Local automotive advertising technology company SocialBot has hit significant milestones in its first years of business. Most notably, the Chattanooga-based company’s revenue has a compounded growth rate of approximately 40% per year since 2017, with revenues nearly doubling in 2020 versus 2019. Additionally, the company manages four million in automotive advertising campaigns annually, and currently has over 500 active campaigns in 350 customer locations after only three years of operating.
Co-founded by Tim Kelly, Joe Alegre, and Casey Tuggle in 2016, SocialBot is a service provider for digital ad agencies that builds, manages, and creates Facebook and Instagram ads for car dealership clients.
SocialBot targets specific Facebook and Instagram users with relevant vehicle-specific ads that exclusively feature the type of inventory each user is currently in the market to purchase.
“As the owner of Kelly Auto Group, I understood firsthand that advertising on social media can be a daunting and costly process,” said Kelly. “We saw a need and wanted to find a way to meet it. Through SocialBot, we are able to streamline the social media advertising process for agencies that specialize in the automotive industry.”
Launched in 2017, SocialBot was the first provider of its kind in the market. In 2016, it was the first group accepted into Facebook Accelerator to build a solution for the automotive industry through its marketing application programming interface (API). Since then, SocialBot has continuously evolved and improved its platform.
The company uses a completely transparent solution, meaning SocialBot runs ads from a car dealer or automotive ad agency’s social media advertising accounts or web pages so there is no cherry-picking of data. The system pulls cars directly from dealer websites daily to ensure accurate inventory and it also reflects price changes or photo changes in real-time.
“The system we set up provides segmentation of ads. For example, people interested in SUVs won’t see compact cars, and so on from there,” said Alegre. “We serve ads to people based on their specific interests and our system automatically optimizes spends to the best performing body style segments and adjusts ad spends based on inventory volume and performance.”