Last Friday, Rich Bolandi, the Director Of Digital Marketing and Facebook Advertising expert at Gravitational Marketing, sat on a panel for FIADA with Zach Klempf, CEO and Founder of Selly Automotive, to discuss the benefits of dealerships advertising on Facebook and Google. See what they had to say in this video.

Or if you prefer, you can read the transcript here:

Moderator: His name is Rich Bolandi. Is that correct?

 
Rich Bolandi: That it is.

 
Moderator: From Gravitational Marketing. If you would just tell us, take a couple minutes and just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. [crosstalk 00:00:12]

 
Rich Bolandi: Yeah, my name is Richard Bolandi. I work at Gravitational Marketing right here in Orlando. We’re right next to UCF. We have a full service agency that has digital marketing, media for media buying and television, full creative staff, full development team, sales team, and I’ve been there about two years, primarily in the digital space helping people generate leads so they can sell [inaudible 00:00:43] individuals nicer, newer cars. We’ve had a lot of recent success in Facebook over about the last year and a half while it’s still cheap. You know, I remember the days of nickel clicks and Google. Those days are way gone. So we got into Facebook early and kind of tried to strike where the iron is hot. Looking forward to getting some good questions and sharing some information with you guys about how we can make Facebook work for you and how you make it work for your dealership.

 
Moderator: Thank you, sir. Zach. Zach is with Selly Automotive. He is the CEO and founder, correct?

 
Zach Klempf: Correct.

 
Moderator: All right, just tell everybody who don’t know-

 
Zach Klempf: A little bit about myself, I bet you guys are wondering who’s this kid sitting up here? I started out in the industry when I was nineteen years old on the retail side, working at a dealership. Really fell in love with the industry, established my sales fundamentals working at the dealership and I worked at a dealership while going to Emery University. After graduating I moved out to San Francisco and I started Sellion Motive. We’re a CRM internet lead management company focused on independent dealerships. We integrate with a lot of DMS systems. Some of them are here in this room. We also white label our products for companies like True Car. I do a lot of thought leadership around millennials, mobile marketing, write for a lot of the dealership magazines as well as other outlets like Ford, CNBC, and Tech Crunch.

 
Moderator: Awesome, thank you. Thank you. Now I’m curious, I’m going to make you work a little bit. You’ve got to raise your hands once in a while. How many of you are currently have a business Facebook account. Anybody’s hand? Okay. All right, fantastic. How many people are paying for some kind of Facebook advertising currently? All right, fantastic. What about Google ads? Anybody doing Google ads? Just a few of you. All right, wonderful. That tells us a little bit about where to start. Okay, so the people who are not currently using Facebook or Google ads or anything, where would somebody start with that?

 
Zach Klempf: I had one actual follow-up question to what you were [inaudible 00:02:55] I guess who in here manages their Facebook and Google AdWords campaigns, and then who hires like an agency or someone outsourced?

 
Moderator: [inaudible 00:03:03]

 
Audience: We manage our own. Manage our own. Agency.

 
Zach Klempf: Kind of when I think about the prerequisites, before you even get into advertising on Facebook, you need to have a business page. What we see at Selly Automotive a lot of the times, we’ll onboard a dealership and they’ll have a personal Facebook page, and for the first name they’ll have like ABC, last name they’ll have Motors. If you’re using a Facebook page you really can’t market on that. You know, one of the fundamentals is building your Facebook page, make sure you have some reviews on it. When you do a search on Google, Google is actually indexing Facebook reviews, so you’ll see your business on the right hand corner of a Google search. You’ll see your Google reviews as well as your Facebook reviews. I guess that’s part of the fundamentals and Rich if you have—

 
Rich Bolandi: Yeah, I mean yeah, kind of going off of that, the next step would probably be to identify what your goals are. Are you looking to generate leads? Are you looking to brand your dealership and get your name out there more? Are you newer? The first step to any great advertising campaign is to make sure you have some sort of goal in place, so you’re not just throwing money against the wall and hoping for results. There’s, within Facebook, there’s a consistently changing list of objectives that you can choose from in order to get the desired outcome that you’re looking for, such as you know lead ads, offer ads, brand awareness ads, [inaudible 00:04:39] related. Things of that nature.

 
I think really the next step that you have to take after that is identifying a real goal and then putting some advertising dollars towards accomplishing that goal by talking new metrics.

 
Moderator: All right, cool. Now I don’t think many people here were paying for Facebook advertising, correct? Just a few of you. What is the advantage to paying for it as opposed to just …

 
Rich Bolandi: Well, I mean, there’s a very large advantage to actually paying for your ads. Now of course, if you don’t pay for ads there’s a lot of things you can do on the social side of things to help you know, get some more likes, some post shares, things of that nature. Paid advertising, which you’re really looking to do there is generate a lead and what I would consider a lead is a name, phone number, and email. Somebody that you can actually sell a nicer, newer car to. Again, there’s many ways you can advertise on Facebook to accomplish that goal, depending on what works for you and your sales team or BDC.

 
The advertising spend is really completely related to basically how many cars are you looking to sell? How many leads are you looking to generate? You don’t obviously ever want to, you don’t want to over stuff your sales team and bombard them with a thousand leads a day and then they-

 
Audience: Yeah we do.

 
Rich Bolandi: You do, well that’s the old saying. At Gravitational Marketing we always say you want to make a mess and then clean it up. So, that would be making a mess. You know? You can generate a thousand leads and think about how to you know, how to sell them, but you want to make sure you have proper follow-up in place once you do generate these leads. You want to make sure that these leads are going into a CRM, so that you have speed to lead, so you’re actually calling them right away. You have all of their information in place, and you know what offer you’re selling them too. If you have a lead ad out there, and I’ll get more into that later, that’s like a seven dollar down offer, well you want to make sure that that offer is translated into your CRM, so when your salesperson gets that lead they can then say, “Hey, saw that you were interested in the seven dollar down offer. Let’s talk.”

 
This opens up a really good playing field for you because you end up being able to sell everything on your lot, rather than just a specific make or model. This is the way that we like to do things because you don’t want to be limited. You have to consistently refresh ads and whatnot for, you know, let’s say you sell the car. Well, then you can no longer run that ad. You’re going to have to swap them out and whatnot. We like to do a lot more solution based advertising, seven dollars down, more for your trade, things of that nature.

