Turn Your High Beams On to Facebook Dark Posts

Today’s market is changing fast when it comes to advertising car dealerships. The days of expensive TV commercials, newspaper ads, radio spots and mailer campaigns are shifting into their twilight years. The truth is while there is still a time and place for traditional marketing, it is more limited now than ever before.

Change is good however. And the great thing for dealerships is that the market has created a massive opportunity. The increasing popularity in content marketing and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have allowed dealers to target specific audiences at a greatly reduced cost than more ‘traditional’ advertising methods. Enter the Facebook dark post.

Facebook Dark Posts are a great way to take advantage of the current market because it allows you to run the same ads, promoting them as sponsored posts and target different audiences and geographic locations. But here’s the best part. All of your ads won’t show up in your pages news stream. This allows you to nurture the audience you’ve built over time and avoid nudging too many followers towards the unlike option.

The Roadmap

Since Facebook dark posts are still relatively unknown within the dealership community we’ve constructed a simple roadmap of scenarios when you might consider this approach usable.

1. Help Move Stale Inventory.
   Target multiple demographic and geographic targets with the same ads to help market your previous year and overage units. Customers are always looking for a great value and Facebook can help you put it in front of the correct audience.
2. Dealership Brand Awareness.
   We all want more traffic to our lot. And Facebook is a great way for you to create brand awareness for your dealership. Utilizing Facebook allows you to create ads that are targeted to specific customers within the town you are located in, or within a certain radius of your dealership, or both.
3. Promote the Launch of New Designs.
   Be the go to dealer in your market with the all the information about the new design your manufacturer is releasing. Try customizing your message for different audiences and hit all segments of your customer base that you think the new design might appeal to.
4. Retarget Your Website Traffic.
   Continue to market to customers that are already interested in your dealership by creating retargeted Facebook Ads from your previous website traffic. Remember, since these aren’t showing up on your news stream it gives you the advantage of not alienating any of your customer base with a ‘shotgun approach’.

… So Here’s The Gist

So in case it hasn’t been clear enough there’s a huge advantage to utilizing Facebook’s dark post option as a part of your digital marketing strategy. It gives you the advantage of targeting multiple segments of your customer base without the disadvantage of overloading your news stream with ads. And when it comes to social media advertising what do we want? We want more likes and to push our ad as much as possible without seeing a decline in followers.

So if you’re looking for a cost effective way to ramp up your advertising efforts on Facebook without seeing a decline in customer engagement, a Facebook dark post might just be for you.

Contact us for more details on how we can help you get started implementing some of these tactics in your content strategy!

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook and check back each week for updated industry content here on our blog!