In today’s digital landscape, social media is a must for car dealerships looking to generate more qualified leads and drive showroom traffic. However, simply having social media pages is not enough. Dealers need effective targeting and retargeting social media ad strategies tailored to their audiences and goals. This article explores the latest techniques to optimize social media approaches for maximum conversions.

For hands-on execution of social media optimization, click here to learn more about Dealers United’s Social Ads Solutions.

Laser-Focused Car Shopper Targeting

The major social platforms allow highly customized audience targeting to serve ads. When creating campaigns, dealers should precisely define demographics like age ranges, gender, income levels combined with geographic and behavioral data. For example, target men ages 30-55 with household incomes over $75k who live within 20 miles of your dealership and have searched for pickup trucks in the last 30 days. The tighter your audience focus, the better engagement and downstream conversions.

Lookalike Audiences For Scalability

Lookalike audiences use custom dealership data like existing customer lists or website traffic to find new people who closely resemble your best buyers. Uploading such first-party data to advertising platforms informs their algorithm to seek new leads that share common attributes. With enough source data, lookalikes can effectively model millions of prospects at scale. Aim for at least 100 high-quality customer records for optimal mirroring effects.

While lookalike modeling can be extremely powerful, executing it successfully requires in-depth expertise.

But Dealers United can help you laser-target your ideal audience across social. 

Remarketing Dealership Website Visitors

Installing tracking pixels on your website lets you build audiences of all site visitors for follow-up ads. If a prospect explored SUV pages on your dealer site, you can then serve relevant ads, such as current purchase incentives or specials on SUV models they showed interest in. This technique essentially allows capturing of ‘lost’ prospects for renewed personalized engagement based on their specific research behavior.

You can also choose to target users based on the timeframe in which they visited your website, for example, you can target all website visitors who have visited your site in the past 180 days, and are:

• Located within a 15 mile radius of your dealership
• In-market shoppers
• Owners of competitive makes and models

Optimize Based on Performance Metrics

Analyzing metrics like click-through rates, cost per lead acquisition, sales cycle stage progression, units sold, and ROI enable continuous enhancement of both targeting parameters and creative approaches. 

Determine which audience segments, geographical areas and messaging themes produce the strongest performing prospects for your sales funnel. Select weaker areas and amplify the high-conversion signals. Adapt campaigns rapidly based on measured attribution.

Full Sales Cycle Attribution

Understand exactly how your social media efforts tie not just to lead generation but all the way through assisting prospects during research phases to purchase. Marketing attribution solutions like Facebook’s Conversions API allow tagging leads then tracking them to closed sales, charting how different messages guide buyers across stages. Dial-in messaging matched to each research phase using attribution insights for exponential conversions.

Strategic Social = More Car Sales

In our fragmented media landscape, dealers must employ targeted and retargeted social media strategies tailored for their prospects. Advanced audience segmentation, behavioral analytics, and attribution enable killer campaigns. Click here to find out how Dealers United can help with proven execution of cutting-edge social media advertising.