The last mile of the car industry’s mind: Video account

The last mile of the car circle's mind in this article has begun to migrate to the video account. Let us take a look at the author's analysis.

01

The Ideal Mega incident, the launch of Xiaomi su7, the popularity of the auto show, and Hongyi selling cars, 2024 is the decisive year for new energy and is destined to be recorded in the history of business.

If you think about it carefully, there are two common themes: first, the founder's IP has become the highest-level strategy for leveraging corporate potential; second, more and more industry topics are exploding in the WeChat ecosystem.

The former cannot be replicated, and the latter is the key to positional warfare.

02

Video Account has made an indelible contribution.

Xiaolong's definition of its atomic components completes the key puzzle of WeChat ecosystem. In the past two or three years, it has quietly become the standard for many official microblogs and self-media.

Ever since the links between video account → WeChat group and video account → Moments were unblocked, the social fission of super topics has become unstoppable.

These atomic components include: account, video/live broadcast, comment area, data volume, friend dynamics, etc. In addition to the content itself, the invisible information density is very large, and each touch point affects the occurrence of the next touch point.

The most intuitive ones are the herd effect and the strong-admiring effect, while the more hidden one is the consistency of private relationships. In social scenarios, every PV/VV is about human nature, interests, aesthetics, supply and demand, desires, and relationships, not just primary emotions.

This is the most essential difference between Video Account and Douyin and Kuaishou, which many people have overlooked (in fact, most people do it subconsciously).

03

From this perspective, the popularity of the automotive industry can be traced back to its more fundamental causes. Behind every major event, there are complex and diverse roles driving it.

• Some people admire the strength of masters, while others hate someone's arrogance;
• Some people like the Porsche style, while others lament the plagiarism.
• Some people just like to watch jokes, some people know they are in a game within a game;
• Some people are shouting that the country's destiny remains, while others are secretly doing evil...

There is no absolute right or wrong, only ever-changing changes. Collective unidirectionality can hardly create national topics. Only complex values ​​can drive the nonlinear evolution of events.

Those who take the initiative to bring up a topic are masters, and those who can turn being passive into being active are masters among masters.

04

Back to business, in the supermarket with a trillion-level cycle of blood turnover, top-tier IPs are in urgent need. The remaining hundreds of millions of marketing expenses are real, and winning the initiative in competition is a strategic necessity. The bigwigs behind the scenes have begun to reveal their eager eyes to become famous.

The last mile of the automotive industry's mind has begun to migrate to video accounts, and almost all new forces have also made their moves.

Especially at the auto show, Lei Jun became a "mascot", Zhou Hongyi became a "car model", and Li Xiang directly "locked" Lei Jun in the car; Xiaomi brought huge traffic to the Great Wall Motors booth, BYD booth, Ideal booth, Changan booth, etc., and almost every joke can be mapped one by one to the video account.

There is a seemingly inconspicuous (but very important) signal. At the auto show, if ordinary audiences want to receive the "chips" for small gifts, they just need to follow the video account. The gears of traffic start to turn from the source.

05

This wave of new energy forces has also opened up new marketing for the century-old automobile industry.

In the past, in the era of joint venture and imported cars, you would come up with a few high-end words that no one could understand, and then shoot some grand promotional videos, and put them in subways, on TV, and in various outdoor advertisements. It didn’t matter whether consumers could understand them or not, what mattered was that the “level” was high.

Today everything has changed.

06

1. From the era of hard advertising to the era of hot topics;

For example, Xiaomi's hot sales, in addition to the Mi fans who gained from the first sale, many people continued to pay attention to Xiaomi SU7 in the subsequent long-tail topics. From the body, number, sun protection, refrigerator, etc., they were all hot searches.

2. From professional media to the national mind;

Automotive media has always been a very "vertical" circle in the advertising circle. Nowadays, it is hard to say for girls, but for boys, "everyone is a professional car reviewer." Now it is about the mind, and we need to move the products, technology and user experience to short videos and live broadcast rooms for users to see, so as to truly establish a trusting relationship with users.

