Adding Fuel to the Fire

With 2022 heading to a close, many dealers in the automotive industry have been left feeling out in the cold when it comes to advertising on Meta (Facebook). Let’s take a look into the reasons why.

In 2019 Meta introduced Special Ad Audiences to accompany the new designation of the Special Ads Category. The Special Ad Audience was introduced as an alternative to the Lookalike Audiences that were no longer eligible for use in the new category. At that time and even today, Lookalike audiences were and are an extremely powerful tool to expand audiences and increase the reach of advertisers to relevant groups of people. One final benefit of these audiences is that they were free to create.

Fall of 2019 Automotive dealers found themselves being categorized as part of the new Special Ad Category could no longer target by age, gender, or zip code as well as limited core targeting as well as losing access to lookalike audiences. Meta quickly introduced the Special Ad Audiences as a new solution for the newly relegated industries. It allowed all the same benefits of a lookalike audience including the cost for creation, $O. All seemed well until Meta announced in June 2022 as part of their settlement with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that they would be sunsetting the Special Ads Audience over the next few months.

The decision from Meta once again left the Automotive industry in the cold. Dealers are now unable to build relevant prospecting audiences and are left with geographic targeting as their main mechanism. So dealers have planned to shift their strategies and have already started to lean into their CM and DMS data to support their vehicle acquisition and service campaigns effectively stopping all of their targeted prospecting campaigns. These campaigns are a very beneficial part of the overall buying cycle in the automotive industry especially with buyers being more loyal to incentives and OEMs than to dealerships.

SOCIALDEALER has always looked for the best solutions for our clients and is always on the lookout for those industry-leading solutions and partnerships. With our SocialDRiVE solution, we help you define and deliver your ads and incentives to your audience. Our dealers get to define their ideal and proprietary audience. Through the SocialDRIVE solution, our dealers get access to second-party data that effectively build an audience that is directly targeted by the dealer’s social ads. Our custom Audience-building tools, allow us to create a completely custom audience: using either vehicle registration data or consumer data to build audiences.

A few examples of registration data options to build the ideal audience are brand, ownership type, make, model and year. Consumer data is used to build custom audiences based on interest, profession, location, and many other demographic data points. Building SocialDRIVE custom audiences that are used in tandem with specific messaging on social ads, greatly increase the results from your digital ads.

Ultimately SOCIALDEALER has created a solution for dealers that allows them to prospect and expand their audiences without resorting to digital audiences of anyone that can click an ad in a 15-mile radius around the dealership. SocialDRIVE allows you to send the right message to the right person at the right time SocialDRIVE will definitely add some fuel to your fire, or in this case digital audiences, and help you re-capture your valuable local audiences again.