 
When your sales rep gets on the phone, they’re actually selling to the offer that enticed somebody to actually click the ad in the first place, so you can then put them in any car that they’re able to get into on your lot.

 
Moderator: Good info.

 
Zach Klempf: Yeah, and I think to kind of piggyback off Rich, you also have to think about the call to action. Are you doing the advertisement on Facebook for your service department? What’s the duration of that? Are you doing a video ad for instance? Are you trying to show off inventory on Facebook? Or are you trying to build an audience for your page? Are you trying to get likes? Are you trying to have people share your posts? Think about what’s the goal of this Facebook campaign? Then secondly, the follow-up. Who’s going to manage the inbound leads from this Facebook campaign? What are the goals? What’s the customer acquisition cost? What’s the profit?

 
I think one thing that dealers need to really consider is being data driven with your Facebook and Google Ad campaigns. It can get really expensive if you’re not tracking it and ultimately you might get some leads, but with the cost that you’re spending on Facebook, maybe it’s not a profitable campaign. That’s something to take into consideration.

 
Moderator: There’s a question back here.

 
Audience: Quick question, before we get too far into it. You’re saying that advertising, but I get confused versus boosting, boosting something versus actual advertising spending. Is there a difference or are they the same thing?

 
Rich Bolandi: That’s right, excellent question. They actually are two different things. Both require some form of advertising spend. Boosting post is definitely way cheaper, but what we find is, and Zach could probably speak to this better, is when you boost a post, you’re essentially going out more to your social network and then kind of expanding from there, locally and internally, like within a finite radius. When we try to generate ads on a large scale doing lead ads, which is definitely a higher cost, which goes back to being able to track, these people are actually going to be serve the ad within their news feed. Everybody is used to logging on Facebook and scrolling through the things. They see oh so and so just worked out that day, and oh you know this one is getting married, this one is having a baby, then all of a sudden boom you’re going to get an ad. It’s very organic feeling. You’ll be able to see the ad right in your news feed, and then something that also catches your eye like, “Oh wow this is a real person buying an automobile from this dealership, which is two miles away from me. Let me go get more information, have them give me a call so I can go ahead and set up and appointment with them.”

 
Boosting posts is more towards your actual network that you’ve built from your business page and what you’ve done on that side of things.

 
Zach Klempf: Yeah, and to give you a couple examples, I think a Facebook boost is great if you’re having a fourth of July sale for instance. Let’s say you’re having a month long sale, you have a specific goal, you want to, maybe it’s a zero down promotion, that might be a better campaign over for instance a month period of time. When you talk about Facebook advertising, it’s so broad. You could do video advertising, mobile advertising. Facebook also owns Instagram. You could advertise on Instagram. It’s really broad when you talk about Facebook advertising. There’s so many different options.

 
Moderator: Lisa?

 
Audience: Can you guys go into a little bit about my understanding is from an advertising perspective there’s retargeting to build an audience, now they have the marketplace. Can you go into a little bit about the distinctions between those things?

 
Zach Klempf: Sure. I guess first of all, do you want to start with this, Rich?

 
Rich Bolandi: Yeah. Again, as far as the actual different kinds of marketing you can do, that’s a great question because there’s a million things you can do. Remarketing is excellent and usually fairly low cost in the sense of basically dropping a cookie on somebody’s site, they go ahead and visit your website, but they might not convert into a lead the first time that they went to your site. What’s going to happen is we’re able to remarket to that list of people overtime as the list builds and builds and builds. It might start off with ten people, fifty people, a hundred people, which is why it’s low cost. It’s a very finite audience. From there, you basically, what I like to do is actually advertise to them a different offer from the one that initially got them to the page because they did not convert the first time. I’m going to try a different offer to get them to convert this time to make them a viable lead.

 
Remarketing is an extremely powerful tool and it’s something that every advertising campaign in my view should automatically have, whether you’re launching Google or Facebook, you should have a separate campaign built out specifically for remarketing needs and usually with a different offer to have them potentially either reconvert, maybe later down the line, maybe three to six months down the line if they didn’t do anything the first time, or if they did convert to actually try to grab them with a new offer itself.

 
Moderator: What was the other part of it?

 
Rich Bolandi: Did that answer your question?

 
Audience: Yes. That there’s build an audience and then also the marketplace.

 
Rich Bolandi: Building an audience is, there’s facets of that within building a remarketing campaign itself, but when you get really big into Facebook, the audience building is probably one of the most powerful tools. One of the great things that Facebook offers is you can actually, say you have six months of converted leads and you want to, but these people actually did not buy, but they converted, you can take that list and you can upload it into Facebook and create what we call a look alike audience off of that. It’s basically as an audience that has a similar buyer profile as the list that you uploaded. What this does is this actually helps get rid of a lot of wasteful spend because you’re going after similar buyer profile that falls in line with the demographics that have already converted for you, and you’re going after that audience more so it’s actually better targeting, right? You can go a million different directions with that because you could actually take a list of people that have bought cars from you for however long, and then you could go ahead and offer them a service ad. You could target that exact list, offer them a service ad, you know they’ve bought a car from you and then you could actually advertise a service ad to them as well.

 
Depending on what the list is and what you’re uploading, you can then advertise accordingly to that list for what you want to accomplish.

 
Moderator: I know several of you have a repair shop. Is anybody using Facebook to follow up with your sales and convert them into repairs? Or no?

 
Audience: We have a business page, but no direct marketing campaigns.

 
Zach Klempf: Then how many dealers are actually taking their CRM, like CSV file with emails and putting that into Facebook and doing any sort of retargeting campaigns?

 
Moderator: Is anybody doing that currently?

 
Audience: What was the question?

 
Zach Klempf: With your CRM taking a dump of, let’s say you have a certain customer segment, people who didn’t buy in the past thirty days, loading that CSV into Facebook and then doing some sort of retargeting campaign. I was asking is has anyone hear done that.

