This is the second part of our four-part Facebook series for how dealerships can attract and reach more customers. In today’s blog, we will be focusing on creating organic content, including when, what, and where you should be posting, and who you should be trying to reach. Although this is what we recommend, take the time to find out what works best for your dealership’s online marketing strategy. There’s no universal one size fits all approach, so play around with the options!
When You Should Be Posting and Frequency
Let’s begin with when and how often your dealership should be posting on Facebook. As of 2021, it is recommended that you should post on Thursdays and Fridays between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. or on weekends between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. However, there isn’t really one universal time that works for everyone, so you might want to do a couple of trial runs to see when will work best. One week you can try posting more frequently, let’s say every day, and see how that does with your followers. The next week, only post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or just Monday and Friday. Or just pick any couple of days you think will work best, you know your dealership better than I do! After you’ve conducted your research, take a look at your insights on Facebook and see how one week compares to the other. Your insights are located on the left side of your page and you can adjust date ranges to get a more accurate view of how many engagements you’re getting per day, per post. Another thing you might want to consider is tracking when your competitors are posting and how well their posts are doing on each day.
What You Should Be Posting
If you’re unfamiliar with the term evergreen content, get ready to learn something new today. Evergreen content is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, content that is always relevant and up-to-date. This is content that will always be relevant to your target audience and it’s something that they can keep coming back to, which will increase your search traffic over time. A few examples of evergreen content that your dealership can create are:
- “12 Emergency Items You Need to Keep in Your Car”
- “The Quickest Way to Change a Tire”
- “What You Need to Do Before Walking Onto the Lot of Any Dealership”
- “How Can I De-Fog My Headlights At Home?”
- “Which Car Upholstery Cleaner Is the Best? We Tested Them Out So You Don’t Have to”
When creating this kind of content for your dealership, you want to make sure it’s search optimized. To do that, you should be doing some keyword research and analysis to find out what keywords are being used by your audience to search for these topics. Another thing to keep in mind is to try to make your vernacular as basic as possible.
Although you may know what brake torquing and a panhard rod are, not all of your audience will. Finally, don’t be afraid to change up the format of your posts. Switch it up between normal posts, videos, recommended podcasts, the latest news in the automotive industry, anything you want!
Who You Should Be Targeting
We obviously know that you’re trying to target potential car buyers in your area, but it goes deeper than that. Your car dealership marketing should include everyone looking for information about vehicles. You never know who is reading your posts and just because someone lives 400 miles away, doesn’t mean they don’t know someone who lives a mile away from your dealership. If you’re able to build credibility and goodwill with anyone reading your content, you’ll likely get some good word of mouth and people will recommend you to others in your area who are looking to purchase your inventory. Furthermore, think about what you would want to see as a viewer of your page. Create some kind of offer that they just can’t refuse and will get them onto your lot or just onto your website. This could be a free detailing service or some kind of consultation when they visit your dealership and show you the post. It may also be in your best interest to partner up with another local business in your area to attract more customers. You can partner with a company relevant to cars such as a tire shop or carwash, or an organization that’s completely different like the Girl Scouts during cookie season or a local bakery. You can work together to create some kind of deal or advertisement that benefits both companies and that customers of both organizations would be interested in. This also shows that you’re an active part of your local community and people will be more drawn to your dealership because of this.
Where You Should Be Posting
Yes, you should be posting on Facebook but it’s important to be posting native material. For native material, this is content that is supposed to be uploaded straight to the social media platform, Facebook in this case, instead of sharing a link to your dealership’s website or somewhere else. The issue with posting links to other places is that once the user clicks on the link, they typically don’t come back to your Facebook page. Although you want the viewer to go to your website, if they don’t end up following through with any kind of action, the lead goes cold. Finally, when you figure out what works on Facebook in terms of the kind of content that your audience wants to see, you can move that content to other social media platforms. After looking at your Facebook reports, you can utilize them in other aspects of your dealership’s online marketing. Although Facebook has such a broad reach and a lot of helpful tools, you shouldn’t neglect your other social media platforms. Make sure you are still tweeting, posting on Instagram, and making the occasional YouTube video!
After working with tons of dealerships all across the country, we have a team of experts ready to help you set up your Facebook Ads and get your dealership’s inventory onto Facebook Marketplace. Stay tuned for the next part of our Facebook series, where we go into more detail about how you can grow your brand. Feel free to reach out to us by sending us a message or giving us a call at 1-515-232-2024