$20 Cost Per Lead, Mixed Feedback, No Awareness Investment
Twelve months ago, this dealer group was running lead campaigns on Meta. The leads were coming in. Some were converting. But the cost per lead was sitting around that $20 mark, which is about average for the industry. The sales team had mixed feelings about lead quality. Some months were better than others.
The problem was not the campaigns. The problem was that every campaign was doing the same job. Every dollar went to the bottom of the funnel. Generate a lead. Hope it converts. Repeat.
There was no awareness investment. No mid-funnel retargeting. No strategy for warming up an audience before asking them to hand over their phone number.
Investing in Top of Funnel Months Before the Sale
We started investing in top-of-funnel campaigns months before any major sale period. TV commercials. Video campaigns. Local sponsorships.
None of this was designed to generate leads directly. It was designed to make the market aware that these dealerships existed, what they stood for, and what they sold. When someone finally saw a lead ad, it was not the first time they had seen the brand.
“A little bit of investment has gone more into awareness, but you've actually doubled the effectiveness of your lead campaign.”
Warming the Audience Before Asking for the Conversion
For the EOFY sale, we did not go straight to lead ads. We ran traffic campaigns first. The objective was to get people onto the website browsing stock and sale offers. No form. No commitment. Just get them looking.
Then we switched to lead campaigns and retargeted the people who had already visited the site. The leads that came through were not cold. They were people who had already browsed, considered, and come back.
The result: 86 leads in the first phase, jumping to over 130 in about a week and a half. And the quality was different.
SMS Verification Cleaned the Data
Every phone number verified before it reached the sales floor.
We added SMS verification to the lead forms. Every person who submitted a lead had to enter a code sent to their phone number. That one change removed fake numbers, old numbers auto-filled by Facebook, and tyre-kickers who were not serious enough to complete an extra step.
The sales team noticed immediately. The leads were contactable. The phone numbers worked. The conversations were real.
Best Lead Quality They Had Seen
The feedback from the showroom floor was that these were the best leads they had seen. No complaints about quality. They sold a car directly from a Facebook lead, and the team celebrated it.
That does not happen when leads are cold.
155 Cars Across Both Sites
Zero complaints about lead quality from the sales team during the sale period.
Obvious Once You See It
There is nothing in this list that a dealer would read and think “I could never do that.” Every step is obvious once you see it laid out.
Build awareness before you need it. Warm the audience before you ask for the lead. Clean the data before it hits the sales floor.
The reason most dealers do not do this is not because it is complicated. It is because the default setting in automotive marketing is to skip straight to lead generation and hope for the best. The awareness investment feels like money with no immediate return. The traffic-first approach feels like a delay. The SMS verification feels like friction.
But the dealer who did all three sold 155 cars in a month.
Black Friday and Beyond
This dealer group is now planning the same sequenced approach for their Black Friday sale. They are filming another TV commercial. The awareness campaigns will start running weeks before the sale goes live.
They are also testing a new idea: a test drive booking calendar built directly into the lead form. After someone submits their details, the final screen offers them a booking within seven days in exchange for a personalised experience at the dealership. The goal is to convert leads into confirmed appointments before the sales team even picks up the phone.
Early days. But the foundation is there because the obvious things are already in place.
Awareness. Warmth. Clean data. That is it.
155 cars.