Ford Dealership Finds Qualified Auto Leads with Facebook Lead Ads
The Challenge
How do you make sure the Internet leads your sales team is receiving are worth their time?
You have to qualify them.
Sabine River Ford, a dealership that had hired 9 Clouds for online marketing services, needed to find more quality leads (especially those shopping for used vehicles). They wanted people whom they knew were ready to come to the table and make a deal.
To help them achieve their goal of getting more qualified leads, 9 Clouds launched a marketing campaign using Facebook Lead Ads: forms that capture a user’s information right on Facebook, without forcing them to ever leave the platform.
Lead Ads typically cost more per conversion than a campaign optimized for clicks or landing page views. But when they’re deployed correctly, automotive Lead Ads are worth the extra cost, as they provide you with specific contact information from a qualified audience. And since you only pay for the users who submit their information, you aren’t wasting your budget.
So how did our Facebook Lead Ads perform for Sabine River Ford?
The Solution
When making our Lead Ads for Sabine River Ford, we targeted used inventory shoppers based on Facebook data and Lookalike Audiences built from Sabine River Ford’s customer relationship management (CRM) data.
To ensure we were connecting with serious shoppers, we wanted to ask for more than just their phone and email. We built the Lead Ad form to ask for trade-in vehicle information as well, promising to reach out to leads with a quote for their vehicle.
This strategy accomplished two big goals:
- It assured leads that there was a good reason we wanted their contact information (and offered them real value in exchange for it).
- It set an expectation with everyone who completed the form that they would hear from the dealership.
We measured the success of these Lead Ad campaigns based on both the number of leads generated and the sales team’s assessment of the lead quality. Here’s what we found.
The Results
In three months of running trade-in Lead Ads for Sabine River Ford, 9 Clouds delivered 62 highly qualified leads. The sales manager noted that the leads were easy to contact and book for appointments.
The ads were shown to audiences of about 6,500 people each month. The average cost per lead was $22.58 (for comparison, the average cost per auto dealer lead is between $25 and $30). In our best month, the average cost per lead was only $16.67.
Among the leads generated, two customers purchased soon enough to be qualified as offline purchases in Facebook. Even more leads were actively engaged with the store’s sales team.
By combining these ad campaigns with 9 Clouds’ marketing automation services, dealers also have the ability to feed Facebook leads directly into their CRM or send email notifications to their staff.
Want to Learn More?
Trade-in Lead Ads are an effective way to capture serious shoppers and prepare them to engage with your sales staff — but they’re just one tactic auto dealers can use when it comes to digital marketing.
If you’re ready to take your online efforts to the next level, request a free digital marketing audit. Not only will you get a snapshot of your current online performance, you’ll also get valuable recommendations that you can use to improve leads and sales at your dealership.
Curious to see what Facebook ads could do for your business? Click below to find out.
