How Dealerships Can Use Facebook Ads to Get Leads

In today’s fast-paced, digital-first world, automotive dealerships are constantly seeking innovative ways to connect with potential buyers and convert leads into sales. While traditional advertising methods still have their place, the power of social media ads cannot be ignored by dealership marketing teams.

Facebook Ads specifically have emerged as an efficient and effective way to fuel automotive sales, offering an expansive user base and a wealth of targeting options that enable dealerships to expand their ad strategy and reach their desired audience with precision.

By taking a data-driven approach to engaging audiences across platforms – including Facebook and Instagram – dealers can maximize their sales opportunities and generate high-quality leads.

Proactive automotive dealerships aiming to stay ahead of the curve should work to establish a competitive edge and maximize their sales potential with Facebook Ads to generate high-quality leads.

In this blog post, we’ll dive deeper into Facebook Leads from ads and what they can do for dealerships, including:

● What Facebook ads are

● How dealerships can utilize Facebook ads

● How to use Facebook ads to track and engage dealership sales leads

● The benefits of Facebook ads for auto dealers

What Are Facebook Ads?

Facebook Ads are a powerful advertising solution provided by the popular social media platform, Facebook, owned by parent company Meta alongside Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp. These ads are designed to help businesses reach their target audiences and achieve defined marketing objectives by delivering tailored advertisements directly to Facebook users.

To use Facebook ads to generate sales leads, dealers can leverage the power of Meta Ads Manager. Meta Ads Manager (formerly Facebook Ads Manager) is a comprehensive platform that allows businesses to create and manage ad campaigns across Meta’s family of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network. This enables dealerships to reach potential car buyers across multiple touchpoints with a single, unified strategy.

Depending on the campaign’s placement settings, Facebook ads can be delivered in various locations across the platform including prominent placements on audience’s news feeds or even in Facebook’s Audience Network, which extends ads to external websites and mobile applications.

Within the Ads Manager, dealers can implement precise audience targeting, manage advertising budgets and track their performance. To ensure that their ads are shown to the right people at the right time, dealership marketing teams have the flexibility within Ads Manager to define the specific demographics, interests and behaviors of their desired audience.

Facebook ads can easily be customized and consist of multiple formats including:

• Images
• Videos
• Multi-use carousel displays
• Slideshows
• Stories
• Text-based content

Each of these formats can be enhanced with compelling call-to-action (CTA) buttons, strategically designed to drive user engagement. Built-in are options to “Shop Now,” “Learn More” and “Contact Us,” which all encourage users to take specific actions directly from the ad in their feed. This combination of visually appealing content, precise targeting options and interactive elements make Facebook Ads a highly effective means for dealers to engage prospective sales leads across channels.

How to Implement Facebook Ads at Your Dealership?

To implement Facebook Ads, dealers need to start by using their Facebook Business Page to set up a Meta Ads Manager account, if one doesn’t already exist. The person or team in charge of managing their dealership’s digital advertising will need to complete a few required and recommended steps to set up the Ads Manager for success, such as setting up an automotive inventory catalog.

Once the initial setup is complete, dealers can begin creating their first ad campaign. Before creating an ad, dealers will need to first select their campaign objective, which ranges from increasing brand awareness to generating leads and driving sales.

From there, dealers can choose from a variety of ad formats, such as single image or video ads, carousel ads or collection ads, depending on their specific goals. Dealerships can narrow down their audience, to ensure the right people are seeing their ads at the right time, based on:

• Demographics
• Interests
• Behaviors
• Specific locations

To discover the right target audiences, dealerships can utilize the range of targeting options within the Meta Ads Manager. They can start by using basic demographic filters – age, gender and location – to narrow down their audience. Facebook also offers more detailed targeting capabilities, which include pinpointing interests (like automotive brands), behaviors, interests, hobbies and connections to popular pages.

Dealerships should focus on targeting specific audiences who are more likely to be interested in their products and services. By leveraging Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences, dealers can use their existing dealership data to find users who may be interested in their products or services.

How to Use Facebook Ads to Track Leads

After deploying Facebook Ads – or any advertising campaign – it’s crucial dealers track and engage sales leads generated by their efforts. Tracking and engaging leads effectively will help you nurture potential customers, increase conversions and maximize your return on investment (ROI).