 
Audience: What does it basically do? It looks at the peoples’ Facebook accounts and…

 
Rich Bolandi: Yeah that’s what I was mentioning earlier. That’s exactly what it is. You can grab that from your CRM and then you can upload it, and then you create custom audiences or a lookalike audience, depending on what the data is. To Zach’s point, the data should be kind of, what’s the word I’m looking for? Kind of sift through a bit to make sure that you’re actually, that the lists are all the same. Are they people that you’ve sold to already? Are they unconverted leads, so on and so forth.

 
Audience: With your CRM, the leads are created on Facebook, they go through your CRM or no?

 
Zach Klempf: It depends. If it comes in plain text or XML ADF format, which is the industry standard, yes. If it doesn’t, then no. It depends on how you have it set up and if you have an additional tool. Most of the time dealers will have an additional tool that will send it in XML ADF. XML ADF stands for XML auto dealer format. That’s like the universal format for internet lead providers, whether it’s True Car, Car Gurus, etc. Dealer websites.

 
Audience: What about Facebook? Lead from Facebook?

 
Zach Klempf: Yeah, so directly from Facebook, no. You have to have some sort of tool that will convert that to the XML ADF format or plain text email format.

 
Rich Bolandi: To add onto that though, when you do, when you are passing the information from somebody who’s converting on Facebook to a CRM, Facebook has over the last couple months done really well with integrating with multiple CRMs, where they can actually pass the information over directly to the CRM and some people actually, depending on how interested you are in it, will actually build an in house tool to pass that information over directly to them internally. They might send it up or they’ll get an email message to them so they can set up a separate inbox where all their Facebook leads will go into if they set that up and develop that in house and pass the API over.

 
Moderator: I have a question for you. I don’t know, let’s say Jim has a certain kind of customer that pays really well and they’re a successful customer, they work well together. Can he take those customers, upload it to Facebook, say I want more customers like this but in a certain regional area?

 
Rich Bolandi: Yes. He’ll basically take that list, he’d upload it, he can create a lookalike audience, which again, that’s just the matches the buyer profiles off of it and then once they are in the backend, you then get into your geotargeting aspect where one of the questions I ask anybody that every does digital is how far is somebody willing to drive to your dealership to buy a nicer, newer car? Usually that’s about twenty, twenty-five miles. Sometimes it’s fifty if it’s a little larger, just because there might be a more dense region. You just put a giant circle around it and then on top of that with the layer of lookalike audience, you’ve then created this really great audience of targeting people with similar profile that will fit in the mile radius of you to go ahead and purchase a new car.

 
Moderator: Pretty cool. Yes, sir.

 
Audience: You guys obviously work with different levels of dealerships, anything from a dealer group with hundreds of dealers to anything probably guys my size, which is the twenty-five, thirty car a month guys. For people my size, our advertising is going to be very different than say the guy with a hundred and forty cars on his lot. What do you find is the most effective type of ad to send in one of these campaigns for small dealers?

 
Zach Klempf: Well, what I’ve seen successful, not just on Facebook but also on YouTube is video advertisement. You’re a smaller dealership and I’ve seen some dealers do some really interesting things where they personalize the video. What’s the value proposition? Why should a customer instead, to give you an example, there’s one in Apple Valley California and they have a return policy, they have a certified program where this used car dealership, they certify their own vehicles, and in this video talking about their store, they list their value propositions in that video. It’s under a minute long and it kind of differentiates your store from anyone else on the market. I think showing like maybe a video advertisement might be a unique way for a smaller store to differentiate themselves. Most of the dealers, they’re going to be running photo of the vehicle, similar ads, but if you have a video and personalized it, I think that might really differentiate you, be a little more successful.

 
Audience: Not spend, base it on program and what you do special as opposed to physical inventory or hey this car is awesome or things like that.

 
Rich Bolandi: I think all of that could play a role, but what, you know, what’s the goal? You have a video on Facebook. Do you want to bring them to your website or a landing page and show off that inventory? What’s the strategy? Do you want to just show that vehicle on Facebook and they see it in an ad and maybe look it up? Or do you want to bring them somewhere specific? It depends on your strategy.

 
Moderator: Question?

 
Audience: I have a question. Following up actually on Lisa’s third point, so our DMS systems are similar but load our pictures and descriptions into our DMS systems and then it sends out to our websites to cars.com, Car Gurus, and whatnot. Is it going to get to a point where the DMS systems will send cars to Facebook marketplace as opposed to us having to individually put each car there? Or turns into like a Craigslist, or turns into … it’s never going to be car gurus, because marketplace is turning into Craigslist, or the newer version of Craigslist. Is there a DMS program that’s working on that? Is that coming? Is that something you see happening?

 
Zach Klempf: That’s a good question. Facebook, they’re putting a significant investment into auto dealers. Now they have a specific landing page with infographics and information about successful dealers that use Facebook. Really, that’s going to be up to the DMSs integrating with Facebook and Facebook putting out some sort of API, which to my knowledge for auto dealers, maybe they have integration for salesforce.com, but for auto dealers there’s nothing as of now. That’s completely possible because it’s a standard format how to send out inventory. Yes it’s possible but it’s going to depend on two parties.

 
Moderator: [inaudible 00:21:44] going to happen. [crosstalk 00:21:48]

 
Audience: You next app developer wants to be a millionaire and develop that API.

 
Moderator: Right.

 
Audience: I’ve got a question. For me, Craigslist is going crazy. We put an ad on Craigslist and the boom, no work. Facebook is working better in your opinion or in the whole group’s opinion? Craigslist is not what it used to be before.

 
It is for us. It’s working for us.

 
It’s working for you guys, Craigslist?

 
No. Facebook.

 
Moderator: Facebook is working better than Craigslist is normally what I hear. How does everybody else feel?

 
Audience: Yes.

 
Zach Klempf: What I see a lot of the time, Craigslist is great if you have what they call a cash car, you know, five thousand, four thousand, three thousand dollar car, it’s great. It’s becoming really competitive. Every dealership knows about Craigslist. They’re adding a new post every single day, taking down the old one, so it’s getting very competitive. While Facebook it’s not quite as competitive from the used car standpoint yet, but of course it would get to that. I think it really varies on your dealership, the inventory you’re selling, and the area you’re in. You might be in an area where Craigslist isn’t as prominent, and maybe you could still sell a lot of vehicles that way. I think there’s so many outside variables, it’s hard to just generalize and say Facebook is better than Craigslist.

