Social Advertising start up

Daidraco · Jul 16, 2017

Ive been thinking about creating an advertising company. Before I became a Finance Manager for an Auto Dealer, I sold cars. I used Facebook and Instagram to advertise a single vehicle for me. The success of the ad depended on the typical factors. I typically had success in this and learned a few things about what not to do along the way.

An ad that was thoughtfully designed and put together would run for about 5 days at a cost of $20 bucks for around ~10,000 unique views. The more I spent, the bigger the audience I reached. If the ad was popular, I could expect to get about an additional %10-15 views for free. I noticed that for the limited area that I was advertising to, $50 bucks tended to be some sort of soft cap towards unique views.

What I want to do is find businesses willing to venture into advertising with Social Media and handle that outlet for them. I dont know how to approach this as a business model.
How much should I charge for my services?
What are some good services that I should include in this?
How much control do I want versus need?
Do they handle their own social media pages, or do I?
Etc.

I know a part of this is just going to rely on my salesmanship. But I know small businesses that could do more business if people just knew they were there. Trainers that are popular in their own right, but people may not know they are a trainer or where they are. I know for a fact that the auto industry here is stuck in the 80's and I could help them out as well as a big client. How do I set the prices between the little guy and the big guy? Packages, sure, but .. price is the question? Time = money, but how much does the next guy over doing this same thing charge? My degree is not even related to business management or advertising - so Im just at a loss for where to start.

TrollfaceDeux · Jul 16, 2017

our dealership actually has a guy who does our website and google adword for that specific purpose. he gets paid something like $2000 a month for both dealership and I am sure that he manages 3-5 more dealerships while he does ours.

Sort of blows because we don't have his loyalty and who knows what he is holding on us. My general manager is telling me to educate myself, so he doesn't have to rely on this guy.

I manage used cars (technically...used car manager...), advertising, listing, and basic ideas for dealership adverts. I am the lot guy and dealer trader guy... sort of like jack of all trades since my brain retains alot of shit and i know almost everything about every deal.....

anyway, people are already doing what you are thinking of.

I say build a portfolio for yourself, show example, and demonstrate some value and trust into your service.

what my general manager wanted was,
"I will bring X to Y and create X amount of positive reviews for Y amount of dollars. etc"

He wants some quantifiable demonstration and promises, and goals to get there.

Control · Jul 17, 2017

Sounds like you need to do some market research. Considering what you're selling, why not design a few (or a lot, depending on your research budget) of different ads with pitches for various services at various price points, target them at different types of businesses and see what kind of response you get (basically split testing your business model). At worse, you lose a few bucks, at best, you have a profitable customer acquisition funnel. One recommendation, go with a retainer model where you get paid $x per month, whether they use you or not (otherwise you'll get nickel-and-dimed to death). The size of the x really just depends on the size of business you're targeting.

TrollfaceDeux · Jul 17, 2017

You could build the service on the basis of increasing their revenue increased walk in traffic etc.

I justify my position with tracking every salr made and where they come from and why. I increased the dealership online lead about 60% and this month i probably will double from last month. I bring traffic from 250kms away and just sold a brand new car. And we made double the money we would usually make from local sales.

Little things like that and you justify your position or role slowly.

It really comes down to "you spend X amount of money on my campaign and I promise Y result."

You can wow and dazzle or whatever but in the end you are selling to sales people. Go to business town immediately and I am sure they will be impressed.

Daidraco · Jul 17, 2017

Control said:
Sounds like you need to do some market research. Considering what you're selling, why not design a few (or a lot, depending on your research budget) of different ads with pitches for various services at various price points, target them at different types of businesses and see what kind of response you get (basically split testing your business model). At worse, you lose a few bucks, at best, you have a profitable customer acquisition funnel. One recommendation, go with a retainer model where you get paid $x per month, whether they use you or not (otherwise you'll get nickel-and-dimed to death). The size of the x really just depends on the size of business you're targeting.

Ive put some thought into how much traffic is generated at a POS thats derived from my service. But I dont see how it would be easy to track at some businesses. Run a 4th of July ad for a business when theyre already suppose to be busy, and how do you separate who is there from the ad and who isnt? Asking each person how they heard about such and such may fall to the way side.

The retainer model, however, is something that I was intending to do. Maybe a 3 month, 6 month and year model. Small discounts as it goes up just like any other long term service. But I fear that some people may get discouraged by too many options. You chose package A for 6 months with the option to go to package B and the option to extend the contract out to a year.