3. From traffic funnel to top IP, and then to KOL/KOC matrix;

The traditional funnel model is already very inefficient, and top-tier IPs are hard to come by. A more stable approach in the future will be to turn KOLs into consumers and cultivate fans into KOCs of the brand.

07

The particularity of car purchasing decisions.

Unlike general consumer goods, the consumer decision of placing an order for a car needs to be considered at three levels:

First of all, it is cognition. In addition to public domain advertising, private domain is also very important, such as someone mentioning a new car in the circle of friends, video content liked by friends, discussions in WeChat groups, etc. The reach of private domain is closer to the real consumer psychology;

The second is to go to the store. My colleagues have recently visited various car companies and their experience shows that as long as you enter the store, even if it is just for a stroll, the car company staff will ask you to add the company WeChat account. With the company WeChat account, it is equivalent to having your own traffic pool. The advantage of the video account is that it can be forwarded with one click, directly reaching the private domain customer base, and the average sales customer base is 2,000 to 5,000 people.

The final decision is made. In the process of car purchase, persuading consumers still depends on one-on-one private messages, especially since the landing prices and subsidy policies vary from region to region.

It is visible to the naked eye that almost all the most critical decisions are made through the WeChat ecosystem + offline, and car companies have also realized the value of systematic decision-making.

08

A new blue ocean strategy: product selection and search efficiency.

When it comes to the micro-management of the marketing department, we will pursue a more pragmatic approach. Officials said that they will start from the four dimensions of brand, content, operation, and effect to meet the marketing demands of the entire cycle of the new car launch.

From my personal perspective, you have to understand this gameplay in reverse order: effect → search → select → product.

• Effectiveness: After watching the video content, if you feel touched, you can directly add the company’s WeChat for consultation (mostly dealers), which is the prelude to a transaction in one step. In particular, the “social + algorithm” recommendation mechanism has made substantial progress in the past six months;
• Search - Through WeChat search, you can connect to search scenarios inside and outside the domain, accept users' active search behaviors, and directly connect to the brand zone, eliminating many steps that may cause customer loss;
• Selection - Based on Tencent's talent ecosystem, with a discourse system that adapts to the user circle, it helps advertisers tell good brand stories and product selling points. In 2023, the number of creators in the automobile category selected by Video Accounts increased by 8 times year-on-year, and the transaction amount increased by 200% year-on-year;
• Brands - getting closer to consumers on WeChat, the online platform closest to them, is becoming one of the ways for car companies to break through. For example, many car company bosses, such as Li Bin, founder of NIO, and Wei Jianjun, founder of Great Wall Motors, have used video accounts as a key platform to enhance the credibility of their products and company brands with their personal credit.

Everyone knows that video accounts are a low-value area, but how low is it? Industry insiders said. In the current automotive industry, the cost of a store lead is about several thousand yuan. However, by forwarding, sharing, and interacting with video accounts, potential customers are attracted to the live broadcast room, which brings an average of 8 to 12 times the traffic leverage (dynamically changing).

It is unknown how long this situation will last, depending on the degree of competition saturation.

09

Lei Jun and Zhou Hongyi cannot be copied, but their market management can be copied.

The competition among new energy brands (excluding supply-side factors) is largely a competition of emotional value and social value.

It is difficult to copy the big guys, but it is feasible to use video accounts to form a kind of synergy and linkage to connect the WeChat ecosystem. Whether it is a car company executive or a dealer, sincerity is always the ultimate skill.

In addition, the content of the video account is not a one-time random touch, but a long-term and precise ecological impact, which requires a systematic and stable operating organization, and cannot be entirely a one-man show.

10

Special Edition.

Even Tesla, which claims to "not advertise", has its store clerks privately show video accounts. Don't ask why, just because they are team members who just came out of a Tesla store.

Official account: Party A Finance