Tag: Digital Advertising

A Strategic Approach to Facebook Algorithm Change

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Over a decade ago, Facebook launched the News Feed with the purpose of connecting people with friends and family. Since then, business pages and advertising efforts have exploded into the Facebook arena, resulting in frequent and drastic changes in the way content is delivered to users. Consequently, users have reported that their News Feeds are consumed with more public content than updates from friends and family.

Facebook’s Algorithm Update

User feedback prompted Facebook’s latest algorithm update, announced in January 2018, titled “Bringing People Closer Together.” This algorithm update will prioritize posts from friends and family and/or content that will promote meaningful conversations and engagement.  At the heart of it, these Facebook algorithm updates are deployed to ensure content in the News Feed resonates with their original value proposition; your Facebook News Feed should inform and entertain.

What does this mean for businesses?

Family and friend interactions will rank higher in News Feed, leaving less space for public posts. As a result, business pages may see a decline in their organic reach, video watch time, and referral traffic. That said, business pages will be affected in various degrees. Pages with quality content that generate authentic interest and spark engagement will be less impacted, whereas pages that post generic or passive content will disappear into the ether. Businesses will need to become more strategic to maximize their reach potential, deploying quality posts and funding boosted posts to drive up engagement.  It does not appear that Facebook is not making any changes to Facebook Ad rankings at this time.

Best Practices for Facebook Business Pages

DO strive to create a conversation that resonates with your audience by:

Building your brand presence within your community.
Establish personality, push local content and community involvement. Connect and engage with local businesses.

Engaging with your audience.
Encourage interaction with open-ended, relevant questions.

Informing with product and business updates.
Keep these updates exciting, concise, and true to your brand. Ensure the updates are useful to your audience.

Exciting your audience with a variety of media formats.
Invite fans to attend events, ask questions during videos (live and pre-recorded), quality imagery, and website links to learn more

Continuing to utilize strategic social posting to create SEO value.
Organic posts still offer SEO value. Ensure that the destination links exactly to what’s expected to improve user experience.

Boosting quality posts to increase reach and engagement potential.
Be strategic with targeting. Establish primary and secondary geo targets, keeping your boosted posts focused on relevant interests and behaviors related to your campaign goals.

Keeping it current.
Leverage trending topics and be sure to utilize appropriate hashtags at all times.

DO NOT set your business page on auto-pilot. Facebook will demote these types of posts and have a low probability of showing up on people’s News Feeds:

Engagement-bait
Avoid “engagement-bait,” or fishing for reactions or comments that do not provide true meaning or value to the audience. “’LIKE’ if you want this car,” does not encourage valuable dialogue.

Passive Content 
Closed-ended questions, sales-heavy copy or visuals, or links unrelated to your brand or community further creates disconnect.

Keyword Heavy Content
Do not over-post or stuff content with too many keywords.

With all this in mind, thought-provoking and inviting content has a stronger chance of tapping into the heart of the Facebook user experience: personal connection. To learn how a Dealer.com Social Media Coordinator can help you create the best possible strategic social media strategy for your dealership, schedule a consultation today.

Miranda Jonswold is a Senior Social Media Coordinator at Dealer.com.

3 Tips to Create an Efficient Advertising Strategy Smart Enough to Tackle 2018’s Challenging Marketplace

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Dealer.com Display Ads

Stop us if this sounds like you:

“Overhead is up 40 percent this year, and now you’re telling me shoppers are going to buy three percent fewer cars in my local market next year? Something’s got to give here if we want to retain gross and have a shot at earning OEM performance award bonuses!”

We hear you. Margin compression is challenging, especially these days. Which is why it’s critical to engage an automotive advertising agency like Dealer.com to develop efficient advertising campaigns – messages that use data gleaned from billions of shopper behaviors in real-time and deliver ads that result in high-quality sales opportunities for your team ­­­– to maintain profitability in a challenging market.

Here’s what you must consider about advertising efficiently.

