How to layout the automotive short video operation matrix?

Viewing cars, selecting cars, and using cars are the best entry points for content organizations to enter the automotive content field during the traditional car life cycle.

Last week, the "2019 Autohome 818 Global Auto Night" created by Autohome and Hunan Satellite TV has come to an end. This grand party known as the "Car Night" has feasted the eyes of countless car enthusiasts. Not only did it invite popular young actors such as Wu Yifan and Cai Xukun, but it also innovated multiple program gameplays, using the right to use hundreds of new cars, tens of millions of gifts and other surprise prizes to ignite the enthusiasm of the whole people to buy cars!

It can be seen that in the cold winter of the auto market, the auto industry has begun to try more new marketing paths. From the traditional satellite TV carnival to the continuous innovation of mobile Internet marketing, the auto industry is no longer willing to lag behind.

Deep changes in the field of automotive content creation, content performance and typical influencers throughout the entire life cycle of automobiles

In July this year, domestic passenger vehicle (PV) sales fell for the ninth consecutive month, with a year-on-year decrease of 30.98%. Reasons such as urban traffic network congestion, changes in national policy direction and negative market economic prospects have led to delays in consumers' car purchase decisions. For this reason, automobile brands, which have always emphasized brand image building and product tone communication, have also shifted more attention to sales conversion.

The first thing that car brands targeted was short video marketing.

Based on the research on the portraits of visitors to automobile 4S stores and users of the six major short video platforms, we found that car buyers are highly similar to short video users, which is an excellent target for short video advertising.

To this end, major automotive vertical platforms have strengthened the construction of their own video content ecosystems, deepened reforms, and created content platforms such as Dongchedi, Chejiahao and Yichehao. To introduce high-quality PGC content, encourage the development of UGC content, and improve the content ecosystem.

As an important part of content production and promotion, KOLs are also actively seeking transformation to meet user needs and brand investment. Currently, there are more than 260 automotive KOL accounts on the Douyin platform with more than 100,000 fans, of which professional double-V accounts (extended to the Douyin platform) from the traditional automotive field account for 40%.

The continuous influx of these professional accounts has not only prospered the vertical ecosystem, but also gradually formed content segmentation, which can be roughly divided into five major content types: looking at cars, learning about cars, choosing cars, using cars, and playing with cars.

Car Viewing

The car-viewing content focuses on the introduction of car models, from million-dollar luxury cars to economical means of transportation, from the overall appearance of the vehicle to the details inside the vehicle, and emphasizes vehicle display to meet the user's dual needs of high-standard curiosity and basic cognition. This type of video has high requirements for text readability, KOL personal expression, professional endorsement, and vehicle model resources, so its replicability is lower than other categories. However, this type of video is also the most viewed content form in the automotive market.

For example, Brother Hu Talks about Cars gradually established itself as the top video on car viewing, with an average of 872,000 likes per episode and a fan quality score of 87. Some people even said that every episode is a must-see.

Learning to drive

The content of driving lessons is mostly explanations of traffic rules and practical demonstrations, with online teaching in a visual way. It has stronger real-life operational significance, a clear audience and strong demand . Currently, the monetization methods for driving learning content are concentrated on online course sales (Kuaishou platform) and offline driving school diversion, and KOLs have extremely strong professional attributes and are not suitable for intervention in the form of incubation.

Car Selection

Car selection content is more of a shopping guide in nature, focusing on the introduction of vehicle selling points, and guiding users' purchasing decisions through performance testing, driving experience, function explanations and other content. Because the content is highly practical and instructive, it can be seen from the interaction rate of car selection content that the average like rate is 1.3 times that of the general car content, and the average interaction rate is 1.5 times that of the general car content . It can greatly mobilize user interest and start discussions on car models to promote conversion . Moreover, more than 70% of the accounts that post car selection content have professional backgrounds, so the professionalism requirements for KOLs are very high.

For example: car play reports record professional tests, such as bump tests, and use cameras placed at various locations on the car body and the experience of guests in the car to give users an intuitive understanding of vehicle performance. This account is also recommended by Dongchedi for its high-quality automotive content, ranking first in Dongchedi creator influence in July.

Use a car

The car-related content focuses on explaining car-use tips, deepening the vehicle usage scenarios, and popularizing car-use knowledge from aspects such as detailed function usage and emergency handling. This type of content has weaker professional attributes and is more entertaining in nature. Because of its low content threshold, high degree of homogeneity, and highly similar character positioning, it has also become a hotbed for plagiarism.

Playing with cars

It focuses more on the automotive aftermarket, offline physical services, car owner's interest modification, etc. The content is more professional and attracts interested users with cool content. Similar to the content of driving lessons, the entry threshold is relatively high and it needs to be jointly produced with offline physical institutions. Among them, the representative KOL: Wudao Kai, has become a "mysterious" figure in the car circle by publishing video content such as collecting, repairing and modifying old luxury cars.

After understanding the common content types in the automotive vertical, we provide the following content and operational suggestions for content producers and automotive brand owners. We hope that it will be helpful for MCN incubating and operating accounts or automotive brands building their own brand matrix or formulating delivery strategies.

Content Strategy

1. Choosing the right content entry point is the first step to achieve a million accounts

Through the above analysis, we have already made it clear that viewing cars, selecting cars, and using cars are the best entry points for content organizations to enter the automotive content field during the traditional car life cycle.

In fact, by analyzing the top 100 automotive accounts with the most followers in Q2 of KasData, we found that the number of accounts with content related to using, choosing, and viewing cars far exceeds that of other types of accounts, with the largest number of accounts related to using cars.

