Today, nearly every industry imaginable has leveraged social media to better engage their customers. The strategy makes sense––in an Affinitiv social media survey of 1,000 auto dealer customers, 70% said they check social media on a daily basis. But with your customers’ social media feeds becoming more and more saturated with sponsored content, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for dealers to get noticed. So in order to make an impression with your marketing, I recommend exploring the effectiveness of your overall social media strategy—and then considering how artificial intelligence (AI) can take it to the next level.
Integrating your social media with AI could be the key component of success. Using machine learning, AI studies your customers’ behavior and identifies vehicles of interest, likelihood to purchase, and other valuable data.
In a recent Affinitiv study, we used our predictive models to identify customers most likely to make a purchase (our test target) and created a Facebook campaign through a sample of stores to engage them. Launching the same campaign to customers that were selected without the aid of AI (our control target), we measured click-through and response rates and compared between the two groups. As a result, we found that the AI-generated customers—or likely purchasers—saw a 25% lift in click-through rates and a 596% lift in response rates over the non-AI-generated list.
However, you shouldn’t think of adding AI as a “hands-off” solution. To deepen the impact of your marketing efforts, it’s crucial to consistently interact with your customers. An active social-media presence builds brand awareness, helps drives more traffic to your page, and perhaps most importantly, shows the humanity of your business. But keeping a lively, informative page is an invaluable sales tool as well: 21% of surveyed consumers who purchased a vehicle in the last 12 months were browsing the dealer’s social media page prior to purchase. So, to provide a stellar customer experience—and potentially win new business––it’s important to keep your store’s social media pages updated with the latest inventory and newest incentives.
Summary
Although mastering the social media space isn’t rocket science, it certainly helps to add the latest data science to your approach. By researching and implementing a few key strategies, you’ll help broaden customer engagement, build your reputation, and generate more profit. And what’s not to “like” about that?
Jeff Giere
Strategy Analyst
Affinitiv