Five Insider Tips for a Killer Ad Campaign

Facebook and Google Ads can be a daunting hurdle to overcome in an industry like ours. Trailer, RV, Marine, and recreational dealerships serve an extremely specific customer base and rely on consistently selling a high-value product. Factor in a highly competitive market, and you’ve got an exceptionally difficult digital landscape to break into. Don’t worry, though! With decades of experience, TrailerCentral has the answers you’re looking for. Next time you want to branch out into the digital space to sell your products, consider the following tips and strategies.

1. Choose the right product

The first (and arguably most important) step to promoting your products is to identify the most crucial products for your dealership to sell. There are a few factors to consider when deciding which trailers, RVs, or boats you should put on sale. 

• First, consider your current stock – you ideally need enough stock to keep up with demand while also having enough variety to give digital customers a wealth of options to select from in your online store.
• Next, capitalize on market trends. As we get further into fall, you can expect to see dump trailer sales increase, and your ad campaigns should reflect that.
• Last but not least, you need to consider profit margins. When it comes to RVs, boats, and higher-end trailers this isn’t too big of a deal, but funneling ad spend into campaigns designed to promote lower-priced flatbeds and similarly priced trailers is going to eat into an already slim margin.
  

2. Identify your target audience

Once you’ve determined your priorities as far as which products you plan to sell, it’s time to match those products to the correct buyers. For instance, if you’re looking to heavily promote car haulers, you’ll likely want to hone in on customers who have interests tied to racing, car shows, custom cars and more within that umbrella. Be careful though! If you set your sights too wide, you run the risk of dedicating a sizable portion of your budget to users who are unlikely to actually complete a purchase. On the other hand, placing too heavy a restriction on your targeting can cause your ads to never reach their intended audience.

When considering your target audience, it’s important to match not only your product to the customer but also your business. When customers visit your store in person, are they there as hobbyists, or on behalf of businesses? Business-to-Business audiences are very different from Business-to-Consumer ones, and you should plan accordingly.

3. Clearly Define your Goals

So, you’ve chosen the products you want to promote and identified the market you’re selling them to, now it’s time to build the ads! The next thing you need to consider is how you want your customers to interact with your ads and your business as a whole. The most direct option is to prioritize lead forms and phone calls from your website. This is a simple, easily-attributed goal and is always a decent option, but it’s not always the best one.

Relying on lead forms and phone calls has one major drawback – it requires customers to visit the site and either fill out an entire form or application, or, even worse in 2022, actually speak on the phone to find out more information. In these cases where getting potential customers to reach out proves difficult, an alternative is to rely on other campaign goals. For example, if you’re using Facebook Ads, you can ask customers to message your company directly via Facebook Messenger, allowing them to make direct contact with your sales team through a low-commitment medium.

4. Optimize your ad placement

Now we know what product we’re selling, who we’re selling it to, and how customers are going to go about purchasing it. The last factor to consider when building your campaign is where these ads are going to appear. If you’re building ads on Facebook, you’ve got several options available to you – should your ad appear in users regular feeds? What about sidebar ads, or even sponsored posts on Instagram? It all comes down to the questions we’ve worked to answer above – product, audience, and campaign goals. So you have a couple things to take into consideration; where a younger Instagram audience may be likely to engage with a sleek Travel Trailer ad, a form-over-function utility trailer customer is probably less likely to click or even see a similar ad.

5. Engage with your customers

We’ve done it. The ads are running and serving in all the right places. Calls, messages, and lead forms are coming in and the last crucial question is on the table: How do we convert these leads into direct purchases? That answer is beautifully simple – good, old-fashioned sales. With the higher price point of products in our industry and the impersonal nature of digital marketing, the thing that really drives a sale all the way home, is a personal touch. Just like customers visiting your store in person, digital customers are looking for the expertise, guidance, and excellent service that only you can provide. It may take a little extra time and effort, but having a team member personally responding to messages, calls, and lead forms is always worth the trouble.

So here is where we get to the best part. How can we help you achieve your ad goals? Simple! We are experts in SEO & SEM – so let us help you get more leads by adding marketing to your TrailerCentral package!
Contact us today at sales@trailercentral.com to see how we can get your Facebook & Google Ads up and running to get you more leads and MORE SALES!