 
Moderator: Okay. See what’s working best for you. In the back, yes sir.

 
Audience: To that point, Facebook is better than Craigslist. I would say as far as spam, Craigslist is terrible.

 
Moderator: Yeah.

 
Audience: That alone steered us away from Craigslist.

 
Zach Klempf: What happens on Craigslist, they publicly post your phone number as well as your email address, or you might do that as a dealership, so they have web crawlers that crawl Craigslist on a daily basis and they get your phone number. That’s why you guys probably are getting calls where you pick up and it’s like an automated like audio play clip and you can’t do anything and they’re just saying some sort of spam message. That’s happening on Craigslist and a lot of other sites as well.

 
Moderator: I’m curious, how many of you here have actually bought something from a Facebook ad? Anybody here actually bought something from a Facebook ad? Two three four five. Yeah a few. It’s funny, talking about those ads and you scroll though them. I scroll through my feed the other day and pick on Bob back there, and Bob uses these little cheater glasses around and I see those ads for these little cheaters that go in this little thing, they’re called [looms 00:24:16] or something like that. Anyways, I was like oh Bob needs those. I sent it to him in a message and he turned around and bought it and saved twenty percent because I referred him and I was just being funny. Didn’t even mean to do it. Obviously it’s working. Another question, yes sir.

 
Audience: A question about the Facebook ads, I know sometimes when you’re on Facebook you can see an ad that kind of is targeted to you. It’ll have a November, like a birthday present for you, it’s your birthday, it’s related to you. You see it. Is there a way to customize something like that where it picks up a specific car that someone may be looking for and advertise to that person?

 
Rich Bolandi: Yeah, so within Facebook, and actually I wanted to address the spam question too that you were talking about earlier, so if I can I’ll go through both real quick. I like that you brought up the spam question and one of the greatest tools is I was actually up at Facebook’s offices in New York City about two months ago, and they were speaking about all the objectives they have and one of them again is lead ads, which is what my company primarily uses to generate leads. They actually, for most industries, they find that Facebook lead ads do not work, but for some reason in the auto industry they do. Related to the spam issues, what happens to these lead issues is you create the ad, when somebody clicks the ad, it pre populates all of their information directly from their user profile and then all they do is click submit. Once they click submit, it captures all that information and goes over to you if you have some sort of integration, CRM or otherwise, and you get that information.

 
Ninety percent of the information that is sent over from a lead ad is a hundred percent accurate. It is a real individual who is looking to buy a new or used automobile. That can definitely help many in the room I’m assuming deal with that kind of spam related issues and also, you know, help the morale of the sales team.

 
The secondary part, when you were asking about the targeting is Facebook offers a lot of in market targeting. Basically going back to what I was talking about earlier with basically the geo radius where you can target around like maybe twenty-five, twenty miles around your dealership, you can also add in market filters. What in market means is somebody who is the most likely to purchase a new or used automobile within the next three to six months. You can actually use that targeting and then you could actually layer on top of that specific makes and models of used vehicles, and then target those people who are the most likely interested in that kind of vehicle that you’re selling. To answer your question.

 
Moderator: Wow, a lot of information. Yes sir. Go ahead.

 
Audience: What about no spam, but scams. I mean, you know Craigslist there’s some crazies. Yeah. Non existing car or trying to buy your car saying that they were [inaudible 00:27:17] and stuff. Does Facebook filter that-

 
Rich Bolandi: I don’t think anyone can really filter that. If there’s scammers out there, they’re always going to find a way whether it’s email, Facebook, Craigslist, SMS texting, robo dialing, I mean, it’s always going to happen. I think if someone wants to wire you money, that’s kind of a red flag [inaudible 00:27:40] with the local [inaudible 00:27:42]. [crosstalk 00:27:44]

 
Moderator: I will say make sure the money is in your account. Sometimes what you get is you get like they email you something saying that the money is there but you need to look at your account [inaudible 00:27:54] look like PayPal or look like a wire transfer and it’s not. First hand and then I’ll come back to you.

 
Audience: Quick question, like a lot of times, and it’s nice my birthday is coming up, and my wife and I share an Amazon account. I get to see sort of what she’s shopping for because it comes in my Facebook feed.

 
Moderator: You’re getting some new socks. Those shoes I always wanted.

 
Audience: How do we as dealers kind of target those shoppers? I work for Cox Automotive, right, so I know that we have the ability to re target auto trades on Kelly Blue Book customers just through the Google network, but how do you do that on Facebook? How would you know that they have a special relationship with Amazon? Are they cool like that? What’s going on and how do we duplicate that?

 
Rich Bolandi: There’s a lot of third party data that can be uploaded into Facebook whether it’s Axium or Oracle data where you can get very, very specific information. Oracle for instance has TransUnion data, you know, seven hundred and greater credit scores, between six hundred and seven hundred credit scores and whatnot so you can target those kind of people. Birthday, purchase behavior, which kind of falls in line with the Amazon stuff. It goes kind of back to Kevin’s point. Everybody is talking to each other in the advertising space. You’re on probably hundreds and hundreds of lists for very different things. The good news is though is that as an advertiser, we can’t see you, meaning that all this data is encrypted. They’ll give you the data. They’ll say, “Okay, you can target ads to seven hundred plus credit scores,” but we’ll never see the name because you’re not allowed to email those people or direct contact them or anything. They’re just building a back end audience completely encrypted to protect your privacy.

 
That’s a plus in an ever changing world where it’s actually really scary that I feel like I’m at Best Buy shopping for a TV and I get home and I have like 4K TV deals on my phone. I’m like, “I’m in advertising. I’m the problem.” This is bad.

 
Audience: Does that target the negative keywords like you do on Google? I want somebody who is not a seven hundred or better credit score because this ad isn’t for them.

 
Rich Bolandi: Just done differently. Yeah, it’s just a different way of doing it. In Facebook you would not have that audience targeted. You would target five hundred to six hundred credit scores and exclude the other ones and you could actually add an exclusion audience as well as another layer to your targeting.

 
Audience: True, but isn’t Google, and correct me if I’m wrong, Rich, when people use keywords like bad credit or credit challenge, they’re starting to have more strict policies around that? I’ve even heard of I think Grant Cardovi—he’s doing some specific targeting and they pulled it down. I heard from some dealers when they were using the bad credit keywords that that’s starting to get flagged by Facebook.

