If you’re worried about how the recent loss of Facebook Marketplace Automation affects your business, you’re not alone. Previously, Marketplace Automation would allow your inventory feed to automatically populate vehicle listings on Facebook. With the new changes in place, you’ll now be forced to manually create a listing for each piece of inventory you want to be listed. This creates a monstrous amount of work for dealers who are trying to get eyes on their inventory in as many places as possible.
As yet, Facebook hasn’t partnered with anyone on a solution that gets around this. With no magic wand that will allow you to post automatically, your next move needs to be backed by data and strategy.
How Flex Can Fix Your Need for Automation on Facebook
When you partner with a strategy-focused agency, you can rest easy knowing that our experts are working on effective solutions for you. Let’s take a look at a few ways that Flex can help support your dealership through these changes, ensuring you continue to see lead growth from your marketing efforts.
1. Marketplace Placement
This hasn’t gone away! You can still show ads on Facebook Marketplace. Whether you’re selling vehicles or food subscription boxes, Facebook ads can be placed in many areas across the internet - it doesn’t need to be only on Facebook or Instagram. For example, if somebody is reading about the new Toyota Corolla on MotorTrend, your ad could show up on the side of that screen. We’ll take care of Marketplace Placement, while also maximizing the likelihood of the right people seeing your ad in the right place.
2. Vehicles Tab
We can automatically feed your inventory right to Facebook, allowing your community to view and interact with your inventory directly on your Page. This, combined with Marketplace Placement for ads, allows you to reach in-market shoppers at multiple stages of the buying journey, whether they’re in the beginning stages or they’re actively shopping for their next vehicle.
3. Maximizing Lead Channels
If you’re excluding certain lead channels from your marketing, you’re missing an opportunity to identify the channels that are providing:
1. The highest quality leads
2. The cheapest leads
3. The most leads
By using all of the lead channels below, you’ll learn more about how many dollars you’re spending in order to sell a car, truck, RV, or SUV:
Automotive Inventory Ads. These are the bread and butter campaigns that every dealership should be running each month. Serve your inventory to shoppers in every place they might be looking, whether on Facebook or in Facebook’s Audience Network, and take them directly to specific inventory on your website. These campaigns are also commonly used to retarget specific vehicles to shoppers who’ve already viewed them in order to keep your dealership top of mind while they continue to shop for the best deal.
Messages Ads. One of the advantages of Facebook Marketplace is that shoppers are able to message the dealership about a specific vehicle, and ask additional questions or set up a test drive instantly. It allows your team to engage with, and close, potential customers when they’re already in a “buyer’s” mindset. There are so many more ways to leverage Messages Ads effectively - don’t hesitate to reach out to the FlexDealer team to learn how you can use this feature to your advantage.
On-Facebook Lead Ads. With iOS14 dropping one year ago, website measurement has become less accurate for every dealership. While we can provide reliable estimates of website leads, some users would prefer to take action directly on Facebook. By providing a lead form on each vehicle, you can capture high-quality leads on Facebook, send them straight to your CRM (we can help integrate this, by the way), and report directly on how many of those leads converted to sales.
So How Do I Use Marketplace Now?
Marketplace might be back to the wild, wild west, but Flex can help make you the Sheriff. Book a call with us to learn more about how to use Marketplace to your advantage and maximize your listings in the ever-changing world of online marketing.
We’ll also be discussing this topic in-depth during our monthly Office Hours event, so if you’d like to attend this exclusive event (or future calls), we can chat about how to make it happen!
