Brilliant Strategy for Using Facebook to Help Car Dealers

That article actually doesnt even mention selling one car, in fact in that entire article these are the only lines that refer to results about marketing cars, the rest is mainly describing using a contest to build a fanbase on Facebook.

Honda Cars of Corona received 50 leads in the first Month of their campaign, of which 5 were highly likely to buy a car in the short term.

if If and buts were candy and nuts,
You are making some big ASSumptions about the results and whether that dealership is "worth its salt"

So if they did all this to sell one car, would you deem that a success?

My point is that the article title is misleading and is a fluff agency piece about building a FANBASE rather than a true case study that showed how to turn a FB promotion into a sale of a car.
Maybe they did sell some cars after the fact and the promo was probably a good idea to get some exposure, but to claim it led to selling cars can not and has not been proven by the study.

FYI, this is not a knock on you, just on the nature of the article, thats all.

Revenue = $15k plus.
Profit = $500 to $2,000 front end, Back of the house (finance office) can double this or more.

As for the 5 leads it depends on what they consider likely to buy. If they are serious buyers and this dealership has a good staff they should get 4 out of 5. Of course people normally go to the dealership they want to buy from (Honda first if they want a Honda) so realistically these 5 if serious buyers would have likely ended up on the lot anyways.

Facebook as a way to bring people in is overrated. But as a means to engage and bring people back it is great. A big part of my job is doing this in house for a dealership.

As I read the article I brought up their current page so I can comment on now vs. 2 years ago.

1. We created a Lead Generating Landing Page on Facebook.

Landing pages no longer exist on Facebook. You can put a like-gate up over some content still though. I didn't see them still doing this but one of their tabs was not working for me.

No "test drive a Honda" tab is still on the site. They have no sign up currently to collect anything on the customer. This tells me that long term that this strategy did not work for them.

2. Get traffic to your Facebook Fan Page with Facebook Advertising

Facebook ads get good ROI for many who have done them. Myself I question what the purpose of getting people to like or even visit your Facebook page is unless you can convert them. That said they (like ourselves) have an inventory tab. This is a great way to get people searching your inventory without them having to leave Facebook. It eases them over to your site and the plan of course is to sell some cars/RV(in our case). Would Facebook ads give a good ROI? Each dealership would have to try for themselves. I have no way to know for sure if they are still running Facebook ads or not.

3. Make sure people click on your ad

Common sense.

4. Make sure people enter the form on your Lead Generation Landing Page on Facebook

Contests work to gain Fans and $500 isn't much to spend when it comes to advertising. I am assuming the 5 true leads were from this campaign so that paid for itself clearly. Once again though they currently have no "form" on the Facebook page so since then they have decided against this.

Does go into some rules on why many of the contests you see in your feed are against the rules. Contests must be ran in an app now always as far as I am aware. Good info and still true.

5. Attract audience at related forums and Facebook Pages.

Always a good strategy. But remember that time isn't free so figure in the ROI based on what you pay the person who does this.

"but I will say that you want to take a look at contest prizes that already have a hungry audience, with an active community on Facebook. Facebook Pages or Groups are great places to get the buzz going."

Not sure I agree with this. Once again as I point out which has more value? A page with 500 fan and 100 fans that are buyers or a page with 10,000 fans where only 100 fans are buyers. If you said they have the same value you didn't think about ROI since the 10,000 fans likely cost you more to get. Filling you page and raising the "likes" is something social media consultants talk about. But it isn't what businesses want. So merely having a contest to fill your pages with likes isn't worth it.

We actually are running a contest now and sent out emails to other lists (beyond our own) and it was interesting to see how different the clicks were. On our more people cared about our sales flyer (buying signal) vs. the contest (in fact they kind of ignored the contest) while with the other two sources the contest was the number one click with one source having 90%+ of it's clicks going there.

Were the fans we gained there of value to us? I'm not so sure personally and we decided to not do that again as neither list brought value. In fact we can not attribute even one sale for sure to them and it costs us $1,800 to send those emails(to about 70k people). That is not a ROI anyone would want. We knew the lists were not as targeted as we would like but decided it was worth a test.

6. Write fresh content, 5 times a week, twice a day.

Good advice but the numbers for maximum engagement are at less then twice a day last I read. But either way being actively engaged and talking about what your customers are talking about is the key. Facebook gives you metrics so use them and test. Pictures will always get more engagement. And testing times and days is always a good idea. Scheduling for when I am not in the office is truly something I need to up my game on to test it.

7. Engage with your audience
8. Be authentic, be real, be personable

Your true fans want to see the fun side of your dealership. I remember when one of the owners ran a tractor into one of our service bay doors. Those pictures got lot's of engagement and people still talk about them when in the dealership.

"Surprisingly, we ended the sweepstakes a week earlier than anticipated because of the overwhelming response!"

Seriously WTF? This is highly unprofessional. This alone could have brought on bad PR. Assuming they didn't list an end date (is that even legal?) or no one noticed.

Fun article and an interesting look back at how easy it was for Social Media consultants in the past.

I got a 6.8 doing it for our RV dealership. Not sure if I agree with that. I would expect to land near what you did for a "car dealer"

Yeah....anything 2 years old about Facebook Marketing is old news. Its a fast paced world out here my friends !!!

Just came across this:

Should You Leave Facebook? EdgeRank Confusion, Promoted Posts, and Why Small Business Owners Are Exceedingly Frustrated - Forbes