 
They won’t let you put that like if you put certain keywords like credit for everybody.

 
Rich Bolandi: They can’t because they consider it an unrealistic offer and the same thing in Google. What I was referring to was the actual backend targeting, not which you would actually put on an ad itself.

 
Moderator: Criteria.

 
Rich Bolandi: Sorry?

 
Moderator: The criteria that you set.

 
Rich Bolandi: Yeah, the criteria for targeting is in the backend so you can target those people with the credit scores, but the ad itself would probably not have credit language because there is so much harsh restrictions on using those unrealistic terms and whatnot. Like you said, credit for everyone, well that’s an unrealistic ad.

 
Zach Klempf: That’s tough for Buy Here Pay Here’s.

 
Rich Bolandi: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

 
Moderator: Question in the back. Yes Ma’am.

 
Audience: Yeah I recently boosted an ad on Facebook and when it finished it said it was boosted to ages eighteen to sixty five within a hundred miles. That’s pretty much everybody on Facebook. Is there a simple way to generalize that?

 
Zach Klempf: Yeah, what you probably did is boosted a post without setting any filters for specific audiences, but when you boost a post they have like advanced options and then you can select eighteen to thirty or whatever you want. You could be more specific.

 
Moderator: Was there another question? Did I see another question there? Okay. Jason, did you have…

 
Audience: I laughed at Cox Media group because [inaudible 00:32:40] we charge too and I see this in my own Facebook feed because I use auction genius or stock play, whatever they call it. When I load a car up, I hit auto trader to see what the dealers are asking for it competitively. Somehow Steve Jobs knows that and told Facebook that, and I was on my Facebook feed and the car I just looked at on auto trader through auction genius now pops up in my Facebook feed.

 
Moderator: Always watching.

 
Audience: Always watching.

 
Zach Klempf: I’m curious to know for the dealers that use Facebook, Google advertising, and they do it themselves, like what’s your average like budget per day per month per campaign? What are we looking at in terms of the campaigns you guys are doing?

 
Audience: We spend fifty dollars a boosted post usually and we are super specific on target zip codes, ages, sex-

 
Zach Klempf: Monthly?

 
Audience: We probably spend seven fifty a month on Facebook posts.

 
Moderator: Anybody else want to share?

 
Audience: Well, kind of piggybacking on that. Clearly I did it wrong, but the, when I did it it was like you set a maximum and then it pulls down from that. Say it was twenty dollars, so then on day three it would say eleven something remaining. How does that work? Is it charging per lead? Like per view?

 
Zach Klempf: No, you set with the boost like a specific budget, let’s say it’s twenty dollars per day. Just because you set twenty dollars per day doesn’t always mean they’re going to use that entire twenty dollars, dependent on how specific the audience is.

 
Audience: Okay.

 
Moderator: Okay, so anybody else want to share how much they’re spending on Facebook?

 
Audience: Two hundred bucks a month.

 
Moderator: Two hundred bucks a month, okay.

 
Audience: We’ve only been doing post boosts because other stuff is all new. Cost wise, and this brings it to a question. If I’m already spending two hundred dollars on boost and it’s eh, would I be better off taking four hundred dollars and putting it on the ad site? Obviously it’s more expensive but am I going to get more bang for the buck by going the other direction?

 
Zach Klempf: Well, I was going to say tell us about your Facebook page. I mean, how many likes? How many reviews? How active is it? What’s the average amount that people post or comment on or like on purpose.

 
Audience: Inactive as far as likes and so forth. We are active with posting inventory. We post everything that we put in there. We post it on Facebook, we share it through, actually it auto goes through cars for sale and posts it that way. We’ve only got about a hundred likes, hundred and twenty something likes the last I looked, but we do have six reviews all five stars. The page has been around for three and a half years, but it’s not overly active.

 
Zach Klempf: Do you track what your customer acquisition cost is? Just your dealership in outside mediums, how much does it cost to bring a customer in who converts? When you look at that, then you can look at the campaign and how much you could put into the campaign. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re spending on average two hundred fifty dollars to acquire customer through car guru for instance. Look at your Facebook budget, start looking at the data and the conversions on those ads, then you could figure out all right, how much can I spend when I know typically I’m paying two hundred fifty dollars to acquire a customer who buys.

 
Audience: If it costs me two hundred and fifty dollars to sell a car I shoot myself in the head. It’s four hundred dollars a month on car gurus. It’s five dollars for a Craigslist ad, and those are truthfully, that and Facebook are the only things I do. My acquisition per customer is extremely low compared to probably a lot of the larger dealers. I’m small. I don’t have a big advertising budget because that’s just, it’s my money. Again, I’m just trying to figure out, rather than boosting posts for a couple hundred dollars, am I better off, am I going to generate actually more deeper funnel leads by spending a little bit more but doing it on the ad side as opposed to the boost side?

 
Rich Bolandi: Yeah, I mean, I personally believe more in the ads than the boosting itself, but Zach is a hundred percent right. It’s all about the acquisition cost. If it costs you a hundred dollars to acquire a client and you’re going to put four hundred in, you run Facebook advertising a month for four hundred dollars. If you don’t acquire four clients off of that, it’s probably a bust.

 
Audience: It’s probably not worth it.

 
Rich Bolandi: Exactly, but it’s worth a test.

 
Moderator: Or change the criteria.

 
Audience: I’m never going to just try one ad.

 
Moderator: Yeah. Let me get this gentleman over here. Yes sir.

 
Audience: This all kind of depends too. It all comes down to the CRM that you have to measure your ROI, your return on investment. If you get a good sale then they will do all that to measure what are you spending versus what you get back and the return on investment-

 
Zach Klempf: I think CRM is going to capture some of the story, but let’s say you’re doing offline marketing, it’s not going to capture that of course. Everything you do through like True Car, Car Gurus, all your lead providers, through your CRM, you’ll know what your conversion rate is on that lead provider, but if you’re doing print and you’re doing outside-

 
Audience: If you do print there’s a way you could put a different phone number and] have tracking on the phone number or you set up the targeting email account or track those.

