For years, marketers have struggled to demonstrate return on investment for their social media marketing efforts. They’ve pondered the true value of a page like, a consumer engagement, or a post reach. Many marketers have been able to measure the conversions to their website from their social media properties; however, since dealerships don’t actually have e-commerce websites, this measurement isn’t applicable. What if there was a way to leverage social media to tell customers that they are due for service, nearing their lease termination, or have positive equity in their vehicle? Check out these tips for demonstrating true social media ROI for your dealership’s business objectives.
Start with Clearly Defined Goals
When you start any marketing, the key to success is laying out your goals and what you want to accomplish. When looking at demonstrating ROI from your social media efforts, are you looking to drive customer retention and get them into your store two or more times in a year? Are you looking to increase sales to service conversions, or are you looking to move more units in the month? Whatever your social media goals are, be sure they fit in your overall marketing goals.
Identify Customer Data
Once you’ve stated your goals, now you’re ready to look inside your DMS to find customers. Be sure to utilize their last purchase or service dates to ensure you are delivering relevant messaging. For example, if you are looking to convert customers from purchase to service, you’ll want to put a list of customers together who have purchased in the past 60-90 days and who haven’t had a service transaction. Selecting the right customers to target is important to ensure you reach them at the right time with the right message.
Create Targeted Ads
After you’ve determined your goals and found the right customers to target, it’s time to create your social media ads. You’ll want to first determine which social media channels you’ll leverage to reach your customers. Start by determining what social channels your customers are utilizing or the most popular social media channels - determined by number of users and amount of activity per day. Creating your ad should be fairly easy. All you need is to make the message unique to the segment of customers you are reaching and be sure to use eye-catching graphics or even video to grab their attention. You may even want to test a couple of different ads to see which one gets you to your desired goals.
Perform Match Back Reporting
The last part of demonstrating social media ROI is to perform match back reporting. Once your ads have run for about a month, take all the customers who you targeted and compare that list against the past 30 days of sales and service transactions to see how many people you can cross reference. This process will give you an understanding of exactly what your return is on your social media marketing efforts.
If you’re tired of spending time and money on your social media efforts without fully understanding its return on investment, then it’s time to start focusing your efforts on true business objectives.