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How to Use Facebook to Sell More Heavy-Duty Parts

Learn how you can leverage Facebook to sell more heavy-duty parts

Episode 158: How do you sell more heavy-duty parts in a digital world? Or to go even further, how can you use Facebook to sell more parts? In this episode, we talk about why Facebook is a social media channel you should give more attention to if you are selling heavy-duty parts.

Would you like a free consulting session with Jamie Irvine? Visit HeavyDutyPartsReport.com/Consulting to learn more.

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Disclaimer: This content and description may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, The Heavy-Duty Parts Report may receive a small commission.

Sponsors of this Episode:

  1. Having issues with your commercial equipment? You need ATA’s Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC). Check out TMC at tmc.trucking.org  
  2. Want to look up parts but don’t have a part number or the VIN? Download Diesel Parts for free on Desktop or on your Apple or Android device.
  3. Looking for high-quality fuel injection for heavy-duty applications? Visit AMBACInternational.com/Aftermarket

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Are you looking to purchase heavy-duty parts and get your commercial vehicle repaired? Get access to one of HDA Truck Pride’s 750 locations across the United States and Canada. Visit HeavyDutyPartsReport.com/BuyParts.

Transcript of Episode:

Jamie Irvine:

You are listening to The Heavy-Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. And this is the show where you get expert advice about heavy-duty parts that keep trucks and trailers on the road longer while lowering cost-per-mile.

How do you sell heavy-duty parts in a digital world? How do you use Facebook to sell heavy-duty parts? That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Last week, we talked about LinkedIn, this week we’re talking about Facebook. Now, why is Facebook a social media channel that you should give some attention to? Well there’s three reasons that I look at that I feel are very important. And the first one is community. When it comes to really finding new customers to sell heavy-duty parts to, you want to be able to build your own community. Of course, online, you want to get people to follow you, to interact with your content. That’s very important. Facebook is a special place because there are Facebook groups that are dedicated to any subject, to any niche within just about any industry worldwide. And it’s no different with the trucking industry.

There are Facebook groups that are dedicated just to independent repair shop owners. ITG the Independent Truck Repair Group has a Facebook group dedicated to just independent truck repair shops. There are Facebook groups dedicated to specific types of engines, specific types of trucks, different types of technicians meet in different places in order to discuss fixing, maintaining, repairing heavy-duty equipment. If we go to those Facebook groups and we join and we don’t just splash “buy from me” type posts, but we actually get involved in the conversation. We add some value. We educate people in that group about expertise that we have about the heavy-duty parts that we sell. We share personal stories of things that are happening in the business, in your business in real time. Hey guys, this week, customer had this problem. We sold them this part, it solved the problem, got ’em back up and running.

Here’s a link for more information. So it’s a wonderful, wonderful way to use Facebook. Now, of course, Facebook can be used in all kinds of other ways and not always good, but for business, for this approach, it works. Diesel Laptops is a company that has done tremendously well with Facebook. And this is how they got started selling diagnostic tools. They started selling the tools on eBay at the beginning, and they got into Facebook groups, talking to technicians who were struggling with diagnostics and therefore they were able to provide value and they have turned their company into a hyper-growth company. And that’s one of the original strategies that they still use to this day, several years out. So it’s gonna work for you too. Okay beyond community, each social media channel is different in the way that we create content. So I see a lot of people, they make one piece of content and then they copy and paste in all the different social channels, right?

So it kind of looks the same, whether it’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, it’s all the same. That’s a mistake because each social media channel has an origin story of what their original goal was. And in that origin story of the original goal of that social media channel, you will find cues as to what kind of content you should be making. Facebook is a place for long-form content. You know, LinkedIn is a beautiful place for creating content for your business, but there’s some limitations to the content, right? There’s the number of characters get capped at about, I think it’s 1300, the length of video you can post is capped at 10 minutes. So the type of content that you share on LinkedIn is longer form than some of the other social platforms, but still not as long-form as the content you can create for Facebook.

So if you wanna really get into the details, you can create a long-form post, basically a blog article. If you want to create a video, you can create a long-form video that really gets into the details of a specific subject and you can really go deep. And so I really appreciate that my podcast interviews are usually 20 to 25, sometimes as long as 30 minutes, we’ve even gone as long as 45 if the subject is particularly relevant and important, I can post that entire video on Facebook as well. So long-form content as well. You have the ability to stream live. So things that are happening right now live, this is a wonderful opportunity. And if I was running a parts store today, I would do events at my store, training events.