 
Zach Klempf: You’ll get a number there, but what you should also do is get out a spreadsheet as well. I don’t know if you use Zero or QuickBooks, but also look at from the full view of your dealership

 
Audience: Yeah you’re never going to get it to like a hundred percent but you could probably get it ninety-five percent return on investment, because some people they have the dealership and the population is sixty five and over people live there, they’re not going on Facebook. They’re looking at print ads…it depends what demographic you are just to see what’s working.

 
Moderator: Miguel?

 
Audience: All right, so we are also a new dealer and small dealer. We sell about twenty five to thirty cars a month and believe it or not, most of our customers are referrals. It started as Facebook ads, but in groups, in specific groups, like car sales groups and it worked really good. We just had someone posting over there all the time. Those leads become customer who become people referring us and that’s how we sell those twenty five to thirty cars every month. Well, we don’t work on our page. We have a Facebook page but we don’t work on it. It’s stopped over there. However dangerous it is for compared to that posting on groups, on specific groups, to have this page viewed and getting leads directly from it?

 
Rich Bolandi: The good thing is, we’ve started a lot of people, again, they have to have the foundation of at least the Facebook page. Yes, in today’s day and age, your Facebook page should be as up to date as you can make it. However, in order to run any sort of ad on Facebook, the only thing that is required is to have the page itself. These people and these ads you run, they never actually ever touch your Facebook business page. They can either, the lead information can actually get captured directly by Facebook itself and then sent to a CRM, or you could have another external link to an alternate website entirely. The only thing that you need your page for is obviously your local presence. You know? It can help answer those questions, the why choose you question, providing value first. All the things that you should do when you’re in marketing. That page can help you do that. However, to run ads does not require you to have the best Facebook business page in the world because there’s multiple places you can send somebody once they submit their information.

 
Moderator: How many of you are asking, like every deal are you asking your customers to like on Facebook? Or does somebody have some kind of plan in place? Is anyone doing that? Everybody? Every deal? Just about? Was there another question?

 
Audience: Facebook reviews and Google reviews.

 
Moderator: What’s that?

 
Audience: Facebook reviews and Google reviews. It’s the easiest way. Odds are they’re going to like your page when they find you on Facebook to begin with, so ask for the review. Same thing with Google.

 
Moderator: I think everybody should have a little sheet that they give out when they sell a car that says how to like you on Facebook, which everyone does that, or do a Google review or what have you. Yes sir?

 
Audience: Just sort of related to the reviews I’ve noticed is Yelp. They’re actually on every Apple device now, so when people are looking for your dealership and they mention independent dealer this or Audi dealer or whatever, you’ll come up but it will show your reviews. Yelp, if you don’t have a plan, you’ll go in the toilet quick. You can do the exact same thing you were talking about, downloading from the CRM and you put them in Google mail, then you can find out who that you sold a car to is on Yelp and you can target them to give you reviews.

 
Zach Klempf: Something that I, you know, I’ve talked to dealers about this, you know, trouble kind of building their reviews online. What you might want to do is look at all the customers who you gave that loser deal to, that amazing deal, call them, follow up with them, and inform them that your dealership is looking for reviews on Facebook, Yelp, Google. I think that’s a great way because when you give that customer an amazing deal, you might lose money. Take advantage of it in some way. Get a review out of it. Get something out of that.

 
Moderator: Did I see a hand back there? Yes, yes ma’am.

 
Audience: I was actually, I guess I understood you earlier to say that boosting an ad is somewhat correlated to the amount of likes you have or your business page itself because it goes to your social network. Is there a correlation between boosting your ad and your business page itself?

 
Zach Klempf: Not necessarily. Again, like the example I like to give is boost is great if you’re doing an immediate sale, like fourth of July sale. Boost it. If you’re doing a more long tail campaign, then-

 
Moderator: If I can interrupt, I think what she’s saying is say that it’s fourth of July sale or whatever, Halloween sale, and you want to boost it then you can set your criteria for that boost, correct, and everything. You can boost that and then you’re-

 
Audience: I only have like ten likes on my page so is it only-

 
Moderator: Is there any relation or it’s going to go ahead and crawl out to everybody that it would target anyway? Regardless if she’s very active on her Facebook page or not, is that correct?

 
Zach Klempf: Yeah, so you could boost outside of your Facebook page is the answer to that question. It’s not going to be those ten people who like your page. It’s going to be-

 
Audience: Well we have more than ten people.

 
Zach Klempf: To the point, you’re not going to hit the reach that you would with a paid ad.

 
Audience: Okay.

 
Zach Klempf: In that sense, which is why there’s the major price difference between boosting an ad and actually running a full set of ads over a month or so period of time.

 
Moderator: I don’t know Facebook numbers, how much it costs to advertise, but let’s just say I’m selling, are you guys selling twenty or thirty cars a month? Or somewhere in there maybe? Somewhere in that ballpark, how much am I going to spend on Facebook? I know that’s a loaded question, but just any recommendations Zach?

 
Zach Klempf: First of all, before answering that question and I’ll go back to what I said earlier, you need to know your customer acquisition cost and then average gross on vehicles to determine that value.

 
Moderator: Got you, okay. [inaudible 00:44:52]

 
Audience: The other day I was talking to a guy. He said that he is dropping Cars.com and Car Gurus, Cars For Sale, and putting all his money into his brand. His website, Facebook, reviews, so instead of choosing to create a bigger operations, he’s wrapped all his money in his brand. What’s your opinion about that?

 
Rich Bolandi: That’s an amazing question. We actually get that question all the time. It’s a delicate balance. If you’re selling cars from Car Gurus, AutoTrader, all those kind of things, advertising should be an add on cost. If those are working, don’t stop them, but you should invest in additional advertising to move more units. If you always want to be a twenty five unit store, then continue doing what you’re doing if it’s working. If you want to grow to a fifty unit store, it’s probably going to require some sort of investment in additional advertising outside of just referrals and whatnot, which goes back to the cost of acquisition for a client. If you have twenty five dealership and you want to get into a fifty, what’s the advertising budget going to look like in order to move those additional twenty five units? That’s really what the question is going to become.

 
A lot of people get carried away and they’d say, “Well, media is given this, but I want to try digital marketing over here.” Well if media is working over here and you’re buying radio spots, that’s providing great business for you, don’t cut it to go do something else.

