Insight into the Beijing Auto Show: Attribution of Automotive Companies’ Marketing Effectiveness

This article discusses the social media marketing content and platforms of car companies through the Beijing Auto Show. If you are interested, let’s take a look.

More than 1,500 automakers participated in the exhibition, 278 new energy models were unveiled, 163 press conferences were held, and 117 new cars were launched globally... After a four-year absence, the Beijing Auto Show, which just ended, has set off a social buzz across the Internet. Not only did major automakers compete to show off their skills and launch new products and technologies, but there were also hot events that sparked heated discussions across the Internet, bringing about another round of efficient dissemination of automotive content.

Lei Jun visited Taiwan's friendly companies to tour the exhibition, "Uncle in Red" Zhou Hongyi climbed onto the roof of a car to become the most eye-catching "car model", and "Physics Tutor" Zhang Chaoyang turned the scene into a lecture hall and gave a physics class to all people... The entrepreneurs who have become famous have become the biggest topic of this auto show. In addition, the strong launch of new products by domestic brands and the healthy competition among domestic new energy vehicle companies have become the focus of discussion among netizens. Automakers have launched limited-time discounts at the auto show to seize the opportunity to boost sales.

Social media and sales have become the two core keywords of this year's Beijing Auto Show.

During the Beijing Auto Show, which car companies and models had outstanding voice performance? What are the characteristics and differences of the main contributors to the Beijing Auto Show on each platform? What are the characteristics of the hit works during the Beijing Auto Show on each platform? Clour combined the data of the new media voice monitoring system to analyze the voice performance of each platform of the Beijing Auto Show and released the "2024 Beijing Auto Show Voice Data Report". Let's take a look at the outstanding data performance of this year's "most watched" auto show.

1. The appearance of “big guys” triggered a buzz, and the auto show changed from a “technical show” to a “sales venue”

Even before the opening of the Beijing Auto Show, major automakers had already begun to preheat price cuts and stepped on the "accelerator" in advance for sales performance during the Beijing Auto Show. A series of discussions about prices frequently became hot searches.

Ideal Auto, which has always adhered to its pricing, announced the adoption of a new pricing system, which even caused dissatisfaction among old car owners; Tesla reduced the price of its entire series by about 14,000 yuan, continuing to "squeeze" prices; Xiaopeng, Zhijie and others also brought different preferential activities to attract users to buy... "Price for volume" has become one of the marketing strategies of car companies during the Beijing Auto Show.

According to the data from the China Passenger Car Association, with its price advantage, the sales volume of new energy narrow passenger cars in April reached 674,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 28.3%, and the cumulative sales volume reached 2.448 million units, a year-on-year increase of 32.9%. The domestic retail penetration rate was 43.7%, an increase of 11.7 percentage points from the penetration rate of 32% in the same period last year.

Image courtesy of China Passenger Car Association

Soon, with the official opening of the auto show, the topic of the price war among automakers was quickly "drowned" by the volume of the Beijing Auto Show. According to Crawley data, the total volume of the five major content platforms on the first day of the auto show was about 341 million, of which Weibo and Douyin contributed more than 90%. In terms of content, the debut of Xiaomi SU7 attracted the attention of netizens, and the appearance of senior executives and celebrities of major automakers at the auto show set off a wave of discussion.

In the following days, the M7 accident triggered discussions among netizens about the safety of assisted driving, which boosted the popularity of related car companies and models. Zhou Hongyi's Maybach auction incident continued to ferment, and the final payment issue was repeatedly searched on major platforms.

From the perspective of the platform, Weibo has more than 10,000 accounts participating in the creation of auto show content, and the number of works is much higher than other platforms. Douyin has the highest average account volume contribution value. Although the number of participating accounts on Bilibili is not large, the average account volume contribution is outstanding. In the case of not having an advantage in content volume, the volume of a single work on Bilibili is slightly higher than that of Douyin, ranking first in the volume contribution of a single work on all platforms.

At the same time, in addition to automobile vertical content, Weibo technology and digital and other platforms that cater to vertical content and life-oriented content contributed more volume during the auto show, and high-quality content attracted the attention of netizens and spread spontaneously. For example, the humorous and funny blogger @雪姨和佳阳 on Douyin cleverly integrated the Xiaomi SU7 into the scene of young people on campus watching and chatting up, highlighting the youthfulness of the car model users through humorous content.

Overall, topics related to car company bosses performed relatively prominently during the auto show. The high-volume content among content platforms had differentiated characteristics, with Weibo and Douyin becoming platforms with outstanding volume performance.

2. The hot topic on the entire network, what are users talking about?

According to the data from the car voice system of the Clour New Media Platform, during the 2024 Beijing Auto Show, Xiaomi Auto ranked first, with Tesla and Mercedes-Benz ranking second and third respectively. AITO entered the top five in terms of voice and became a "dark horse", becoming the top two new power brands with Xiaomi Auto.

