The ‘social’ customer journey is made up of multiple stages, just like email and SMS contact plans, and paid activity should support this.

Knowing how best to penetrate the online conscience of the right demographic at the right time is key to social media engagement. The ‘social’ customer journey is made up of multiple stages, just like email and SMS contact plans, and paid activity should support this.

For example, by placing tracking pixels on a retailer’s website, prospects can be remarketed with relevant social media messages during the crucial research phase. Further advertising campaigns can then be built to ensure customers fitting specific criteria – based on where they are in their motoring journey – are fed targeted ads designed to keep retailers front of mind before the next stage.

At the end of August, we launched a new Dynamic Custom Audience feature within our VoiceBox Social software to support sales and aftersales activity. Our marketing automation platform, VoiceBox, integrates with a retailer’s DMS and automatically uploads customer data matching their desired criteria directly into Meta to facilitate targeted Facebook and Instagram campaigns. A tactic that hasn’t really been practicable in the motor retail sector before without time-consuming manual intervention.

Furthermore, by linking with the DMS to build audiences based on ‘first-party’ data (i.e. highly accurate information relating to the customer’s actual preferences and stage of their ownership journey), retailers won’t be restricted by any limitations that might be placed on the use of third-party cookies.

Historically, it has been difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns, so marketing departments have struggled to demonstrate the return on advertising spend (ROAS). However, our VoiceBox integration with Meta’s conversions API supports enquiry attribution for Facebook and Instagram ads.

VoiceBox users can evaluate the proportion of enquiries and orders that result from their paid placements and which specific social campaigns drove the most engagement, enabling marketing teams to accurately track the success of social media advertisements without them having to carry out lengthy manual processing.

Analysis of data from retailers using our automotive inventory ad software, SocialStock, shows that 91% of remarketing audiences clicked through to the retailer’s website after seeing a social advert, and 27% of conquest audiences did the same. Trackable results such as this, which can be extracted with minimal administration, provide a direct correlation between social activity and website visits.

Since commencing the trial of Meta’s conversions API with our clients in June this year, we have been able to attribute over 380 enquiries and 211 orders directly to social media campaigns . With robust analysis tools in place, the power of social media becomes more measurable, reducing any guesswork when formulating a social media strategy.

With this new technology available to elevate the profile of social media, we encourage retailers to integrate paid advertising into their current digital marketing strategy to maximise exposure and boost revenue.

Communication strategies don’t need to be one size fits all. Marketing Delivery’s VoiceBox solution can trigger further AI-powered communications based on the customer’s previous interaction.

VoiceBox distributed 1,035,197 AI-powered emails in Q2. Our commercial director talks us through the key performance metrics for our clients and actionable insights you can take away.

Balancing supply and demand can be fraught with challenges, but with the right processes and systems in place, every lead can be nurtured, and conversion rates can be kept high.

2nd Floor East, Portland House,  4 Great Portland Street, London W1W 8QJ