9:07 am, September 11, 2024
Knowing how best to penetrate the online conscience of the right demographic at the right time is key to social media engagement.
The ‘social’ customer journey is made up of multiple stages, just like email and SMS contact plans, and paid activity should support this.
For example, by placing tracking pixels on a retailer’s website, prospects can be remarketed with relevant social media messages during the crucial research phase.
Further advertising campaigns can then be built to ensure customers fitting specific criteria – based on where they are in their motoring journey – are fed targeted ads designed to keep retailers front of mind before the next stage.
Reach your existing customers across social media
At the end of August, we launched a new Dynamic Custom Audience feature within our VoiceBox Social software to support sales and aftersales activity.
It means that VoiceBox can integrate with the retailer’s DMS and automatically upload customer data matching their desired criteria directly into Meta to facilitate targeted Facebook and Instagram campaigns.
This is a tactic that hasn’t really been practicable in the motor retail sector before without time-consuming manual intervention.
By linking with the DMS to build audiences based on ‘first-party’ data (ie, highly accurate information relating to the customer’s actual preferences and stage of their ownership journey), retailers won’t be restricted by any limitations that might be placed on the use of third-party cookies.
Track conversions and report on ROI
Historically, it has been difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns, so marketing departments have struggled to demonstrate the return on investment.
However, our VoiceBox integration with Meta’s conversions API supports inquiry attribution for Facebook and Instagram ads.
It means that VoiceBox users can both evaluate the proportion of inquiries and orders that result from their paid placements as well as which specific social campaigns drove the most engagement.
The results are in!
Analysis of data from retailers using our automotive inventory ad software SocialStock shows that 91% of remarketing audiences clicked through to the retailer’s website after seeing a social advert and 27% of conquest audiences did the same.
Trackable results such as this, which can be extracted with minimal administration, provide a direct correlation between social activity and website visits.
Since commencing the trial of Meta’s conversions API with our clients in June this year, we have been able to attribute more than 380 inquiries and 211 orders directly to social media campaigns.
With robust analysis tools in place, the power of social media becomes more measurable, cutting down on the guesswork when formulating a marketing strategy.
With this new technology available to elevate the profile of social media, we encourage retailers to integrate paid advertising into their current digital marketing strategy to maximise exposure and boost revenue.
Retailers can find out more by visiting marketingdelivery.co.uk