When I actually was a sales account manager, I organized annual bike runs. So we had truckers who brought their motorcycles and we would all ride together and we would raise money for charity. And we would, you know, again, creating community, bringing people together. Well, if I was doing that today, I’d have videographers there. I’d have the cameras running and I’d be streaming live so that people could come along on a journey with us. And there’s a big opportunity when it comes to going into repair shops and showing actual repairs or going into the parts warehouse and showing parts and talking about the various things. The possibilities for your live Facebook posts are just about endless and really, you know, you want your live to kind of be like your serial TV show that you published. So your long-form content, your prerecorded edited videos, your long-form posts, you know, those things are, are one kind of content.

But with your live video, you should think about it as this is my weekly TV show. And so I’m gonna produce a weekly TV show or a daily TV show, or it could be bimonthly or monthly, whatever the interval is, but regularly we’re gonna put out a program that our customers are going to really enjoy and gonna take some value from. Okay. So this is very, very important. That’s how you use live video is think about it in those terms. This is my TV show. We’re gonna take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Having issues with your commercial equipment? You need ATA’s Technology and Maintenance Council also known as TMC. TMC develops recommended practices, addressing the most pressing technology and maintenance issues affecting commercial vehicle fleets. You can join TMC for just pennies a day. And when you do, you’ll get access to thousands of pages of technical information, and you can attend events like the upcoming 2022 Annual Meeting and Exhibition, March 7th through 10th in Orlando, Florida.

For more information, check out TMC at TMCtrucking.org. Don’t have a heavy duty part number and need to look up a part? Go to parts.diesellaptops.com or download the app on Apple or Android to create your free account. Looking for high-quality fuel injection for heavy duty applications? Having one supplier for fuel injection allows you to better serve customers by providing them with a complete line, which increases your sales and profitability. Learn more at ambacinternational.com/aftermarket. Now, Facebook also allows you to do stories and stories are different. They’re little short clips. You can string together a bunch of them, but the way that your stories should be used is to provide behind the scenes, to provide your reality TV show, if you will. So while your live program is more like a live weekly TV show, your stories is like your behind the scenes reality show.

And that’s how you use your stories. This is what Facebook is good at. It’s all about engagement, community, bringing people together. It’s all of about sharing valuable content with them. And it’s about going to the places where our ideal customers are on Facebook. So if you’re gonna choose Facebook as one of your primary social channels, these are the kinds of strategies you want to use around your content, around building your community. Now on Facebook, you have your own personal profile. You have your business page, and then you can create your own group. So you need to think through strategies for each one of those elements on Facebook. Now, the last thing I wanna talk about is advertising. Facebook is still one of the most cost effective places to advertise. And even with some of the changes with Apple and with around privacy, you are able to do hyper-targeted advertising campaigns that you don’t waste a single penny on people who aren’t relevant to your business.

So you can focus on geography. You can put a geo-fence around a city or a state or a country. You can target people based on their interests, their vocation. So you can create this custom list. And for The Heavy-Duty Parts Report, we have a custom Facebook list that we are advertising to. It’s a specific age group. It’s a group of people who are obviously interested in the trucking industry who work in the trucking industry, either as a owner operator, who is responsible for their own repairs, a repair shop technician, or a mobile technician, or a fleet maintenance person who is working in the shop on a fleet. These are the types of people that we’re targeting. And then lastly, but not least the parts technicians who sell the parts. This is what makes up my Facebook targeted list. And I’m only focused on those people.

So when I advertise and I promote The Heavy-Duty Parts Report, that’s who I’m targeting. So for you, who is your ideal customer? If you’re selling parts, you can just, it’s unbelievable how targeted you can make your ads, and this saves you money. And, you know, I love LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where I built The Heavy-Duty Parts Report. I focused on it at the beginning. LinkedIn is amazing for so many reasons, but they’re really expensive for ads. I recently did an ad campaign and I got 10 people to go to my website and I did the same ad campaign on Facebook. I got 39 people to go to my website and the cost on LinkedIn was more than double actually. I think it was closer to triple the cost. So LinkedIn is an amazing platform for business B2B, but Facebook, when it comes to advertising is still one of the cheapest and most cost effective places where you can get the most ROI on ad campaigns.

So that is my summary of Facebook and how you can use it to sell heavy-duty parts. If you would like some assistance with your social media strategy, with your marketing, your pitches, for your sales people, your website, all of the things related to the digital sales channel, converting to eCommerce. All of that. That is what I specialize in. That is what I do. Reach out to me. [email protected] or head over to heavydutypartsreport.com/contact and reach out to me directly. I would love the opportunity to meet with you, find out what’s going on in your business and see how I can help you with your marketing strategy.

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