We have been working with Facebook Ads in B2C verticals where our clients include Automotive, Cosmetics and Hospitality sectors. Each client has unique business processes inside their building that makes conversion and follow up of these Facebook ads challenging and existing. As a lead generation platform, Facebook will indeed help bring the customers to your dealership, but who will answering the door.  

That's why we wanted to these best practices on Social Media Marketing and Ads that we have now developed to help all B2C companies. The goal it to help management teams identify the missing resources and processes that will help them succeed with Facebook Marketing.

Here are a few examples of best practices we recommend for Facebook Ads:

Unique Phone Numbers:  Use a unique phone number that will make it easier to measure the success your Facebook campaigns. For instance, if you are doing Google AdWords to market your Lease Specials or Used Cars ads on Facebook, assign a unique number to Facebook ads to distinguish where the leads came from.

Use compelling creative: Without compelling creative, the reach of your ads will be limited and the cost will be higher. You might need to pay for GettyImages at 1st, but depending on your target audience, the investment might be worth the risk.

Used Video Ads: Facebook Video ads have 30% more consumption that ads with static images. More than a 1 Billion video minutes are being consumed on Facebook every day and the trend is growing. Our video ads for Automotive sector, are producing buyer leads within hours. These challenge with the brands is that they are still producing long videos as if it will be consumed on TV! These ads should be 10-30 seconds long. Facebook has proven that video consumption drops of f=You should monitor your video Insight to see how much of the videos are being watched and then tailor your future campaigns.

Don't Convert on a Webpage:  With the advent of to Facebook Lead Ads, you now have the option to convert your leads on Facebook which eliminates the need a browser to be launched. Another powerful feature of these Ads are that the user's contact information is auto-populated and released from their Facebook profile which eliminates the need for any data entry. This makes these ads optimal for conversion where they just have to hit "Submit".

Unique URLs:  If converting on Facebook is NOT an option, then take the extra step to create unique URLs for each Facebook campaign. This will make it much simpler for you to determine which campaigns are producing the best results. It's a sin to use the same URL for your landing page that you use for all your other campaigns.

Set the right expectations with management:  Our experience with Facebook ads in some of the verticals like Automotive is that marketers are over-promising and under-delivering. And when the management team is unimpressed with the results, Facebook is the easy target to blame.

Some marketing and advertising companies are branding themselves with bogus grantee offers of car sales if an auto dealer buys their Facebook service!! This is a dog whistle, that you should avoid at all cost. After all, as a marketing company we do not control our client's prices. How can we commit to certain number of sold cars, if your cars are over-priced for the local market

Train on Social Selling: Like early days of internet marketing, most of our target audience need education about the mechanics of social engagement and Facebook ads. Take the time to answer questions about the different types of ads you are recommending and how that content will be shown to potential buyers. Commit to train ALL the sales and service staff who will be responding to Facebook ads to eliminate the risk of failure due to untrained staff.

Our marketing agreements include training at lest 2 of Sales Reps on social engagement. We give these reps in-depth view of how the ads are developed and where the contact information comes from. We also coach these reps about the best engagement models where they can preview the Facebook profiles of the buyers to better understand that buyers needs. We also cover commitment to price and inventory which has legal implications in most States.

Engage with relevant data: The expectations of your target audience who post questions to your social media ads are that someone well-informed needs to contact them soon. And that response better contain useful, relevant and engaging information to compel them to take further action.  We have now introduced Messenger based Apps (BOTs) that respond with Natural Language processing and seamlessly transfer teh conversation to a Rep after the initial chat.

You still need CRM: With the massive volume of social engagement data that Facebook Ads generate, it's impossible to manage the follow up without a CRM. We are are generating more than 3 buyers within a few hours of a Used Car ad campaign. Without a CRM follow up, you will lose these buyers to your competitors.

In summary, don't market Facebook as the Silver Bullet that will solve ALL of your customers lead generation problems. In fact, expect plenty of jockeys who will blame the Facebook horse when they fail to implement the these best practices. One automotive clients assigned 11 different sales reps to Facebook campaigns in the span of 3 months; only to find out that none of them were willing to follow up with these buyers through their CRM.

We would love to hear how your Social Media Campaigns are doing.