How to do car marketing well in the era of CEO selling cars

As the automotive industry enters the era of intelligence, marketing methods have also undergone tremendous changes. This article explores the impact of different marketing platforms on the automotive industry and how automotive companies use these platforms to promote their products. From Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu to WeChat Video Account, each platform has its unique advantages and applicable scenarios. The article also deeply analyzes the changes in the consumer decision-making chain and how to achieve more effective marketing strategies through multi-point touch. It is suitable for readers who are interested in automotive marketing.

The automotive industry has entered a new round of market segmentation brought about by intelligence. Along with it comes a new marketing rhythm for automakers, which is unprecedented in terms of importance and speed of change.

The challenges faced by automakers are mainly the following:

First, cars have gradually evolved from means of transportation to large-scale smart terminals. More scenarios and functions need to be matched with the more diversified demands of consumers and effectively communicated; second, marketing channels have surged, and the voice channels and voices of users and brands have "reversed"; third, the industry is in a state of internal circulation with the iteration of new and old forces. Many old joint venture brands have begun to cut prices, the number of new forces has surged, and the pressure on car companies has further increased.

This means that the automotive industry is gradually moving from "industrial products" where quality and technology determine everything to "consumer electronics" that are more influenced by concept transmission and brand building. This is also one of the reasons why Xiaomi, Huawei and other companies are accompanied by huge traffic when they cross over into the automotive industry - they have not only accumulated enough user trust, but have also long understood the consumer electronics marketing model that is closer to today's automotive marketing trends.

The automotive industry has always been a high-investment customer in advertising, and is also a type of customer that all kinds of community platforms are competing for.

As the market is re-circling, Douyin, Kuaishou, Bhongshu and Hongshi have become the five most popular and promising platforms. Douyin's efficient distribution, Kuaishou's bottom-up transaction entry, Bilibili's young long video community and Xiaohongshu's keenness in trends and labels and the gathering of high-net-worth female consumer groups have made the automotive marketing of each platform show different forms.

The fierce marketing actions of automobile companies in recent years can serve as a starting point for us to observe the commercialization characteristics and progress of major platforms.

1. Automotive Marketing Ecosystem on Different Platforms

Internet celebrity entrepreneurs’ personal IP is becoming a dominant force in car companies’ marketing. Whether it is at this year’s Beijing Auto Show or at key voice nodes of various brands, CEOs nicknamed “old men” have joined the game, more directly conveying brand concepts, functional models, and personal charm to build momentum for the brand.

Accounts featuring the CEOs of major car companies, such as "Uncle Zhou Hongyi in Red", "Li Bin of NIO", "XP He Xiaopeng", and "Lei Jun", appeared; CEOs of established car companies such as Great Wall Motors, Chery Group, and Geely Holding also conducted live broadcasts.

These CEO accounts distribute almost the same content on various platforms, but the dissemination effects are different on various platforms. Behind this is the difference in traffic ecology and content ecology of each platform.

Video accounts present a stronger "sharing and communication" attribute. Based on WeChat's public and private traffic, video accounts have outstanding social fission capabilities. Unlike any community platform, a large part of the discussion of video account content does not take place in the comment area, but through sharing to private domains such as WeChat groups, more intense discussions and higher attention are carried out in the group.

The likes-and-repost ratio shows the difference in people's desire to share and communicate on different platforms. According to Li Fang, head of automotive and transportation industry planning at Tencent Advertising, the likes-and-repost ratio of Video Account is five times higher than that of other short video platforms.

Let’s take Lei Jun’s account as an example: the repost-like ratio of his videos is between 1/1 and 1/5. Xiaomi has 3 billion views in the WeChat ecosystem, most of which are not commercial traffic, but the “tap water” brought by the interaction between the private and public domains of the video account.

This kind of discussion atmosphere is more friendly to many categories that require a certain threshold of consumer awareness, including automobiles. Li Fang also shared that the completion rate of automobiles in the video account reached 17%.

Bilibili is one of the content platforms that entered the automotive commercialization market earlier. As early as 2020, Bilibili and Xiaopeng Motors jointly held a "Super Long Long Long Automotive Conference". As can be seen from the name of the conference, young people are the most important reason why automakers choose Bilibili. By getting close to Bilibili, they can get close to young people.

According to a set of data released by Bilibili, male users account for a high proportion of automobile content consumption on Bilibili, and more than half of them are over 25 years old. These users have reached the golden stage of buying/changing cars and are heading towards the peak of the consumption parabola.

However, compared with other platforms, the form of automobile advertisements on Bilibili is relatively simple. In terms of the source of creation, Bilibili content mainly includes OGV content produced by the platform and PUGV content created by UP masters; in terms of marketing form, Bilibili's automobile advertisements are still mainly traditional creative TVC.

Xiaohongshu is another recently emerging automotive marketing platform. Its core competitiveness lies in its accurate insights into people and trends, as well as its collection of female users with consumption power and actual car purchase decisions.

Xiaohongshu's main focus in car marketing is to match scene functions with consumer needs. For example, among the keywords of passenger car notes on Xiaohongshu in the past year, travel, daily life, camping, self-driving tours, and off-roading have become high-frequency keywords. Brands can use these segmented car use scenarios to conduct marketing by interpreting different lifestyles.

2. Longer consumer decision-making and more reach

As competition in the automotive industry intensifies and media channels increase explosively, the logic of automotive promotion is also changing. One prominent manifestation is that when consumers are exposed to the same content multiple times and at high frequency, their "wariness" will increase, and the actual decision-making process will become longer.