Buyers Want This to Be Easy

Mobile shoppers are far more likely to ‘click to call you’ from the search ad they see (and/or get directions to visit) if your ads address their individual desires (What’s my payment on a 2018 truck lease? How many are in stock?) especially if shoppers visited your website before. You need to consider how your ad content will adjust to gain interest from the most likely shoppers, both the message they see and level of aggressiveness needed to place it above competitors. For example, are you bidding more to deliver a specific new vehicle ad to the person who visited that car on your website last week? If you’re not, you need to be (The technology is called Retargeting Lists for Search Ads, or RLSA). Make it easy for shoppers, especially high-income, high-spending shoppers, to do business with you. Don’t limit your ad delivery to shoppers browsing Google search engine results pages.

The good news is that dealers using effective marketing practices online receive as much as four times more traffic to their online listings, an increase that drives a 15 percent improvement to their new car turn, according to vAuto, a Cox Automotive brand.

Here are three tips to make sure you run efficient ad campaigns that bring in more high-quality prospects for a lower average cost, using the most compelling content.

1. Showcase your inventory.

Highlight the unique features of your inventory with equally unique messages delivered based on each shopper’s profile. Update your most current deals, then take advantage of intelligent software to match them to the right shoppers at scale.

2. Match and draft.

Match the advertising message (payment/vehicle features/comparable offers) from TV and digital advertising to the message greeting shoppers who visit your digital showroom. Don’t forget to draft off Tier 1 and 2 national/regional event ads. Say one of your manufacturers is aggressively promoting one of its compact SUV offers. Ensure your ads deliver more specific content than the brand-awareness focus, and target net-new shoppers who are still cross-shopping the competition. Once you saturate local search demand, it’s time to use first-party shopper data from cross-shoppers to generate more interest using social networks and audience targeting.

3. Turn over hidden gems.

We get pretty obsessed with metrics, sometimes to the point of “analysis paralysis”. VDP views by model, however, is a report worthy of your attention. Having trouble selling a particular vehicle, and yet the VDP traffic volume is unexpectedly high? Check to make sure your price and pictures are sharp, then dedicate a realistic budget to advertising that vehicle so you can goose sales. Do you know which zip codes are generating the most sales of this vehicle? How aggressively are you positioning the specific vehicle in these areas versus spreading your investment evenly across a larger geographic.

Sales may plateau or decrease, but that doesn’t mean you can’t grow your sales and market share using a more efficient digital advertising solution as part of your holistic media and content platforms.

Got an advertising plan for 2018, or need help getting started? Drop us a line or comment below. We’d love to know what’s been working, and what the challenges are, for your dealership.

Joe Mescher is on the Enterprise Media Solutions team at Cox Automotive

How to Use Google’s New Micro-Moment Automotive Study to Inform Your Digital Strategy

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Google recently adapted its highly influential Zero Moment of Truth concept to the automotive industry, calling the decision-making, car-buying journey a series of micro moments, or key behaviors that led, or didn’t lead, to a purchase.

In their research, Google determined five micro moments where car shoppers asked themselves:

­– Which car is best?

– Is it right for me?

– Can I afford it?

– Where should I buy it?

– Am I getting a deal?

For decades, savvy auto retailers and industry vendors have almost intrinsically known that shoppers are asking themselves these questions at pivotal moments along the car-buying process. Google’s study reinforces the importance of these critical moments with consumer data.

But what the industry is now adapting to a new sales strategy, one that embraces shoppers’ desire to do more of the shopping process online, and is backed by groundbreaking technology to help customers get the best possible answers to their most important questions.

Here’s how to put Google’s five key micro moments into the context of building a strategy using digital marketing and digital retailing to generate automobile leads:

1. Advertise where car buyers perform research.

Whether it’s a paid search or audience targeting campaign, the Google micro-moment study reminds us that strategic digital advertising, a service that Dealer.com offers as a sort of personal automotive advertising agency for your dealership, can help you capture the attention of shoppers who are in the information-gathering phase of the car-buying process.

2. Create content on your website that compares your models to those of key competitors.

Shoppers are looking for the right information to help them reach a buying decision. And we know that as research and decision-making has moved online, the days of shoppers having to visit multiple dealers are long behind us. If your brand and models are cross-shopped, create video and write blog content on your website and for social media that provides side-by-side comparison and analysis to tell the story of why your car is right for car buyers.

