What is Paid Social and How Can it Benefit Your Dealership?

With such a huge proportion of people using social media today, it has become a crucial part of marketing strategies and now, more and more companies are investing in paid social. But what exactly is paid social and can it be useful for your business?

What is Paid Social?

Paid social is the use of sponsored content or advertising to increase your presence on third party social media feeds and pages. This method uses various demographic tools to ensure that your company is reaching potential customers effectively and efficiently.

Paid social is available across all of the major social media platforms, including: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat.

Is it Worth the Cost?

It is useful to try to extend your reach, but when social media pages and accounts are free anyway, is paid social worth the cost?

The answer to that question is that paid social is not essential, but as with everything, you can only get so far without spending money, but even just a small budget can make your social media marketing efforts a lot more fruitful.

Statistics show that click-through rates are much higher for social media than for normal web adverts. For Facebook, rates are 8.1 times higher on desktops and 9.1 times higher on mobile.

How Can Paid Social Help Your Dealership?

Targeting customers

Paid social advertising allows you to target your marketing, enabling you to identify specific audience segments based on their demographics, and tailor your marketing messages around this information. Here are a couple of examples of how social networks do this:

• Facebook
  • With paid social on Facebook, you can choose your target region, age range, gender and user interests.
  • Once you have determined a budget (the cost will depend upon the duration of the advert) Facebook will produce an estimate of the post’s reach.
  • Facebook also offers features called Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences which can help you find out very specific information about users and improve your targeting. To find out more, click here.

  Twitter

  • You can target audiences on Twitter based on what else they follow as well as location, language, gender or device being used to access Twitter.
  • Twitter also has a feature called ‘Tailored Audience’, which enables you to upload customer or prospect lists from your own data so that you can reach your existing customers with new campaigns.

Brand Awareness

Like more traditional online advertising, paid social is an effective method of raising awareness of your brand. Paid social is excellent for brand awareness because it enables you to target new audiences.

Facebook alone has over 1.3 billion users, and with so many potential customers, social media is an optimal way to spread your message.

Calls-to-action

Social media is usually about soft leads but paid social can turn these into hard leads by providing a compelling call-to-action, which will drive users to your site or a lead generation form.

Lead generation

Lead generation is key to initiating a relationship with potential customers. Leads are formed when an individual exchanges their contact details for an offer, such as a coupon, a special offer or a piece of content.

Paid social can be used to direct social media users to lead generation forms, and you can then use their data to enhance your relationship with them as potential customers and drive more sales.

Paid social has the potential to be highly beneficial for your business, and if your organic reach is not bringing in enough leads, it is definitely an option worth considering.

With high-quality content and thorough research, targeting through paid social can deliver incredibly valuable results.

If you decide to try paid social, it is also important to make sure that you use social media metrics to measure its effectiveness for your dealership.

For more information on how Click Dealer can run paid social media campaigns to generate more leads for your dealership, get in touch today by emailing marketing@clickdealer.co.uk, calling us on 01782 904 715 or via our contact page!