The content of car-related accounts can reach the largest range of car users, namely car owners. The content is highly practical and can often combine content forms such as plot, detective stories and multi-dimensional scenarios to enhance the interest of the content, making it interesting while being useful. Therefore, it can accumulate fans faster than other professional evaluation content in the early stages.

However, since the three major content forms have different focuses, KOLs should choose carefully based on their own advantages, and avoid unclear early positioning that leads to cluttered content in the later stage, which is not conducive to long-term operations.

1. Establish different content attributes based on platform characteristics

Looking at the content characteristics of Kuaishou and Douyin, simply distributing one piece of content cannot meet the content needs of platform users. Therefore, different content attributes should be established according to the different platforms.

Douyin: “Content + Cars”

Douyin connects users with "content", so the output of pure hard knowledge is difficult to break through the constraints of the circle. It should be centered on content, shape plot scenes, and implant automobile elements on this basis to create content that conforms to the Douyin ecosystem.

Kuaishou: “Career + Car”

Kuaishou connects users through "people" and has a high degree of occupational segmentation. Therefore, it is more attractive to create content using vivid real life under occupational attributes. For example, the route of a truck driver and the on-site teaching of a car beautician have all achieved impressive results.

1. Optimize creative style based on high-quality content

First, let’s take a look at two video cases. The two KOLs in the cases are automotive accounts incubated by the same MCN agency at the same time, and the video topics are all about explaining automotive professional knowledge.

However, due to the different content presentation forms, the two short video accounts showed completely different fan growth and interaction performances.

• In terms of fan accumulation: @车老湿 currently has 520.4W fans, while @汽车系超老师 has only 23.2W fans;
• Judging from the like ratio (the ratio of total likes on videos posted by an account to total comments, the smaller the ratio, the more active the account's interactivity), the like ratio of @汽车系超老师 is 8:1; while the like ratio of @车老湿 account is 34:1.

In other words, the professional and authoritative content produced by @汽车系超老师 is more likely to attract in-depth user interaction, and the fans are more vertical; while the interesting and exquisite content produced by @车老湿 is more likely to accelerate fan sedimentation, but the fan portrait will be relatively vague.

The two types of accounts each have their own advantages, and brands can use them in combination when doing KOL advertising. One is more likely to produce hot products, and the other is used to have a deep impact (on target users).

Operational Strategy

Comparing the TOP100 KOLs with the most followers in Q2, we found that the accounts with the fastest follower growth are still concentrated at the top, and only 19 accounts have follower growth values ​​higher than the average. Therefore, creating a hit product becomes a difficult problem, and it is imperative to plan a long-term operation path in advance and carry out strategic account incubation.

1. Construction of multi-KOL matrix

1) Cross-domain KOL content complements each other and attracts traffic

Taking @祝晓涵 and @老丈人说车 as examples, @祝晓涵 is a pan-entertainment KOL, and @老丈人说车 is a more professional automotive KOL. The two people’s personalities penetrate each other’s account content and interact deeply, achieving the circulation and growth of fans on both accounts. At the same time, institutions continue to incubate small-sized companies in the same way, driving their growth.

2) Differentiate the positioning of KOLs in the same field and guide each other’s traffic

Both the Car Detective and Car Goddess accounts are positioned in the field of car use, but there are differences in the creative content positioning. The accounts of car detectives are more inclined to car safety, while the accounts of car goddesses are more inclined to car skills. The dual accounts have high-frequency and in-depth interactions during the operation process and attract fans to each other.

2. Multiple positioning of the same KOL, IPization of KOL value

On the premise of the same person appearing on screen, content segmentation is done for different directions in the same field to distinguish users at different demand stages and orientations. This can not only ensure the continuity and uniformity of account content, help users quickly understand account positioning and clarify needs through content, but also help advertisers to place targeted advertisements through clear content directions.

For example, IP: Nan Ge has three car selection accounts, namely Nan Ge Talking about Cars, which focuses on car model reviews; Golden Eyes for Buying Cars, which focuses on test drives, reviews and shopping guides; and Wandering in America, a travel-oriented account for knowledge sharing.

3. Different platforms, different operational positioning of the same KOL

While creating different content tones on different platforms, different operating strategies should also be formulated.

On traffic platforms such as short videos, we focus on using content such as plots and positive energy to accelerate the accumulation of fans for accounts and expand the boundaries of the traffic pool for algorithmic content recommendations. On professional vertical platforms such as Autohome, the continuous output of professional test drive and evaluation long video content with PGC program attributes can, on the one hand, strengthen the authority of IP in the automotive field, and on the other hand, meet the conversion needs of brand owners through deep brand implantation through long videos.

For example, IP: Wu Nan, her account on Douyin, Miss Wu Nan, is mostly full of positive car scene plot content, while on the Autohome platform, it is mainly professional test drives and evaluation content, which is well-produced, with professional and easy-to-understand explanations, and has a better conversion effect.

4. Seize the benefits of live streaming and increase the retention of accurate users

According to Kas Data Insights: Tik Tok is currently in the bonus period of live streaming, and celebrities who have opened live streaming have a higher efficiency in increasing fans than KOLs who have not opened live streaming. Therefore, it is recommended that car accounts also seize this bonus:

1. Accelerate the accumulation of original users;
2. Make up for the shortcomings of short video content that is not vertical and profound enough, better meet the needs of professional users, accelerate the accumulation of accurate fans, and better serve the effect demands of advertisers;
3. Live streaming can also increase fan stickiness and interaction rate, and through real-time comment interaction with users, understand users' real needs and provide reference for subsequent content creation.

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4. How to create a hit through short video operations? Share 13 cases!

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6. 8 tips for creating a popular account through short video operation!

Author: Kas Data

Source: caasdata (ID: caasdata6)