3. Use Digital Retailing tools.

Answering the question of affordability begins with payment (italicized because you’ll read that word a lot in the next sentence). The payment affordability experience should begin on your website with real finance payments and leases, the ability to search by payment, and self-pencil alternative down payments, terms, trade values and credit tiers.

4. Be transparent online and in every step of the selling process.

Digital Retailing allows you to create a unique car buying experience for shoppers that choose to save time by doing some of the work online. Not everyone will want to leverage these transactions tools – especially since as many as 43 percent of buyers see the dealership as a place to learn.

But by creating a transparent shopping and buying experience, your nurturing trust, establishing true partnership with your customers, and making great leaps into the future of car buying and selling.

5. Use marketing campaigns to drive awareness and visibility into your car-buying process.

Now that you offer an experience that differentiates your business, let it. From retargeting, to updating your brand-oriented display advertising, to slideshows, to social media, even a YouTube channel – the sky’s the limit on how to disseminate the message that your business is equipped to meet, and exceed, shopper expectations.

While other dealerships may continue to implement an outdated sales model, you can market your dealership by selling your car-buying experience, and value, and orienting your business around time savings, transparency, and convenience.

Dealers will never make every deal, or sell every opportunity. But by taking key industry research like the Google Micro-Moment Automotive Study and aligning your strategy with those learnings, you are establishing your business to continue to thrive in this digital age.

Are you using Google’s Micro-Moment Automotive Study to help guide your digital strategy? Comment below to let us know.

 

Patrick Wyld is an enterprise performance manager at Dealer.com

Predicting Auto Retail’s Top 3 Trends in an Unpredictable 2017

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Dealer.com Automotive Predictions 2017

We don’t have an 8-ball, a pair of lucky dice, or even sport cars-themed tarot cards. But if there’s one thing we can say about 2017 with utmost certainty, it’s that it’s going to be an unpredictable year in automotive retail.

A changing marketplace, longer vehicle road life, possible gas price variations, and a new political landscape are all factors with which the auto industry must reconcile this year.

But we can predict some things. For instance, dealers will focus on where they can make profits, as they should always do. What dealers won’t make on volume or new car margin could be made with faster turn rate, more efficient operations, and greater emphasis on customer satisfaction, F&I, and service.

With that in mind, here are three more specific prognostications to help you, the dealer, fortify your bottom line no matter what 2017 brings your way:

1. Flexible Payment and Financing Options

Affordability is going to be a huge factor for shoppers this year. Many shoppers’ purchase decisions are driven largely by their monthly payment budget and/or access to financing. Building confidence and transparency into the shopping and deal-making portions of the process are easier if you embrace a digital retailing strategy to generate automobile leads.

This year, the industry really figures out how to sell a new vehicle online while preserving the customer-dealership relationship.

2. Multi-Channel Advertising

Shoppers are not limiting themselves to one device or one source of information. Being able to track those patterns, learn preferences, and target shoppers who’ve demonstrated a readiness or likeliness to purchase across multiple devices and sites will allow you to aim advertising and offers where they will count most.

This year, digital marketing settles on how to personalize what shoppers are looking for and deliver content that is neither irrelevant nor intrusive.

3. Attribution

You need to know what marketing investments work. Vendors and publishers will need to emphasize quality and value, and cannot simply post quantitative numbers. In terms of performance, transparency and actual ROI will stop being the exception, and start being the standard.

This year, the industry can confidently and intelligently use existing audiences to drive more relevant traffic and capitalize on specific shopper intent.

It’s still early in the year, but if what we saw and felt at NADA, and have been hearing from dealers around the country for months, is any indication of the accuracy of these three predictions, then we probably didn’t need to bring out the Ouija Board after all.

What are your auto industry predictions for 2017? We’d love to know what you think. Connect with us by commenting below.

Andy MacLeay is the director of digital marketing at Dealer.com

3 Ways Luxury Dealers Can Sell Slow-Moving Inventory

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Dealer.com

Some luxury dealers probably wonder what happened to the segment they used to know.

As the lines between automotive mainstream and premium blur, the mix of consumers shopping for luxury has changed – and so have the types of vehicles they want to buy. Consumers are purchasing midsize luxury SUVs faster than dealers can stock them, while sedans linger on the lot for weeks or months. It’s a simple supply-and-demand issue that doesn’t seem to have a simple solution. How can you stay profitable if you’re stuck with inventory your market won’t buy?

