Get Social! How Dealership Service Departments Can Benefit from Social Media

The constant changes and trends in social media are a lot to manage. Many dealers quickly realize it’s easy to create a page for their dealership, but falter after that.

Some dealerships post the occasional website links to sales promotions, or share content from other local businesses. Most of the time, service is completely left off the page—no mention of hours, reviews, or how to schedule an appointment.

But for the area of the dealership they depend on to drive customer loyalty, excluding service from an online community of customers hurts profit potential.

Social marketing targets the customer where they spend the most time online. Advertising service on social and video sites can change the way you generate and keep customers. If you aren’t promoting your service drive with social media advertising, read on to see how you can get started.

Facebook

Facebook’s targeting settings make your dealership data your most reliable marketing resource. Using your historical service data and customer emails you have on file, you can target customers on social media with services their vehicle may need at that moment.

But unlike many other marketing methods used in fixed ops, social advertising isn’t limited to current customers. Reach out to website visitors with retargeted ads based on the pages they viewed on your site. Use Facebook’s social insights to show your ads to people with similar buying trends and interests.

Your content and how it’s shown are just as important as the audiences you’re targeting. Using market trends like buying behaviors and demographics, you can design and write ads that speak directly to customer needs and trigger a reaction.

Inspiration:

Conquest service

Claim offer ads provide customer engagement and ROI. When you run a claim offer ad, you can measure impressions, but more importantly, clicking the “Get Offer” button gets them to share their information with you. When you review your social media reports, you can see how many offers were claimed online and how many were used, then measure success and make any adjustments in future ads.

Sales customers who never serviced

Unfortunately, many customers buy a vehicle at your dealership but never come back for service visits. Offers like oil changes probably aren’t likely to bring them in, but a deal on more expensive repairs (like the tire deal in the example above), may promise enough of a bargain! These ads can be highly targeted based on your database and historical records, which makes it easy to measure results.

YouTube

YouTube is a great platform for raising awareness through quick advertisements, and it’s a very inexpensive option. Depending on the length of your video, customers are guaranteed to see at least the first 6-15 seconds of your ad. If they don’t stick around to watch the rest of a longer ad, you don’t pay anything to show that ad!

YouTube’s targeting is similar to Facebook. Using your database of customer information, you can target customers based on their history with your store. Or, if you’re going after new customers, you can use filters based on interests and behaviors to target viewers with your ads.

Video traffic has grown exponentially since YouTube began, with nearly 30 million users visiting the site per day.¹ Users recognize brands 90% better after watching a video than viewing ads on other channels.²

Inspiration:

Brand Awareness

You don’t have to invest in a camera crew and special effects team to make a successful YouTube ad. Simple effects and language get your message across without gimmicks. In the example above, a 30-second ad uses photos from the dealership to share a simple brand awareness message for their fixed ops department.

Promotions

To motivate customers to visit your website or call in to schedule service, you can run basic promotional offers on YouTube. When you want to drive action, shorter videos work well to decrease cost and increase the likelihood that customers watch the entire video.

In Conclusion

It’s not just about the time spent on these sites; customers are willing to engage with and buy from businesses who show up on their social media feeds. In fact, nearly 48% of social media users have purchased something after viewing or interacting with a business’s ad on social sites.³

Advertising your service center online creates opportunities to capture new customers and also target previous ones. It takes time to create a strategy and see consistent results, but social media advertising is a current, influential marketing channel for fixed operations.

1 Think With Google
2 SproutSocial
3 Deloitte