A brief discussion on automobile brand marketing!

As for cars, of course, the first reason is that car customers have money. After all, the price of a car is there, and car companies have relatively sufficient marketing budgets. Secondly, car consumers care more about the brand. After all, a car can best reflect a person's economic strength, social status, personal image and taste (a car can be driven, but a house cannot be moved).

These two points have destined car companies to pay great attention to brand building and marketing promotion, but there are two century-old problems in doing a good job in car marketing. It is the existence of these two problems that makes car marketing have very high requirements on operational level and technical content.

Consumer reports - find the main consumer groups and understand their needs, decision-making methods, lifestyles, and catalyst habits;

Market and competition report - identify the market segments and lock in core and secondary competitors.

Ultimately, you need to know which group of people will buy your car and which group of people will not be moved no matter how much you talk. This is a real test of one's marketing skills.

These two points, in the final analysis, return to the two most basic and core issues of marketing:

1. How to accurately identify target consumers? Who are my consumers and what are their needs?

2. How to effectively influence consumers’ purchasing decisions and increase the value of your product in their minds?

In traditional times, the answer to the first question is called "research" and the answer to the second question is called "integration."

However, consumer research, which consumes huge amounts of manpower and financial resources, can only help you gain a qualitative understanding of consumers. You cannot quantitatively find out where the consumers are and what information can touch them.

Integrated marketing communications, which consume huge budgets, can only provide all-round information coverage for consumers. It cannot identify consumers’ car-buying stage to implement precise attacks, nor can it innovate content for different individuals at different touch points.

Therefore, in traditional times, it was difficult to solve these two problems. The advent of the digital age has given us hope for solving these two fundamental marketing problems. Everyone in the industry says that car companies are good at playing. If there are any new interactive technologies or digital platforms, car companies are often the first in the industry to apply and launch them in marketing. The reason is nothing else but that the pain points of car companies in consumer link marketing are really too painful.

Today, digital marketing is booming. Many corporate clients are constantly experimenting and exploring, trying to find their own path, especially automobile companies.

Not long ago, I noticed an automotive IP called "Roar" by ByteDance. In the form of a documentary, it records the different digital marketing paths of many car companies, including joint ventures, independent companies, leading companies, and companies that are undergoing transformation. In my opinion, it is a very good opportunity to summarize and analyze cases through those automotive brands that are best at digital marketing, which can also help us find new opportunities for business and growth.

Based on the records of these car companies, I would also like to talk about my understanding of automotive marketing. From a digital perspective, to solve the century-old problem mentioned above, there are several key points to deal with: content scenarios, contact management, and digital traceability.

1. Content scenarios

Only when companies create content that is closely related to consumers' life scenarios and integrate their products into consumers' life scenarios can they impress consumers. And more importantly, content scenarios help you automatically identify who your target audience is.

For example, SAIC Roewe cooperated with ByteDance to co-create products and content around today's popular national trend culture. It filmed the documentary "Palace Craftsmanship Creates National Trend" on Douyin, and then Roewe iMAX8 sponsored the "Second Douyin Creator Conference".

In addition, the way SAIC Volkswagen cooperates with ByteDance is to develop high-quality content such as new ways to celebrate the New Year and one-square-meter fitness competitions for young people in cities.

Different content is used to target different groups. Accurate content helps companies identify users, so in this era of the Internet, data, users, and content are actually an integrated construction. The first step to doing a good job in digital marketing is to create good content.

Content needs to be faster - it is not like the traditional era where one TVC or one main graphic design was broadcast all year round. Today's content must be more frequent and constantly changing according to social trends and consumer preferences.

The content needs to be more precise - targeting the demands of a precise target group and targeting the precise life scenarios of this specific group of people.

The content needs to be more visual - using short videos and other forms to present the product in specific life scenarios.

The content needs to be more complex - it should be diversified and decentralized, rather than just the perspective of the business owner. In particular, the content requires the joint participation of kols, kocs, consumers, and dealers. For example, the Douyin "Sparks" plan jointly launched by ByteDance and Roewe has helped Roewe to incubate 20 dealer accounts, guiding dealers to quickly get started with Douyin, jointly operate content, produce short videos, participate in live broadcasts, communicate and interact with consumers online, answer questions, and guide them to stores. Strengthen the linkage between enterprises, dealers and consumers.

Finally, the content needs to be more consistent - with a unified style and persona to continue to build fans for the brand.

2. Contact management

Automobile marketing has always attached great importance to results, that is, the collection of consumer clues. For sales-oriented car companies, the most direct demand is how to find more sales leads at a lower cost and convert them into company performance.

But as mentioned earlier, car consumption is a complex and long-term decision. In most cases, consumers will not place an order or purchase immediately after viewing a piece of content about a car or watching a live broadcast.

Therefore, we need to differentiate the "effect" that the entire industry is talking about repeatedly today, which touchpoints and which content can produce immediate effects, so that consumers can take immediate action and leave information after reading your content. Which touchpoints and content have long-term effects? We need to plant a seed in the hearts of consumers and establish long-term connections and communications with consumers, which will ultimately influence their purchases.

The pursuit of instant effect is authenticity, which requires the optimization of corporate advertising and delivery through data analysis, so as to capture more high-quality users with real intention to buy cars.

The long-term effect is about sustainability. After a company has created its content and placed its advertisements, in addition to exposing the information to consumers, it can also keep consumers on its own self-media accounts, social platforms and other digital platforms, and establish long-term relationships with consumers, thereby continuously accumulating users and activating private domains. In this way, the long-term effect can be truly achieved and can be seen.

3. Digital tracking

Ultimately, this entire set of strategies must be measurable and the effects tracked. That is to say, companies can continuously optimize and improve it through technical review, and ultimately precipitate their own digital assets and clarify their own set of digital marketing strategies, which will have sustainable value for the company.

The last effect is efficiency improvement, which is used to solve the problem of digital traceability. Through DT LAB, Bytedance makes marketing quantifiable, diagnosable, and optimizable, helping automakers to achieve sustained growth. The combination of three effects and their mutual synergy is the real full-effect marketing.

In today's digital world, we must understand the entire consumer purchasing chain and analyze each consumer's complete decision-making process through digital means.

What content do consumers at different stages want to watch and what information do they want to obtain; and through what paths and touchpoints do they receive this information.

Through these analyses, we have summarized a set of vivid content strategies and truly effective communication strategies that can truly help automakers achieve and accelerate the effectiveness of digital automotive marketing. And this, I believe, is the value of "Roar" in recording the digital marketing journey of car companies.

It helps companies implement full-link marketing, calculates the results of enterprise digitalization, and provides us with a mirror to reflect our marketing gains and losses.