Case Study: Pride Chevrolet – Making Facebook Work for You
By
Alexi Venneri

Facebook can be very powerful for small businesses. It has the capability to target by geography, behavior, interests, and demographics. But Facebook can also gobble up digital ad money by reaching the wrong people. Here’s how, with careful planning, money invested in Facebook ads targeted and timed appropriately led to 22 qualified leads, five sales and a 1,539% return on investment for Pride Chevrolet in Lynn, Mass.

Primed by a barrage of national advertising from General Motors for “Chevy Truck Month,” consumers looking to purchase a vehicle nationwide were motivated. The challenge was to reach only those who might be local buyers for Pride Chevrolet.  A more specific objective was to reach “intender” consumers likely to buy a vehicle within 12 miles of Pride Chevrolet’s home of Lynn, Massachusetts and turn them into high quality leads by driving them to our automated price quote platform.

We created two variants of the campaign: one to focus on truck buyers during the tail end of “Chevy Truck Month,” and another to capture “In Market Intenders” considering the purchase of a new Chevrolet car or truck. An ad to retarget consumers who went to the site, but did not request a quote was also created, with the goal of enticing them to get an “eprice.”

Facebook enables precise targeting, which was the lynch pin of success for this campaign. Using the Automotive category in Facebook’s behavioral targeting allowed us to target Facebook users shopping for a Chevrolet and even specific Chevrolet trucks.  Facebook could also provide us with prospects who either leased or purchased a vehicle 37 or more months ago, and might be shopping for a vehicle again.

To keep campaign costs in check, we used a combination of both the Facebook single image and carousel style format. Carousels use several images in one ad unit and lower total ad units. We even used multiple pictures within one carousel image slot, giving users a more dynamic shopping experience as they saw different vehicle angles and features like in-dash navigation.

Facebook users that clicked on “Shop Now” within the ad and entered their information were taken to the page to select a vehicle and options from an easy drop down menus. Next came a price quote and a link to a customized landing page. We combined Facebook’s technology with our own automated price quote platform to turn the Facebook responses into quality leads.

This combination was a huge success. Approximately 45 percent of the people who provided information and received an online quote set an appointment to come to the dealership. Seventy percent of those people showed up on the lot — 20 percent above the industry benchmark.

The ROI of the campaign was stellar. It demonstrated that social media ad campaigns needn’t be expensive to yield great results and that companies of all sizes can benefit from the powerful and precise targeting of Facebook ads. Pride Chevrolet sold five vehicles to 22 leads which translated into over 1,500 percent ROI.  Our targeting using Facebook’s data was so spot on that 90% of the leads identified did buy a car somewhere.

Alexi Venneri is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Air Strike, a leading social media and digital engagement company. Alexi has more than 20 years of experience in marketing and is a pioneer in digital response, social marketing and online reputation management.