SPOILER ALERT: I had an in depth conversation with my Facebook (FB) Rep and we have real answers to this big challenge for RV Dealerships. 

You may have heard about the new Facebook Algorithm Change. I have to admit that I’m part of the problem…

Professional Marketers ruin EVERYTHING!

When something is working extremely well (like Facebook Marketing) we flood the market and spoil it for everyone. That causes either the price to go up or the results to go down. It happens all the time and here’s two examples you’re probably familiar with:

Email Marketing:

Remember back in the day when we would read every single word of every single email?  Email open rates were well over 90%. Now most emails head to your junk folder and the ones that make it in we barely read because we’re inundated with email marketers.

Google Ads:

Same thing. You could dominate for very little money years back, now you can still dominate but there’s a significant cost attached to that. I recently read that it was down last year 19% in effectiveness… It’s getting more expensive for the same result.

My Conversation with Facebook

The Facebook newsfeed has recently become a mindless scroll. Too many companies and advertisers have taken over and shifted Facebook from what it was designed to do.

Mr. Zuckerberg has said his goal for this year is to fix Facebook, and help the users feel better about how they spend time on Facebook. To do this Facebook announced recently that it would try to have users see fewer posts from publishers, businesses and celebrities, and more from friends and family.

I spoke with my Facebook Rep for around 40 min about the Algorithm Change and how to position my clients in a way to capitalize on it.

I’m actually excited about the changes. I have articles and videos that I put together dating back years talking about how these changes are coming. Here’s a video I shot almost a year ago that explains this challenge already and how to position your dealership on social media to get around it.

I think it was needed for the long term health of Facebook and it’s going to weed out a lot of the weak competition.

• Posts from Brands and Publishers will be scored differently from posts from friends. Posts from family and friends will be much more prominent and because news feed space is limited, company posts will be suppressed as much as 80% of your reach.
• Facebook Ad prices will skyrocket. Facebook estimates that these changes will create people overall to spend less time on Facebook which will increase the competition for ads. In the past 2 years we’ve seen an ad increase cost of 53%.

Real World Application

I study the results in detail every month of roughly 50 RV Dealerships that we do the Social Media for. Over the years the trend is clear that the competition to get in front of someone is getting heavier.

The days where you could slap up a terrible post and it would still reach people are gone!

This move is going to cut down the saturation; it’s going to cut down on the crap (amateur marketers). You’re going to actually need to provide content that people want to consume. So what do people want to consume?

A Guide on What’s Working

If you produce great content that engages people in conversations, customers will crave your content and look forward to interacting with it. Be sure to keep the “social” in social media. Too many dealerships think of social media as a one-way conversation; a marketing tool. And that’s when we get it wrong.

You need to have Enough Content

I mentioned earlier that professional marketers flood the market on things that are working well. We post for all of our clients 4 posts per day. We revisit how often to post constantly and have found 4 per day to be the most effective in our aggressive strategy.

So why isn’t everyone posting that often?

It’s simple, people don’t know how to maximize results on Facebook and most important is they don’t have quality content to post.

You need to have Good Content

Come on. Nobody wants to see the type of posts that is obvious it wasn’t taken by an RVer. Your audience doesn’t want to feel like some city slicker who’s never stepped foot in an RV and who sits at a desk in an office each day to do your posts. Unfortunately whether it’s someone internally at the dealership or a marketing agency this is almost always the case where the person posting isn’t an RVer.

How can you add value when you don’t have any value to add?

Seriously think about this. How are you going to provide the education and entertainment your audience needs to feel like you are a trusted camping resource in your area when the person posting isn’t an expert on the subject?

Facebook Ads – You Need to Pay to Play

One of the biggest changes in Facebook over time has been the effectiveness of Facebook Ads. This new Algorithm change is going to force more and more advertisers to utilize Ads.

Here’s another video taken in June 2017 explaining how this EXACT change is coming.

Facebook Ads are so powerful that I’m going to write an entire article in depth soon about them. I’ve personally written over 1,000 Facebook Ads so I know a thing or two about what’s working (this alone is reason enough to hire us; I don’t outsource this for my clients).

A few brief reasons they are so powerful:

• That’s where the people are. The goal of marketing is to get the right message in front of the right person.
• Finding the right people (Targeting) on Facebook is insane. Rather than doing a shotgun approach like a TV, Radio or Billboard; you’re able to target based on the exact psycho and demographics of your ideal customer for any particular unit or at any part of the sales funnel.

Take this video ad for example, it’s a funny little video where I’m fishing off the Toy Hauler Deck and catch something other than a fish… The Ad sends people to a landing page of toy haulers that we recommend they purchase and fish off of. It’s also HIGHLY targeted to people who are homeowners, have discretionary income to purchase an RV, they enjoy camping and fishing (it’s more detailed than that but you get the gist of it).

Let’s Increase Your Sales

Your marketing dollars matter. Here are a few tips I give Dealership Owners when considering a social media strategy/agency.

• Are they social media experts who are going to be able to convert activity into sales? Will they stay on top of things like this Algorithm Change to consistently get results?
  • We are experts.
• Do they have the authentic content to connect with the audience so that they can convert prospects into customers? If they claim they do, how did they get that content (almost all agencies just pull stock pics from the internet)?
  • We have content coming out of our ears. There is NOBODY who can compete with us in this industry with the amount of consistent quality posts we produce, NOBODY! That’s why we get hired by companies like Go RVing, Camco, Cummins, Heartland, etc.
• The people creating the captions and getting the posts ready to publish, are they expert RVers? RVers can tell when content was put together by someone who doesn’t RV and it will turn them off. If you really want to connect, you need someone who lives the RV Life.
  • This is so rare, our entire team are RVers and almost all of them Full Time.

If you’ve been thinking about improving your social media but have been confused on the right way to go about it: call, email or text me. I’ll do a full audit on what you have going and what needs to happen to get trackable results that will make a difference.

To take a look at our RV Dealership Social Media Packages click here. 

If you’ve been hesitant to do something like this let me make it easy for you;

We have packages that start at just $199 and if you contact us and move forward with one of our packages by the end of March, we’re going to throw in a FREE $100 Ad Spend into your first month of service!

Here’s a video that explains a little bit more in depth our strategy to increase sales for RV Dealerships.

Eric Hannan

763-807-9537

Eric@shorelooksnice.com