It is worth noting that, in a horizontal comparison of the performance of automakers on the five major content platforms, except for Kuaishou, Xiaomi Auto's voice volume has entered the top 10, and its voice volume on Douyin and Weibo is comparable. AITO and Weilai, both domestic new power brands, mainly contribute to their voice volume on Weibo.

Among traditional car companies, the domestic brand Great Wall has an outstanding voice on the Douyin platform, and more than 70% of its and Hongqi's voice comes from the Douyin platform.

Compared with imported brands, nearly 70% of Tesla's popularity comes from Weibo, while most of Mercedes-Benz and BMW's popularity comes from Douyin. BMW also has a certain popularity on Xiaohong. For joint venture brands, Douyin has a slight advantage. Volkswagen has nearly 20% of its popularity on Xiaohongshu. Toyota is relatively balanced between Weibo and Douyin. Audi mainly relies on Douyin to gain popularity.

According to Crawley statistics, the total volume of new energy vehicles during the Beijing Auto Show was about 49.099 million, and the total volume of fuel vehicles was 26.832 million. Xiaomi SU7 and Wenjie M7 received strong attention among new energy vehicles, and their volume performance far exceeded that of other models.

Xiaomi SU7's popularity mainly comes from Weibo and TikTok, with users focusing on battery, battery life and price. Wenjie M7 has a higher popularity on Weibo, with users mostly discussing vehicle functions and safety around a negative accident.

It is not difficult to find that the hot topics during the auto show are not necessarily all about the cars themselves. The negative news about the M7 focused people's attention on safety and functional configuration, Okura Takashi's rhythmic dance of the Great Wall Cannon triggered users' imitation, and Wang Feng extended his masterpiece in NIO... Hot topics extended from cars gradually began to contribute more voice to the brand.

Looking at the hot topics on various content platforms, #2024Beijing Auto Show, #Xiaomisu7, and #Beijing Auto Show Trend are the top three topics in terms of volume. Frequent interactions between Lei Jun, Wang Chuanfu and other car company bosses have led to multiple hot topics that have made it into the top 10. Among the hot topics, users discussed vehicle prices and configurations more, followed by power and performance.

Overall, at important industry time points such as auto shows, social media communication has become an important part of brand hot spots. At a time when car users are getting younger, how to closely monitor the dissemination trend of major brand events and public opinion trends is of great significance to the development of the entire auto industry, and this is also the key to doing a good job in social media marketing.

3. Visualization of Voice Volume: A Scientific Measurement of Automotive Marketing

In the process of brand content dissemination and fermentation, although brands can understand the dissemination effect through the background data of the works, they lack systematic cognition of voice monitoring, the direction of netizens' discussion, and the comparison of competitor voice. This is because voice monitoring is a dynamic process. Brands need to receive information in real time according to the direction of user discussion and adjust strategies in time. At the same time, there is no comprehensive, flexible tool on the market that can continuously monitor the distribution of voice trends of brands and products in multiple industries on mainstream new media platforms.

In order to solve the pain points of automobile brand voice monitoring, Clour combines communication-related concepts, based on the idea of ​​"different platforms, different weights", and designs algorithms based on the logic of NLP natural language analysis keyword hits. It is the first to create a scientific algorithm for new media voice, and based on this, it has built Clour's new media voice monitoring system.

Clour’s new media voice monitoring system covers more than 800,000 accounts on Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili, and monitors more than 1 million works per day. It can provide voice analysis and monitoring of brands and products in multiple industries, and output visual chart interfaces and functions for brands in a friendly and intuitive manner.

Brands can not only identify the source of the volume and collect the volume performance of their own works, but also bring together the marketing value of different platforms. For KOL placement, brands can gain insight into the influence of content creators, while taking into account the volume performance of creators in different vertical categories, and improve the efficiency of cross-domain content dissemination.

On this basis, brands can quantify the brand and product voice on new media platforms so that they can be evaluated. By combining quantitative data with brand order behavior, the cost and effect of advertising can be compared, enabling new media advertising analysis and insights, and helping to optimize advertising strategies.

Simply put, voice can be sustainably collected/quantified, marketing input-output ratio can be evaluated, and brand marketing strategies can be analyzed and optimized.

Nowadays, car marketing has entered the social media era. More and more car companies choose to attract the attention of young users by using KOLs to speak out and create hot topics. Social media marketing has become a normal action for car companies, not only during new car launches or auto shows. However, in this process, advertising is not a one-time deal. Public opinion monitoring and data analysis within a certain period of time are the best basis for optimizing advertising strategies and improving advertising effects, which is exactly what car companies tend to overlook.

Author: Klout Source: WeChat public account "TopKlout Klout (ID: TopKlout)"