Thankfully, Facebook Ads provide dealerships with powerful tools to not only generate leads but also track and analyze them effectively. To use Facebook Ads to track and engage dealership sales leads:

1. Implement Conversion Tracking: Facebook offers a powerful tool called Facebook Pixel, which is a snippet of code that you can place on your dealership’s website. The pixel tracks the actions users take after clicking on your Facebook ads, allowing you to measure and optimize your ad campaigns. By implementing conversion tracking, you can see which ads are generating leads and sales, enabling you to focus your efforts on the most effective campaigns.
2. Set Up Custom Conversions: Custom conversions allow you to track specific actions taken on your website, such as form submissions or vehicle inquiries. By creating custom conversions, you can measure the success of your lead generation efforts and optimize your ads accordingly. For example, dealers can create a custom conversion for when a user submits a test drive request form on your website. This way, their team will know exactly how many test drive leads were generated from your Facebook ads.
3. Utilize Lead Generation Forms: Facebook provides lead generation forms that can be integrated directly into your ads. These forms make it easy for users to submit their contact information without leaving Facebook. This data can then be used to follow up with leads and move them further down the sales funnel.
4. Automate Lead Follow-Up: Once leads are captured through your Facebook ads, it’s essential to follow up with them promptly. Automated sales and marketing tools like Mastermind can help dealerships streamline the process of nurturing and retaining loyal customers by automatically delivering personalized messages and relevant offers to your most engaged leads.
5. Use Retargeting Ads: Not all leads will convert immediately, but that doesn’t mean they’re lost. Retargeting ads allow you to re-engage with users who have previously interacted with your dealership but haven’t made a purchase. By serving targeted ads to these warm leads, you can remind them of your offerings, provide additional incentives and encourage them to take the next step.
6. Analyze and Optimize: Regularly review the performance of your Facebook ad campaigns and analyze the data provided by Meta Ads Manager. Identify which ads and targeting strategies are generating the most leads and conversions. By continuously optimizing your campaigns, you can improve the quality and quantity of dealership sales leads over time.

Benefits of Facebook Ads

From targeted audience reach to measurable ROI, Facebook ads offer auto dealers a range of benefits that can significantly impact their sales and lead generation efforts, including:

1. Expansive Reach: Advertising dealership services on Facebook allows access to a massive user base of more than 269 million monthly active users in North America, offering a vast potential audience to engage with and target.
2. Precise Targeting: Facebook Ads’ robust targeting options enable dealerships to reach their ideal customers with the utmost precision. They can narrow down their audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors and location, always ensuring their ads are shown to the right people at the right time.
3. Enhanced Brand Awareness: By consistently showcasing dealership services through Facebook Ads, dealerships can establish a strong presence, build brand recognition and stay top-of-mind during the car buying journey.
4. Effective Lead Generation: Facebook Ads provide lead generation forms that help generate high-quality leads and facilitate prompt follow-ups from BDCs that convert prospects into customers.
5. Cost-Effective Advertising: Facebook offers flexible budget options, allowing dealerships to optimize their ad spend and allocate resources efficiently. With careful targeting and measurement of campaign performance, auto dealerships can achieve cost-effective advertising and maximize their return on investment.

How Can Mastermind Help with Facebook Ads?

Digital Audiences enable dealers to bring the power of Mastermind’s Behavior Prediction Score® to their Facebook advertising to reach highly relevant, engaged segments across multiple channels.

With Mastermind Digital Audiences, dealers can create and automatically upload custom or pre-built Loyalty or Conquest audiences to the Meta Ads Manager based on the most comprehensive and reliable data in the industry.

Download the Brochure:
Learn more about Loyalty Digital Audiences

Mastermind Conquest Digital Audiences take this one step further, enabling dealers to create a custom audience or choose from one of Mastermind’s 15 pre-built Service and Conquest audiences, fueled by comprehensive Polk Audience data with 650+ million vehicles, tracked daily powered by S&P Global Mobility.

From here, audience data is instantly uploaded to Meta and automatically refreshed every month, empowering dealers to expand the reach and frequency of the ad efforts.

Download the Brochure:
Learn more about Conquest Digital Audiences

Mastermind also provides easy to read performance tracking and reporting features, empowering dealerships to monitor ad effectiveness, track metrics and make data-driven decisions to grow their advertising strategies.

Conclusion

With expansive reach, precise targeting options and the ability to track leads, Facebook Ads enable dealers to connect with their target audience and optimize their advertising strategies as an effective means of generating leads and driving sales.

But to truly maximize the potential of Facebook Ads and take dealership advertising to the next level, dealers need to take an intelligent approach to engaging buyers across channels.

Mastermind Digital Audiences enable dealers to build digital audiences that drive sales. By fueling their Facebook advertising campaigns with hyper-relevant audiences powered by comprehensive data, dealers can automatically target, engage, nurture and convert sales leads into loyal customers.

Want to learn how Mastermind enables dealers to take a multi-channel approach to engaging Conquest, Service and Loyalty customers? Request a free demo today.