Do any of you know of a business I can look at that is already doing this with their options readily available? Should I invest in a website from squarespace or something similar? If I know whats successful, I can copy those recipes and change them to fit my business model. Figuring out what exactly I want to offer seems to be what I need to narrow down right now. Then the price can be questioned.

TrollfaceDeux said:
You could build the service on the basis of increasing their revenue increased walk in traffic etc.

I justify my position with tracking every salr made and where they come from and why. I increased the dealership online lead about 60% and this month i probably will double from last month. I bring traffic from 250kms away and just sold a brand new car. And we made double the money we would usually make from local sales.

Little things like that and you justify your position or role slowly.

It really comes down to "you spend X amount of money on my campaign and I promise Y result."

You can wow and dazzle or whatever but in the end you are selling to sales people. Go to business town immediately and I am sure they will be impressed.

Salespeople advertising themselves is, in my opinion, next level. Dealership advertising brings in its own customers, but they arent guaranteed to go to a particular salesperson. Lot Lizard Jimmy that smells like shit and has a musical tie might get the customer. He's there cause hes always outside, sweating, catching ups. But his ratio is horrible. If a salesperson gets popular enough, word of mouth spreads freely for him without any follow up. Its a no brainer to me since its rare a dealership will give you the type of hours to network properly.

TrollfaceDeux · Jul 17, 2017

if I had time, I'd be handling these leads myself and do crazy follow up but life is not ideal...

This is why I give most of the leads that I take to one particular guy because I know he will close better.

Control · Jul 17, 2017

Daidraco said:
Run a 4th of July ad for a business when theyre already suppose to be busy, and how do you separate who is there from the ad and who isnt?

Tracking return on ad spend is a problem that all advertising deals with. Anyone who's going to pay you enough money to run ads for an event or something that's otherwise untrackable should already be familiar with this. It's sort of a shitty model for fb ads though. Target businesses selling big ticket items (like cars) so it's worth spending a lot to make one sale, and then, ideally, it would be a transaction that's completable online so you can tie the sale directly to your ad. Otherwise, you're basically doing lead gen, which is a viable thing too, but then you need to be getting paid for each lead you send someone. There are mountains of stuff online about both ways.

Daidraco said:
Do any of you know of a business I can look at that is already doing this with their options readily available?

Call up people doing this and ask them. Pose as a business that you'd like to target and get some quotes.

Araysar · Jul 17, 2017

Daidraco said:
Ive been thinking about creating an advertising company. Before I became a Finance Manager for an Auto Dealer, I sold cars. I used Facebook and Instagram to advertise a single vehicle for me. The success of the ad depended on the typical factors. I typically had success in this and learned a few things about what not to do along the way.

An ad that was thoughtfully designed and put together would run for about 5 days at a cost of $20 bucks for around ~10,000 unique views. The more I spent, the bigger the audience I reached. If the ad was popular, I could expect to get about an additional %10-15 views for free. I noticed that for the limited area that I was advertising to, $50 bucks tended to be some sort of soft cap towards unique views.

What I want to do is find businesses willing to venture into advertising with Social Media and handle that outlet for them. I dont know how to approach this as a business model.
How much should I charge for my services?
What are some good services that I should include in this?
How much control do I want versus need?
Do they handle their own social media pages, or do I?
Etc.

I know a part of this is just going to rely on my salesmanship. But I know small businesses that could do more business if people just knew they were there. Trainers that are popular in their own right, but people may not know they are a trainer or where they are. I know for a fact that the auto industry here is stuck in the 80's and I could help them out as well as a big client. How do I set the prices between the little guy and the big guy? Packages, sure, but .. price is the question? Time = money, but how much does the next guy over doing this same thing charge? My degree is not even related to business management or advertising - so Im just at a loss for where to start.

Start with small dealerships and work with those. Basically, family owned lots, where they own 1-3 dealerships. Those guys typically dont have the mega budgets of large dealer groups and they dont have the experience and/or knowledge to scale out in digital marketing effectively. Look at the guys still advertising in newspapers, they are the ones that are more likely to take a chance on you.

I actually worked in automotive for a year, heading up marketing strategy for an auto advertising startup. Think of like "Shopzilla.com" for cars. Fact is, the automotive advertising space is extremely saturated and there are already a lot of the big guys automating FB advertising for large inventories.

Some additional problems you are going to run into is that you dont have a background in digital marketing, so its hard to sell yourself. Also, the attribution gap in automotive is a perpetual issue, so its hard to prove that your FB advertising sold the car since there is no direct attribution.

