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How boosting Facebook posts is a smart investment

JimJabaayBlog2016Facebook is a pay-to-play marketplace when you have a business page. It’s nearly impossible to reach your entire audience without putting an advertising budget behind it. This post will give you a basic understanding of Facebook boosting (advertising) and audience targeting to help expand the reach of your dealership’s messaging.

On all of your posts, you’ll see a (Boost Post) button, which brings up a separate window with options to reach more people. Facebook gives tons of options and if you are willing to experiment with some of your advertising budget, it’s definitely worth the investment. 

Facebook boost audience options:

  1. People who like your Page
  2. People who like your Page and their friends
  3. People you choose through targeting

The first two audiences are self explanatory, but the third option is the most valuable one. Facebook gives you the ability to reach people on Facebook who don’t already like your page and display your posts to them. Utilizing this type of audience is how you grow your audience and how you grow your business.

You have a lot of options at your disposal and creating a well defined audience is where you will see the best results.

What is a well defined Facebook audience?

Instead of selecting one of the first two options, select (Create New Audience). Give your audience a name and determine who you want your ads to go to. You can target just men, just women or both. You can also target states, cities and even specific zip codes.

Pro Tip: Review your sales records and determine the top zip codes your current customers are from and target those.

Not only can you choose from gender, age and location, but you can also target by interest. Interest targeting lets you choose from a long list of options to help you reach consumers that may be interested in what you’re offering.

How to use interest targeting on Facebook

Your dealership is hosting its annual open house and you have specific units in inventory that your dealership wants to sell. You can target people who have interest in those brands by selecting them from the list. Now you have targeted messaging which will resonate with the people you are trying to reach.

How to determine if you should boost one Facebook post over another:

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By now, we hope that you have learned from the LotVantage Marketing team that Facebook has decreased the organic reach for Pages. Essentially, that means that in order for your posts to be seen by the fans you have following you, you will need to set aside some money for a marketing budget and spend it on Facebook Ads and Boosting your posts.

In order to make the best decisions on which posts you want to promote, we suggest basing your choices on which posts will be most helpful to your audience and further your goals of promoting your brand awareness. The typical “happy customer” photos are not something we suggest boosting. However, the release of a new model, dealership offers and discounts, and useful product maintenance information are things worthy of Boosting.

In truth, knowing what will be worth spending your money on is going to be experimental until you see what gets you the most attention from your audience. Pay attention to the posts that are most popular and compare that content to those of which were less popular, and you will have created the most masterful plan of attack for your dealership’s Facebook marketing.

Mastering Facebook advertising:

If you find that you are unfamiliar with general marketing strategies and would like an introduction to Facebook Boosting, advertising and targeting, please email us at hello@lotvantage.com for more information.

Jim Jabaay is the vice president of Sales and Marketing for LotVantage, a leader in digital marketing for automotive, powersports, marine and RV dealerships.  Jim has grown up in the automotive industry with the family dealership in the suburbs of Chicago. Jim started at Manheim in sales and continued to grow his career running sales teams throughout Texas for nine years.  Following Manheim, Jim spent two years at Dealertrack expanding his career in the software side of the business.  LotVantage utilizes data to help dealerships understand which inventory to post and when to post it for a local, national and social presence.  Jim’s number one goal is helping dealers succeed in an ever growing and changing dealership world.

Website: www.LotVantage.com

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