay the groundwork for the next needs notification. The use of predictive analytics to create highly targeted and relevant offers will further maximize revenue potential.

Capturing more service from current customers is simple in theory but requires diligence to execute. These processes have been around forever and your service staff “know” how to do them, which is why it can be extremely challenging to make any changes. The only way to ensure the necessary change is with the use of data and accountability.

A ‘tentpole’ event at your dealership is one of those big-deal events that you really want to be successful. It could be a sale, holiday event, new product promotion or a community event that you’re sponsoring.

Tentpole marketing is a strategy that generates social buzz around your event that drives traffic to your dealership or to the event you’re promoting.

The most effective way to promote tentpole events is with an omnichannel strategy that includes digital channels such as email marketing and display ads; and may or may not include traditional media such as television, radio and direct mail. 

Social media is of course, is one of the best ways to generate social buzz. Facebook has a number of tools that are ideally suited for event promotion, including:

Facebook Live
Facebook Live is a highly successful way to drive excitement around a live event such as a new model reveal or promotion. Or, you can try creating a live event where your sales or service managers answer customer FAQs.

These videos are live streaming and best suited for events where the audience wants to interact and ask questions. For that reason, don’t plan your Facebook live video with a rigid editorial format. Keep it fluid and respond to customer comments and questions. 

According to a study by Newswhip, 98 out of the top 100 performing posts by brand pages on Facebook in January 2018 were native videos. Facebook live videos are an ideal way to gain a lot of exposure for your event on the big day, and also in the days after the event.

360 Photos and Videos
Did you know the Facebook app can be used to take panoramic photos and/or videos, then upload them to Facebook? This is a very captivating way to share immersive stories, places and experiences with your fans. Users must swivel their phones to view the entire photo or video.

Facebook’s 360 photos and videos create an experience that’s similar to virtual reality, except that it doesn’t require any special equipment or third-party apps.

What better way to showcase the interior of a vehicle? Or you could share videos of your showroom, service department or a community event that you’re sponsoring.

Canvas
Canvas ads are designed to provide mobile users with a full-screen ad experience that brings your brand or products to life. According to Facebook, a remarkable 53 percent of users that open a Canvas ad view at least half of it, and the average view time per ad is 31 seconds. That’s a lot of exposure!

Canvas ads are easy to create and versatile. Use videos, photos, image sliders, text and call to action buttons to generate excitement around your event.

Local Awareness (geo-targeting)
The ‘reach’ objective on Facebook gives you the chance to connect with local audiences and drive foot traffic to your dealership’s event. Facebook allows for narrow targeting and is very effective at connecting you with in-market shoppers within a specified geographical radius.

Upload your current customer list in your DMS database and use Facebook to target them with specific messages. Create lookalike audiences to expand your reach even further.

T-Minus Countdown
Start building momentum for your event several weeks, if not months beforehand. First, create the event on your dealership’s Facebook page. Then create the content. The more content you can create—especially videos—the more successful your campaign will be.

Start with a canvas ad featuring photos or a video to tease the event. If you are partnering with another organization, create co-branded content that can be shared on both of your brand pages. 

One to two weeks before the event is the time to really ramp up your content and targeting efforts. Use at least five of the following Facebook tools to maximize reach and frequency, and to ensure that your content is being seen by your intended audience:

·        360 photo/video

·        Regular photo/video ad

·        Canvas ad

·        Carousel ad

·        Co-branded content

·        Lead ads

On the big day, stream a video of the event on your Facebook page with Facebook live. Continue to use local awareness ads to build brand awareness through the event. Also use lead ads to encourage people who missed the event to come in at a later date and take advantage of the offer.

Not all Events Have to be Sales
One of the most successful tentpole events for a dealership I know of was hosted by Fort Bend Kia in Rosenberg, TX. Owner Virgil Skinner partnered with a local organization called Pets Alive to promote a pet adoption event at his dealership.

Skinner made a simple 30-second video that was posted on the dealership’s Facebook page. You can view the Pets Alive video here.  

The video went viral in Rosenberg and nearby towns, generating over 11,000 views. On the day of the event, hundreds of people visited the dealership. Fort Bend Kia covered pet adoption fees for everyone who adopted a pet. So many pets were adopted out that two of the shelters ran out of animals and had to go back to their shelters to pick up more pets.

It was a special event and a cause near and dear to Skinner’s heart. Of course, they also sold cars as a result of the event, but that wasn’t the purpose. The amount of goodwill they generated from this event cannot be bought at any price.

The next time your dealership plans a big event, don’t overlook Facebook as a marketing tool. Effective tentpole marketing requires a lot more than just posting event information on your Facebook page. It requires a strategy, content and knowing how to take advantage of the incredible tools that Facebook offers.