Automakers are working to solve the imbalance by adjusting production mix. That takes time, though, so some luxury dealers are relying on OEM incentives and rebates on slow-moving inventory as a short-term fix. But a dealer can’t profitably discount much more than an OEM is willing to incentivize. Simply put, solving this complex problem is going to take more than discounts.

These three tips will help dealers protect profits and keep inventory moving while awaiting OEM production mixes to rebalance:

1. Find and fix issues in new- and used-vehicle listings.

Optimizing listings is always a good idea, but it’s even more important when supply outweighs demand. While selling luxury sedans against the tide, listings have to be even more compelling to catch consumers’ attention. Unfortunately, many listings are incomplete. In a recent review of more than 10,000 dealerships with listings on Autotrader.com, 27 percent of listings had no photos, 29 percent were missing vehicle descriptions, and 16 percent were missing a price. Of listings that included prices, 86 percent only listed MSRP and 52 percent didn’t include relevant live specials or incentives, making those vehicles look less competitive than they actually were.

As dealers know with used vehicles, complete and compelling listings drive interest in inventory traffic to showrooms. But the same rules apply to new cars, too. A new car listing that’s missing key information will get overlooked. It won’t even show up in most online searches. This doesn’t have to be a complicated project. Just focus on the basics: photos, descriptions, retail prices, and relevant incentives for every sedan listed, every time. The more compelling, the faster it will sell.

2. Move more new sedans by leasing.

More attractive online listings will help consumers find luxury sedans, but not necessarily help them pull the trigger. Plenty of consumers won’t choose to buy a luxury sedan for various reasons. But they might feel great about leasing one. Leasing has always been a powerful force in the luxury market. It lets consumers get the new luxury vehicle they want for a lower monthly payment, and it makes it easy to upgrade to a new model every few years. As sales volumes slow down a bit in 2017, dealers can lease new luxury vehicles to bring in a continuous stream of revenue.

And what kind of vehicles do luxury consumers want to lease? Sedans. The ones dealers are having a hard time selling. Luxury sedans make up 56 percent of the lease share of new-vehicle volume, while luxury SUVs total only 33 percent. By targeting potential lessees and promoting sedan inventory, dealers can start those slow-moving cars rolling off the lot.

Comb through the customer-relationship-management system for consumers who could be interested in a new lease. Consumers near the end of current lease terms are an especially good fit, because dealers know exactly when they’ll need their next vehicle. And because returning lessees are more likely to upgrade than new buyers are, coordinate upgrade-focused offers with lease renewal dates. Educating consumers about the benefits of leasing can convince even more shoppers to give it a try. If customers have never leased before, make sure they know it’s an option that can get them into a higher-end vehicle faster and at reasonable monthly payments.

3. Upgrade used sedans to Certified Pre-Owned.

Leasing is all well and good for new vehicles. But what about used ones on the lot. Used luxury sedans can be a major opportunity for dealerships that take full advantage of certified pre-owned options.

Driving a luxury vehicle is a goal for countless consumers, but the cost of buying or even leasing a new one can shut many people out. Certified Pre-Owned creates a best-of-both-worlds solution for these consumers. They can get their dream car for a lower price, while the vehicle’s certification removes potential quality and safety concerns sometimes associated with buying used. That peace of mind is a major CPO selling point: 64 percent of consumers who purchased CPO said certification played a major role in their decision.

Certifying used luxury sedans does come with an upfront cost. But this small investment can result in a major payoff. It’s a simple way to make used vehicles feel like new. That’s an upgrade consumers will pay more for. Used-vehicle shoppers are willing to pay more for a CPO vehicle than for the same vehicle without certification. Even better, 74 percent of CPO buyers will purchase their next vehicle from the same brand. CPO does more than move sedans off lots. It can win customers for life.

Yes, shifting consumer preferences can leave dealers with misaligned inventory. But that doesn’t have to be a disaster. The right moves can keep dealership inventory moving. All of it.

Brian Geitner is president of Cox Automotive Media Solutions which includes Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, and Dealer.com