In this regard, in addition to key marketing actions like the CEO's actions, in daily communications, businesses need to use more touchpoints for all-round and high-frequency reach, and communicate with consumers in a gentler but more comprehensive way for a continuous and long-term period.

From this perspective, whoever can achieve multi-point reach more smoothly may have the potential to become a more attractive new frontier in automotive marketing.

Douyin mainly reaches out through recommendation relationships, and as a national APP, Douyin has the largest traffic pool and obvious billboard effect, and the coverage of concentrated reach is generally wider.

On Bilibili, KOLs represented by UP hosts take on the core position of leading ideas, and often present a single point of contact based on close attention relationships, sometimes supplemented by public domain recommendations such as hot lists. At the same time, Bilibili has a long video knowledge-seeking mentality, which may attract some potential consumers to actively search or pay attention regularly, which is equivalent to achieving small-scale precision and efficiency through circles.

In addition to homepage recommendations and follow-up recommendations, Xiaohongshu also has a private message group as a touchpoint. Also, because Xiaohongshu's grass-growing is about daily life, you may also see car-related content in the general content scenario.

Video accounts based on the WeChat ecosystem can reach consumers in a variety of ways.

In the WeChat ecosystem, four relationships are formed between buyers and sellers: the first is the recommendation relationship, which is driven by algorithms and includes functions such as listen, watch, live broadcast and short video; the second is the search relationship; the third is the follow-up relationship; and the last is the social relationship, where users can establish closer social connections by adding friends.

Relying on these four levels of relationships, as well as the closed loop of social relationships formed with WeChat and enterprise microblogs, top influencers such as CEOs and super IPs; highly professional vertical KOLs; and tens of thousands of stores and sales matrix accounts can achieve close interaction with users through multiple forms of marketing methods such as screen-sweeping hot spots, short videos, or live shopping guides.

Some car companies that have settled in video accounts have achieved phased results. According to Cui Fangfang, head of Tencent Advertising's automotive and transportation industry factory store live broadcast, dealer accounts increased by 735% year-on-year in 2023, and one company received 200,000 leads in the first quarter through live broadcasts on video accounts.

For example, FAW-Volkswagen achieved an average of 70,000 leads per month and 100,000 average short video views by making scenario-based videos from the car owners' perspective; FAW-Volkswagen held 40 live broadcasts in 10 days, achieving a single-show traffic of over 60,000, and the lead cost in the live broadcast room was almost reduced to one-tenth.

3. Who will become the next automotive marketing field?

What future automobile marketing will look like will definitely be the result of changes in automobile consumption logic and the progress of marketing field, that is, platform commercialization.

The Douyin and Kuaishou models are relatively mature and have traffic advantages. As for Bilibili and Xiaohongshu’s video accounts, the former two have clearly identified commercialization as their next development focus, while the video account has a mature commercialization system and a more complete grass-planting conversion chain to rely on.

Bilibili still emphasizes its unique role in "deeply influencing consumers' minds" as a community platform that mainly uses PUGV for medium and long videos. Especially in the automotive field, many consumers will most likely still go to Bilibili to watch UP's evaluation videos before making a decision to learn professional knowledge as part of the seeding process.

The user scale and user time of Xiaohongshu are increasing, and it has basically established itself as a place for consumer decision-making. Almost all industries and categories cannot avoid the marketing field of Xiaohongshu, but Xiaohongshu needs to provide brands with corresponding marketing tools and methodologies.

Specifically for the automotive industry, Xiaohongshu may be able to start optimization from two aspects. First, in addition to the scenario-based content, it can add some in-depth explanation content to influence consumers more deeply; second, it can improve the performance of marketing products and tools such as search and leads that are suitable for automotive customers.

As for the video account, its advantages are first of all the advantages of the public opinion field and the marketing expert matrix mentioned above. Tencent Advertising summarizes it as "quality, selection, search, and effect". For example, when Chery Xingtu Xingjiyuan ET was launched, it relied on a top expert "Wu Pei", 9 industry big accounts for interpretation, more than 90 expert accounts for dissemination, and more than 100 sales accounts for dissemination, to maximize the event highlights and topic effects of "Chery Chairman personally participated in the first live broadcast with friends in the circle of friends", and finally the total network reading volume exceeded 280 million.

The entire WeChat ecosystem is also constantly improving the infrastructure of commercial products and updating platform services. For example, it launched the use-now-pay-later function and launched freight insurance, and actively invited brands and merchants to join through traffic support and reduced commissions, and encouraged creators to grow. According to the "2024 Creator Marketing White Paper" jointly released by Tencent Advertising Automotive Industry and Video Account Interactive Selection Platform, the scale of creators in the 2023 Video Account Interactive Selection Automotive category increased by 8 times year-on-year, and the amount of auto transactions increased by 200% year-on-year.

More importantly, Video Account can rely on the various technical collaborations of Tencent's system capabilities to complete a full-domain marketing closed loop from lead mining to sales completion.

In the automotive industry, brands generally judge the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns from three aspects: the first step is impression, which is how many people see the ad; the second step is engagement, which is how many people open the ad and go to the specific product page; the third step is leads, which is how many people leave personal information and contact dealers.

In addition to these three steps, the video account can rely on tools such as WeChat to conduct a closed-loop monitoring of subsequent customer additions, communication, and even store visits and purchases throughout the entire life cycle. This may be the most difficult part to replicate.

Author: Narrow Broadcast; WeChat public account: Narrow Broadcast (ID: exact-interaction)