The car buying journey is continually becoming more and more of an online process. YouTube is seeing two times more test drives than physical dealerships and visits to dealerships have dropped to 1 to 2 visits on average. In fact, 31% of people said that if they could buy their next new vehicle online, they would.
With all of this information on car buyers’ online habits, it came as no surprise when Facebook announced it would be partnering with auto dealers last October in hopes of boosting used car sales via their e-commerce platform, Marketplace. As the months have passed both large and small, locally-owned dealerships have started listing their inventory on the platform.
On Facebook Marketplace, dealership listings appear alongside individual seller listings but buyers can filter between dealership or individual listings when they search for vehicles. Searches can also be filtered down to specific details and show vehicles by color, make, model, year, mileage, transmission, and vehicle type. This way if a buyer is looking specifically for black SUVs that were made after 2015, they can filter by that criteria and only see those options.
While this partnership with Marketplace is a great opportunity for dealers to reach more Facebook users, it is also a process that takes a lot of time to maintain. Dealers have to upload and maintain their inventory manually, which means every time a car is sold, or a new one is added to the inventory, someone needs to go into the platform and update the listings.
That is, until now.
DOM360 has developed an innovative tool that will monitor and update your dealership’s new and used inventory automatically as new arrivals come in and inventory is sold. Every evening the tool will scan through the dealership’s inventory and take note of any changes. These changes are then transferred into the Facebook Marketplace platform where the listings are updated. This way the information is always up to date. And accurate.
By listing inventory on Marketplace, dealers can reach more people on Facebook and people that are already browsing vehicles. With the benefits of reaching more car buyers and the addition of automation to the process, Facebook Marketplace becomes a very powerful marketing tool for dealers.