 
Zach Klempf: Add to it.

 
Rich Bolandi: Add to it, within your limits of course. Add to it. See if that works. If it doesn’t, cut that but don’t cut things that work. I can’t stress that enough. There’s always going to be nicer, new shiny objects that you’re always going to want to play with and see how they perform and whatnot, but sometimes the old stuff still works the best.

 
Moderator: Yes.

 
Audience: That all comes down to the, you could do that with Google Analytics. You can go and measure your return on investment. If there’s no way you’re going to track it, you’re not going to track it, you’re not going to know what’s working.

 
Rich Bolandi: Hundred percent right.

 
Audience: You know what I mean? You could take AutoTrader and they could bring you one deal a month and you could take that money and put it to Car Gurus and they’re could bring you ten more deals for the money. You’ve got to know how to track it. You’ve got to track it through your CRM.You’ve got to track it through the Google Analytics as well and you can put it there-

 
Rich Bolandi: A hundred percent. Tracking is the key.

 
Audience: That’s the only way you’re going to measure your ROI.

 
Zach Klempf: Yeah, so going back to it, you’ve got to use a CRM, but what you can determine is maybe cars.com and car gurus, they’re sending a lot of the same leads and maybe Car Gurus they’re converting better. Again, being analytical, looking at your CRM, and then some lead providers are different than others. I’ll give you an example. True Car. They partner with USAA, so when you get a lead from USAA from True Car, that’s a little different than like a Craigslist or a cars.com lead. Also consider who’s the lead provider and what sort of lead are they sending to you as well?

 
Audience: Deep in the funnel and what likelihood of closure.

 
Zach Klempf: Exactly.

 
Moderator: [inaudible 00:48:16]

 
Audience: Along those lines, I’ve been a dealer, I’m still more a dealer than I am a vendor, but you know, we ran an eight store group, we looked at a lot of stuff. We’d see some weren’t performing as well on leads, both emails and phone calls, but those have really gone down a lot. We’ve got a lot of insight now with our partnerships with dealer.com and Kelly blue book. We can see a guy who got twenty phone calls. I was like I don’t know about auto trader Kelly Blue Book, right? He had five hundred people last month that were on Kelly Blue Book that went to his website and six hundred people on Auto Trader that went to his website. Well, they’re all website leads, but if you’re a smaller independent, how are they really finding out your name? Right? Look at the whole thing because I’ve seen some people, key people that they thought were working that weren’t. We had a pre provider give us a hundred leads a month and we sold six cars in eight months. It was awful. There’s a lot of leads. It is, it’s a tricky slope to figure out what’s working.

 
They did like a free month, and they tracked anybody that clicks on the website and they track all of that so they can give you the data [inaudible 00:49:30] one time in my store they put that down. They tracked down anybody that clicked to your store-

 
Moderator: Yeah, you gotta track it.

 
Audience: Correct.

 
Moderator: Or you really don’t know.

 
Audience: It’s the best thing to do is to do it at closing. If you have a finance guy that’s going to ask how did they hear about you, what made them call you and at the end of the month you’ve got to match that with your CRM.

 
Moderator: Sure, yeah.

 
Moderator: Out of the people that are spending money on Facebook, I’m curious are you spending more on Facebook or Google ads?

 
Audience: Facebook.

 
Moderator: Facebook?

 
Audience: Facebook.

 
Moderator: Is anybody spending money on Google ads? Anybody? A few. Want to talk any about Google ads?

 
Zach Klempf: Yeah, I think Google ads is again just like Facebook, there’s so many different things you could do, but what I always recommend dealers looking into is the YouTube video ads you can do through Google AdWords. Again, you’re a smaller dealership, you want to target to a specific area around your store and show that video before they, let’s say you’re targeting people who are looking at Mustang videos on YouTube. Right before they see that Mustang video, they see that thirty second ad for your dealership and you talk about certified preowned, you have an out of state buyers program, and they click on it, brings them to your website or a landing page. I would recommend looking at YouTube ads and looking at video because that’s really the future of advertising in my opinion.

 
Moderator: Is anybody doing YouTube? YouTube advertising? Yeah.

 
Zach Klempf: It’s cheap too.

 
Moderator: What’s cheap?

 
Zach Klempf: I mean, you could do a, if they don’t watch the whole video, the thirty second video, you don’t get charged.

 
Audience: If they skip it at the four second, five second interval-

 
Zach Klempf: You’re not charged.

 
Audience: It’s truly somebody that’s interested if they’re going anything past that.

 
Moderator: Yes sir, right here.

 
Audience: Is there a way to set up a Google where if someone is looking for let’s say a 2010 Ford Fusion and I have it, how do I get it to come up on the Google search using my website?

 
Rich Bolandi: Oh okay, well [crosstalk 00:51:56] He’s doing this [inaudible 00:52:00]

 
Audience: How do I use Google AdWords and that’s a damn expensive campaign.

 
Rich Bolandi: The best way I want to put this is to kind of segment out Facebook and Google and what I consider what each tool does, right? Google is more intender based marketing. It’s, you have to build a campaign around keywords. They actually physically have to type the keyword into Google for your ad to pop, okay? In Facebook it’s disruptive advertising because again, you’re just scrolling through your news feed and then bam, all of a sudden you see an ad, right? To your question, you would have to bid on those keyword terms, 2018 Honda, and then hope your surrounding competition isn’t also bidding on the same keywords and that they’re not bidding more or have a better quality score and whatnot so that your ad actually shows.

 
It then becomes this kind of tug of war back and forth. There’s still a place and there always will be a place for Google ads. The issue is is the money that it costs nowadays. They recently, just a couple months ago, they added a Ford spot on Google for paid searches, so now your whole first page when you’re on your home screen and you type in a keyword, basically your whole first page is ads. You know, there’s so much bidding and going on there that unless you want to be a player and especially in an area where there’s heavy competition it’s going to be costly. Doesn’t mean it won’t be beneficial, which goes all back to knowing the value of your client, because just because it costs doesn’t mean it’s still not going to be profitable for you in the end.

 
Audience: There’s no way to link it?

