Before your auto dealership can start effectively leveraging the Facebook Ads platform, there are some preliminary pieces of marketing collateral you’ll want to have in place. For example, you’ll need to develop buyer personas, ensuring that you have a clear sense of who you’re marketing too. You’ll also need to set up a proper Facebook page for your dealership, of course—and while that may seem like it goes without saying, actually creating a branded Facebook page is harder than you might imagine.
Setting Up Your Dealership Page
The first thing you’ll need to do is go to www.facebook.com/pages/create.php, where you can choose between six different categorizations for your page—including things like Entertainment, Brand or Product, etc. The one you’ll want to choose for your car dealership is Local Business or Place.
Once you select your business classification, you’ll be asked to fill in a few additional fields of information. These include:
– About
– Hours
– Contact
– Address
– Price Range
– Parking
Complete this information as best you can, but don’t worry: It’s easy to make revisions later on, and in fact we recommend routinely tweaking/updating your dealership’s profile information.
Facebook will also ask you to fill in your dealership name. The best advice we can give you here is to pick a name that is consistent with the rest of your online branding. For example, if your website and your Yelp listing both say Al’s Used Car Company, it’s important that you state it the same way on Facebook. Abbreviating to Al’s Used Cars, or something like that, can compromise your SEO value.
Completing Your Facebook Profile
There are some additional fields you’ll also want to complete—starting with a Short Description, which should be sort of an elevator pitch for your dealership. Keep the focus on value—specifically, the value proposition you make to buyers.
Facebook will also ask you to select a profile picture and a cover image. You’ll see instructions on the proper dimensions to use, and we’d recommend getting as close to those parameters as possible. Your image should be something that is colorful and attention-grabbing, but also something fairly simple and on-brand. For best results, your profile picture should be a perfect square.
A couple of additional points: Facebook will allow you to make your dealership page a “favorite,” meaning there will be a shortcut to it on the sidebar of your personal Facebook profile. This is purely a matter of convenience and personal ease, and it’s totally up to you whether you want to do this. Also note that Facebook will prompt you to make your first ad, but we’d urge you to hold off on this until you read a bit more about how Facebook Ads works.
We’ll be getting into that in future posts, and we also recommend you check out our book, The Ultimate Dealer Guide to Facebook Advertising. Educate yourself about the power of Facebook Ads, then see for yourself how powerful they can be!