Marketing and Promotion | Why is Guazi Used Cars so successful?

How did Guazi.com become a leader in the used car industry? The author of this article will narrate from the perspective of marketing strategy~

"Individual sellers sell to individual buyers. There are no middlemen to make a profit from the price difference. Buyers spend less money and sellers make more money."

——Guazi Second-hand Car Direct Sales Website Slogan

This is an ad that appears almost every time I watch a movie. It appears so often that every time I see Sun Honglei,

Everyone thinks of this ad.

So driven by curiosity and professional sensitivity as a marketer, I decided to dig deeper into this used car direct sales website to find out why its marketing strategy is so successful.

1. Integrated Communication

The so-called integrated communication is to use multiple channels to carry out communication and marketing according to the characteristics of each channel to maximize the effectiveness of the brand. This is a communication method that every company uses, and Guazi Used Cars is no exception.

1. Traffic Acquisition

Guazi Used Cars has placed a lot of advertising, with advertisements placed in subways, Focus Media, bus stations, cinemas, variety shows, TV commercials, bidding, and information streams.

The purpose of such large-scale advertising is mainly to enhance market penetration, increase brand awareness, and use the slogan "No middlemen to make a profit from the price difference" to tell users that our platform has no intermediaries and does not charge agency fees. Buyers spend less money and sellers make more money, achieving a win-win situation. This directly hits the user's pain points, and with huge advertising investment, traffic naturally comes in a steady stream.

2. Build word of mouth

While acquiring traffic, you should also pay attention to building your reputation and use SEO to create a positive, reliable and professional image for yourself.

like:

Guazi Used Cars will purchase a large number of news sources, mainly writing about the user's experience after purchasing a used car, in order to increase the sense of immersion and gain the trust of readers.

At the same time, they will also post soft articles about Guazi used cars on various automobile websites, and answer questions about Guazi used cars in the name of users on Baidu Zhidao or Tieba to gain the trust of users.

3. Brand media

Guazi Used Car has opened a Weibo account and service account with the same name as "Guazi Used Car Direct Sales Network".

Weibo is mainly used to release information about automobiles or favorable news such as promotions, discounts, and sweepstakes, in order to attract the attention of netizens and increase traffic. Of course, when a company encounters a crisis, it can also be used as a media to communicate with the public to reduce negative impact.

Unlike Weibo, service accounts do not have the ability to communicate directly with the public and can only be spread within WeChat.

Therefore, Guazi Used Car referred to the idea of ​​fission and set up a reward invitation module in the service account. As long as you share the exclusive recommendation page with friends and ask them to register, you can get a 10 yuan bonus. If your friends successfully buy a car through this page, they can get a 1,000 yuan bonus. Traffic can be obtained through sharing, and the customer acquisition cost of 10 yuan is not high.

In addition, there is a special transaction window in the service account to facilitate users to buy and sell cars, and can also import part of the traffic into the APP. After all, there is almost no risk of the APP being blocked.

2. Dismantling of Human Nature

Marketing is inseparable from human nature, and only by utilizing human nature can we achieve better marketing.

1. Birdcage Effect

When people buy a birdcage, they subconsciously buy a bird to go with it.

Therefore, while providing transactions between buyers and sellers, Guazi Second-hand Car has also launched other ancillary services, such as car loans, insurance, repairs, and maintenance. With huge traffic, some people will choose to purchase these ancillary services, thus bringing profits to the company.

After all, companies also need to make a living, and no one can expect the 4% service fee (Guazi’s service fee is actually the agency fee, just another way of saying it) to bring any profit, so the main profit still has to be obtained from these ancillary services.

1. Halo effect

Emphasize the advantages of your brand, let people see your advantages and magnify the disadvantages of your competitors.

Therefore, Guazi Used Cars emphasizes that "there are no middlemen to make a profit from the price difference" and says that their products have no middlemen, and individual sellers and individual buyers trade directly, so buyers spend less money and sellers make more money.

This move indirectly slaps the face of all similar products. Saying that you are good is just saying that others are not good! Isn't it just implying that there are middlemen for similar products, and the service fees they charge are not low?

1. Loss Aversion

The pain of losing 100 yuan is far greater than the happiness of picking up 100 yuan.

Therefore, Guazi.com added a "Discover" column to the APP, which aims to teach users how to choose and use cars, tell users the process of buying and selling cars, how to obtain after-sales services, etc.

After all, when everyone decides to buy a car, it is impossible for them to pay for the transaction immediately. They will definitely check various information online and decide whether to buy the car after getting the answer.

The "Discover" column of Guazi Used Cars just solves this pain point. It directly provides various car-related information for users to read in order to gain their trust and reduce their fear of loss. In this way, by eliminating users' concerns, there will be a greater chance of users purchasing cars on the platform.

3. Brand market positioning

In terms of time, Renrenche entered the used car market more than a year earlier than Guazi. But why is it that in people's general perception, Guazi is the leading brand in the used car market?

This brings us to the positioning of Guazi Used Cars. When it first entered the market, it took out two killer weapons to split the minds of users and quickly capture the minds of users.

Let me talk about the first killer weapon first:

"Individual sellers sell to individual buyers. There are no middlemen to make a profit from the price difference. Buyers spend less money and sellers make more money."

It is different from the traditional used car market, which sells to individuals through merchants. Guazi Used Cars emphasizes that used car transactions are transactions between individuals, there are no intermediaries, and no agency fees will be charged.

This is good news for both buyers and sellers. Let’s think about it, what do buyers fear the most when trading in the offline used car market?

I’m afraid of buying a car that’s too expensive or being ripped off.

What are sellers most afraid of?

With the presence of middlemen, people naturally dare not set the price too high, and thus make less money.

Therefore, the existence of Guazi Used Cars solves the pain points of both buyers and sellers. For buyers, they can spend less money, which is equivalent to getting a bargain; for sellers, they can make more money, so why not do it?

Let’s look at the second killer weapon:

"One year after its establishment, the transaction volume is already far ahead" (this slogan was changed to "Leader in the used car industry" because Renrenche complained about vicious competition and violation of the Advertising Law).

This is Guazi’s killer move to defeat Renrenche, quickly seizing the position of leader in the used car industry and thus establishing the image of Guazi as the number one in the minds of consumers.

Why can one defeat predecessors of similar level and funding with just one slogan?

We must know that no matter whether it is business model innovation or technological leadership, the market will give companies a time window of 3 months or even half a year. Companies must use this time to quickly seize the minds of consumers and implant the titles of "first", "leading" and "leader" in the minds of consumers. If you miss this window of time, you will most likely become a runner-up.

The reason why Renrenche lost was because it missed the window of opportunity and ultimately became a runner-up.

Finally, let’s look at Guazi.com, which has spent a lot of money on advertising to increase brand awareness and enhance market penetration. It has also quickly captured consumers’ minds and built influence by not having middlemen to make a profit. Finally, it has used human nature to retain users and made the company profitable through additional services.

This is Guazi Used Car. After analyzing the whole article, I think what is most worth learning is its positioning theory, because it understands positioning so thoroughly that it can definitely be regarded as the best among them.

Source: Xinmo Marketing (ID: xinmoyingxiao)