DealerOMG and the Listing Migration from Craigslist to Facebook
Transcript
Kelly : You know, earlier you mentioned something about Craigslist. And we were all around for that. That moment in time when Craigslist personals were eliminated in 2018. And suddenly all of this lead generation dropped off to the dealerships that was being generated. And all those folks who are specializing in Craigslist marketing, had to switch over to Facebook marketing. Is that when your company saw an opportunity to become FB/Meta focus at this point.n
nDavid : Yeah, so, dealer OMG was a little bit unique because the two founders worked at Facebook, in Austin. And so when they left Facebook, they started a Facebook agency. Yes, quickly discovered automotive, they weren’t initially automotive focus, they kind of figured out that that was a really good niche pretty quickly. But at that time, I was still with Auto Suite with the company that had been a predominantly Craigslist provider. And we even, I mean, the dip happened before that, right? Like Craigslist started to kind of become a little bit obsolete a little bit more year over year. So we had started rolling out Facebook advertising, email marketing, some other things to kind of fill that hole that was being left by Craigslist already, because you had Offer Up, came out of nowhere you had, you know, Facebook marketplace happened pretty quickly there. So you had these other third party listing sites. n
nAnd look, if you go look at Craigslist right now go pull it up. It’s literally the exact same website that it’s been for 20 years, like, no updates, there’s no app, it’s not mobile friendly. It looks like something somebody made in their basement like a 12 year old made in their basement, the offices of Craigslist, or a house. In San Francisco, it’s, I mean, you can do a Google image search of the Craigslist office, it’s literally just some, it’s a house, they’re doing billions in revenue. n
nBut you know, they’ve never been all that great of a company to market with anyways, because of those things. They’re technologically so far behind. So when these other options started coming up, that you can do so much more with and actually have visibility into, you know, results and track some of the marketing results. It was just an easy jump it made so much sense to everybody and social became this place where, you know, you had marketplace on Facebook, you had the automotive inventory ads on Facebook you had and the beauty of all of those are, look at the options.n
nI can run an ad on Facebook where somebody can chat me in Messenger immediately. Craigslist never had that. I can run an ad where they can click it a little prefilled forms or prefilled form that comes up with their name and address and phone number and it goes straight to the dealership CRM. Craigslist never had that. I can run ads that drive people out to your website and drive them right to your, to your finance app to your, you know, inventory to to your to your appraisal tool, whatever it might be, and have huge amounts of tracking that tells me not just that people went there, but what they did once they got there. So the ability to provide that much more value was huge. It was just huge. And make no mistake like we’re doing Craigslist at the peak. There are lots of dealerships spending 3,5,6, $7,000 a month on it. You transfer that budget over to Facebook, and you not only are your results gonna go through the roof, but what you’re able to see for your results is gonna go through the roof. It’sn
nKelly :nI was just gonna say that well the whole Craiglist thing was incidental. It wasn’t the platform as an automotive selling tool. It was because of the personals and people would be cruising the personals and they found their way over there. They weren’t necessarily there for automotive. Things just changed but I remember seeing the graph when they cancelled and the cratering was unbelievable.nn
nDavid : Yeah, so, dealer OMG was a little bit unique because the two founders worked at Facebook, in Austin. And so when they left Facebook, they started a Facebook agency. Yes, quickly discovered automotive, they weren’t initially automotive focus, they kind of figured out that that was a really good niche pretty quickly. But at that time, I was still with Auto Suite with the company that had been a predominantly Craigslist provider. And we even, I mean, the dip happened before that, right? Like Craigslist started to kind of become a little bit obsolete a little bit more year over year. So we had started rolling out Facebook advertising, email marketing, some other things to kind of fill that hole that was being left by Craigslist already, because you had Offer Up, came out of nowhere you had, you know, Facebook marketplace happened pretty quickly there. So you had these other third party listing sites. n
nAnd look, if you go look at Craigslist right now go pull it up. It’s literally the exact same website that it’s been for 20 years, like, no updates, there’s no app, it’s not mobile friendly. It looks like something somebody made in their basement like a 12 year old made in their basement, the offices of Craigslist, or a house. In San Francisco, it’s, I mean, you can do a Google image search of the Craigslist office, it’s literally just some, it’s a house, they’re doing billions in revenue. n
nBut you know, they’ve never been all that great of a company to market with anyways, because of those things. They’re technologically so far behind. So when these other options started coming up, that you can do so much more with and actually have visibility into, you know, results and track some of the marketing results. It was just an easy jump it made so much sense to everybody and social became this place where, you know, you had marketplace on Facebook, you had the automotive inventory ads on Facebook you had and the beauty of all of those are, look at the options.n
nI can run an ad on Facebook where somebody can chat me in Messenger immediately. Craigslist never had that. I can run an ad where they can click it a little prefilled forms or prefilled form that comes up with their name and address and phone number and it goes straight to the dealership CRM. Craigslist never had that. I can run ads that drive people out to your website and drive them right to your, to your finance app to your, you know, inventory to to your to your appraisal tool, whatever it might be, and have huge amounts of tracking that tells me not just that people went there, but what they did once they got there. So the ability to provide that much more value was huge. It was just huge. And make no mistake like we’re doing Craigslist at the peak. There are lots of dealerships spending 3,5,6, $7,000 a month on it. You transfer that budget over to Facebook, and you not only are your results gonna go through the roof, but what you’re able to see for your results is gonna go through the roof. It’sn
nKelly :nI was just gonna say that well the whole Craiglist thing was incidental. It wasn’t the platform as an automotive selling tool. It was because of the personals and people would be cruising the personals and they found their way over there. They weren’t necessarily there for automotive. Things just changed but I remember seeing the graph when they cancelled and the cratering was unbelievable.nn