I can help more and provide more advice, but you have to be seriously committed to this. This is a saturated field and a saturated industry, where even the multi-million dollar companies are routinely grilled for non-exemplary performance, for providing inadequate metrics and reporting, and for inability to consistently deliver results on every auto sold.

Araysar · Jul 17, 2017

Control said:
Tracking return on ad spend is a problem that all advertising deals with. Anyone who's going to pay you enough money to run ads for an event or something that's otherwise untrackable should already be familiar with this. It's sort of a shitty model for fb ads though. Target businesses selling big ticket items (like cars) so it's worth spending a lot to make one sale, and then, ideally, it would be a transaction that's completable online so you can tie the sale directly to your ad. Otherwise, you're basically doing lead gen, which is a viable thing too, but then you need to be getting paid for each lead you send someone. There are mountains of stuff online about both ways.

Call up people doing this and ask them. Pose as a business that you'd like to target and get some quotes.

There's basically no way to tie online advertising to an auto purchase, its a constant problem that plagues the auto industry. One way we used to do is looking at source/medium in Google Analytics for particular VDPs (Vehicle Detail Pages) and then looking at what percentage of view in a time frame that it was sold could be attributed to our advertising. Sometimes it would be 100% and then it was easy to prove that we sold that auto, but anything under 90% was questionable.

Araysar · Jul 17, 2017

TrollfaceDeux said:
our dealership actually has a guy who does our website and google adword for that specific purpose. he gets paid something like $2000 a month for both dealership and I am sure that he manages 3-5 more dealerships while he does ours.

Sort of blows because we don't have his loyalty and who knows what he is holding on us. My general manager is telling me to educate myself, so he doesn't have to rely on this guy.

I manage used cars (technically...used car manager...), advertising, listing, and basic ideas for dealership adverts. I am the lot guy and dealer trader guy... sort of like jack of all trades since my brain retains alot of shit and i know almost everything about every deal.....

anyway, people are already doing what you are thinking of.

I say build a portfolio for yourself, show example, and demonstrate some value and trust into your service.

what my general manager wanted was,
"I will bring X to Y and create X amount of positive reviews for Y amount of dollars. etc"

He wants some quantifiable demonstration and promises, and goals to get there.

Tell him to stop doing Google Adwords - its a total waste of money for the auto industry.

The 2 things a dealership should be doing is
1. SEO: this is for people who are researching dealerships. its a relatively fixed cost to the dealership (not a monthly model) and the benefits are residual and build over time.
2. CSEs where people can compare vehicles from multiple dealerships. Think of autotrader but that shit is expensive, there are more robust and cheaper options that drive even more high quality leads

TrollfaceDeux · Jul 17, 2017

adword i told my boss is conflicting...

TrollfaceDeux · Jul 17, 2017

i think the best way to increase sale is more traffic and appointments. We got 150 online leads this month and fuck...they all suck...

Araysar · Jul 17, 2017

TrollfaceDeux said:
i think the best way to increase sale is more traffic and appointments. We got 150 online leads this month and fuck...they all suck...

i think the age of leads is over for the most part. With how easy it is to fill out forms online and auto populate forms, people with minimal interest are spamming those things. and places like autotrader are more than happy to peddle leads because they were designed during the age of leads and have failed to adapt. so as long as they can get people autofill a form for a couple cars and send that shit to you, theyre happy.

i think the most accurate way these ways to drive online auto sales is by looking at VDP Views as a metric instead of leads. The more eyeballs you can get on a VDP on your site, the faster it will move off the lot. We did a bunch of studies and A/B testing on this, VDP views heavily correlate with sales. But lead conversion is getting lousier and lousier over the years

TrollfaceDeux · Jul 17, 2017

Araysar said:
i think the age of leads is over for the most part. With how easy it is to fill out forms online and auto populate forms, people with minimal interest are spamming those things. and places like autotrader are more than happy to peddle leads because they were designed during the age of leads and have failed to adapt. so as long as they can get people autofill a form for a couple cars and send that shit to you, theyre happy.

i think the most accurate way these ways to drive online auto sales is by looking at VDP Views as a metric instead of leads. The more eyeballs you can get on a VDP on your site, the faster it will move off the lot. We did a bunch of studies and A/B testing on this, VDP views heavily correlate with sales. But lead conversion is getting lousier and lousier over the years

Yeah no shit. I am reconfigurinv website for that specific purpose. It ia working.

Araysar · Jul 17, 2017

good job trollface.

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Social Advertising start up

Daidraco

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TrollfaceDeux

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Control

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Daidraco

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TrollfaceDeux

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Control

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TrollfaceDeux

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TrollfaceDeux

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