 
Rich Bolandi: It links once you click the ad itself-

 
Zach Klempf: Let me give you an example. You want to do a 2015 Toyota Camry. You have a couple of them on your lot. You do a Google ad for a 2015 Toyota Camry in Orlando, Florida. Well, first of all you’re going to be competing with all the Toyota dealerships who have much larger budgets and they’re willing to pay more for that customer. You’re going to have a lot of competition on Google. Then in terms of organic SEO, all of the lead providers, they’re going to rank above you. Auto Trader, Car Gurus, Cars.com. I think doing like a 2010 or 2015 Toyota Camry AdWords campaign and competing against a franchise store, that’s really tough. If you have a unique vehicle that maybe like franchise dealers don’t have, maybe. Again, you’ve got to track customer acquisition costs.

 
Moderator: Otherwise you’re competing with every other ninety five hundred dealers in the state of Florida, plus.

 
Zach Klempf: Yeah.

 
Moderator: However many else there are. There’s a couple more hands I saw go up. In the back and then back to you. Yes, sir.

 
Audience: My question was based on experience with Facebook ads. Do you find it better to advertise one ad long term or a couple ads short term?

 
Zach Klempf: That’s a good question.

 
Rich Bolandi: Always got to A B test. You should at least run two ads against each other and then track on the backend which ad is converting better for you. That could be different ad copy itself, different images. You just want to have uniquely different ads to test against because, you know, been doing this a long time and I can tell you like you’d be surprised how many times the thing that you didn’t think was going to work actually is the one that outperforms the initial ad itself. I always recommend running at least two ads at all time to test against each other. Like, you run an A B test, after a month B is not working well, still go ahead and replace it with another B test while you’re still running the A, the control as we call it.

 
Zach Klempf: Here’s a good analogy to kind of think about. When you go to the mall and you see a window, let’s say it’s a Louis Vuitton store, they’re going to be changing out the inventory every season. They’re going to be putting different items in. You should kind of think about that with your advertising as well. If you have the same stale ad all year long, it might not be as effective.

 
Moderator: We’ve got a few more minutes here, so get a few more questions in. Yes sir.

 
Audience: One thing I was going to say in regard to the Google ad to that [inaudible 00:56:24] I saw a lot of independents and they’re able to be more successful on about a fourth or a fifth of the budget as their franchise counterparts because they’re not carrying the stupid stuff everybody else has, the 2015 Altimas and 2016 Camrys. We’re having some 2008 this and 2010 that and sometimes it’s Porsches or it’s BMWs and different models. When you get into those, a lot of the companies out there can help you with your Google Analytics. You’re just targeting that long tail, not just the BMW three series, but a 335 I, whatever. You’re looking at specific things and that’s going to drive your cost down and your effectiveness up.

 
Rich Bolandi: Can I ask you a question? How many people are just independent dealers.

 
Moderator: Everybody.

 
Rich Bolandi: Everybody—hence the conference, right? The bottom line is co-opable dollars is they have so much restrictions as far as franchises for what the advertising text can be. It’s very actually limiting for franchise dealers versus you guys because you guys have more power and more control over what your ad can actually say, where when you’re dealing with major manufacturers, they’re using co-opable dollars that have fifty page pamphlets on, you know, what you can and can’t say and have very limited budgets. Always keep that in mind too. You can compete if you want to.

 
Moderator: One of the things I really picked up is the data that you can upload into Facebook and such, but I’m sure not everybody here is using Facebook, so does Facebook, I don’t know this, does Facebook have a help center kind of thing? Videos?

 
Rich Bolandi: Yeah.

 
Zach Klempf: Facebook, Google, they have extensive help centers. You can go on YouTube and look up tutorial videos. There’s a ton of content out there, but I guess the question is, who in your dealership is going to be managing this? What’s their technical competency? How much time do they have to commit to learning about it?

 
Moderator: Does anybody here have somebody dedicated to just Facebook? Is that your job? Fantastic. Jason, you wear like five hats?

 
Audience: We do and I will say that I have a sales person in each store that has the Facebook app on their phone and we all get messages and honestly we have like a two or three or five response rate, so whoever gets it first answers it.

 
Moderator: Okay. Fantastic. Does anybody else have a dedicated person for social media? No?

 
Audience: We do.

 
Moderator: You. You’re it. Okay. We’ve got just like two minutes left, so I don’t forget, everybody should have one of these for your continued education. Don’t forget to fill this out and sign it before you leave tomorrow for continuing ed classes.

 
Audience: Can I have that?

 
Moderator: Read it? Oh you want it? Need one of those? Okay.

 
Audience: Thanks.

 
Moderator: One last, okay, we got one minute left. Any last questions? I was going to go to another subject, but if we have another question…

 
Audience: I’ve got a question for you, so you were in the business, you said there’s all kinds of help videos out there. We could probably spend weeks watching all of those. What would it cost an independent to actually run a decent campaign through your company?

 
Rich Bolandi: I mean, it all really depends. That’s something we could talk about after or whatnot and give you some recommendations. It all really depends on your advertising budget, what your goals are. I mean, any advertising agency that you use, you should make sure they have a strategic conversation with you about what your goals are make sure that they can help you reach those goals.

 
Moderator: If somebody says I’ve got five hundred bucks a month to spend, should they talk to a company?

 
Rich Bolandi: I would say in most cases probably not. I don’t think a five hundred dollar ad spend a month is, between I’m sure a management fee associated with any agency is probably going to move the needle enough, but it’s always worth having a conversation because they’re going to at least point you in the right direction.

 
Audience: Let me ask you this, so if it’s going to cost us two thousand, twenty five hundred dollars to have a individual run it all month long, would we be better off to do that? Or would that not even cover a-

 
Rich Bolandi: No, I think when you get into those higher budgets that it becomes more worth your while. Again, you should factor in those costs with your cost per acquisition as well, so make sure you lump it all together so it’s paying for itself.

 
Moderator: All right, last question. Yes, Lisa.

 
Audience: Just a kind of response to that, we use an agency to do our Facebook ad campaigns and so we budget five hundred dollars a month for the Facebook ads itself, but then the agency gets five hundred dollars a month.

 
Moderator: That sounds about right, yeah. Less expensive than hiring another person and all the backend of that. Okay. It is, we are out of time. If you, I’m sure these guys will take a couple more questions. Thank you all for your attention.