With the largest online audience in Canada, the social networking giant Facebook says it’s got the hottest virtual corner for Internet advertising.
Canadians spend more time on their mobile devices than desktops or laptops, Joshua Bloom, Auto Industry Lead at Facebook Canada told more than 250 people attending the Facebook Automotive Summit at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on March 22.
Auto dealers, GMs, OEM representatives, and marketing experts were all in attendance to learn how to leverage the latest digital marketing tools on the world’s largest social network to drive auto sales.
Breaking through the digital barrier towards increased dealer-sponsored mobile-based advertising has taken some time in Canada and is proving somewhat challenging, both due to the generally slower pace at which “traditional” Canadian marketers move and the “traditional” nature of the auto industry, according to Bloom.
“I think what the industry needs is a number of champions speaking out at dealer conventions, at OEM/dealer initiatives, that will reach the masses with a single communication,” said Bloom, who emphasized the fact that Facebook reaches 22 million active Canadian users each month.
Bloom and other Facebook business leaders introduced new user-friendly digital shopping tools developed by Facebook which, they say, have the potential to increase sales, such as an ad feed format that will soon be officially named when it is released.
“If Acura of Hamilton wanted to reach women who live in Hamilton, who are married with two kids, they could do that with near 100 per cent accuracy; there’s no other platform that has the ability to do that, let alone in a measurable way,” explained Bloom.
He highlighted the examples of Agincourt Mazda and Acura of Hamilton, two dealership Facebook advertising success stories which highlight the role Facebook ads can play in reaching qualified auto shoppers while helping bring people into showrooms to buy — this reduces cost per lead and achieves a five-fold increase in return on ad spending, he said.
Other speakers discussed actual brand/sales outcomes along with the measurement solutions Facebook uses to gauge whether a business is reaching “real people” and how effective ads are at reaching audiences across different devices.
“Our thumb is the new remote control,” said Christy Liu, Creative Strategist at Facebook’s Creative Shop in New York. Liu explained that effective “mobile-first content experiences” should “feel native to the platform” both in terms of the scale of presentation and the graphic elements.
The Facebook Canada Summit was presented in two parts. For the first part 1,200 people representing five separate industries including retail and financial services learned about Facebook’s increasingly sophisticated use of analytics and its technical abilities to hone in on highly specific demographics using the latest advances in mobile marketing technology.
Facebook business leaders Jordan Banks, Managing Director of Facebook/Instagram and digital marketing maverick, Jessica Jensen, Head of Brand Strategy & Product Marketing Communications, Facebook Business Marketing at Facebook, highlighted companies who have “embraced the change” digital has brought to marketing, such as McDonald’s, and others like HMV and Beck Taxi whose businesses have suffered because they have not kept up with the times.
