In the era of CEO selling cars, how to do a good job in automobile marketing

Text | Narrowcast, by | Zhao Xiaomi

The automotive industry has entered a new round of market segmentation brought about by intelligence. What follows is a new marketing rhythm for car companies, which is unprecedented in importance and rapid change.

The main challenges faced by car companies are as follows:

First, the car has gradually evolved from a means of transportation to a large-scale intelligent terminal, and more scenarios and functions need to be matched and effectively communicated with the more diversified needs of consumers. Second, the marketing channels have proliferated, and the voice channels and volume of users and brands have been "reversed"; Third, the industry is in a state of involution of the iteration of new and old forces, many old joint venture brands have begun to reduce 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 closer to "consumer electronics", where quality and technology determine everything, to "consumer electronics", which is more influenced by concept transmission and branding. 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 also have already understood the consumer electronics marketing model that is closer to today's automotive marketing trends.

The automotive industry has always been a highland customer for advertising investment, and it is also the type of customer that various community platforms are competing for.

At the time of the re-enclosure of the market, "Doukuai B Red Vision" has become the five most concerned and potential platforms. The efficient distribution of Douyin, Kuaishou's bottom-up transaction, the young long video community of Bilibili, Xiaohongshu's sensitivity in trends and labels, and the convergence of high-net-worth female consumer groups have made the car marketing of various platforms show different forms.

The drastic marketing actions of car companies in recent years can become an entry point for us to observe the characteristics and progress of commercialization of major platforms.

01 Automotive marketing ecology on different platforms

The personal IP of Internet celebrity entrepreneurs is becoming a leading force in the marketing of car companies. Whether it is at this year's Beijing Auto Show, or between the key voice nodes of various brands, CEOs nicknamed "old men" have entered the game one after another, more directly conveying brand concepts, functional models, and personal charm to build momentum for the brand.

"Uncle Zhou Hongyi in Red", "Li Bin of Weilai", "XP He Xiaopeng", "Lei Jun" and other major accounts with the CEO of the car company himself as the main body appeared; The CEOs of old car companies such as Great Wall Motor, Chery Group, and Geely Holding also conducted live broadcasts.

These CEO accounts distribute almost the same content across platforms, but they don't spread the same across platforms. Behind this is the difference between the traffic ecology and content ecology of each platform.

Channels present a stronger "sharing and communication" attribute. Based on WeChat's public domain traffic and private domain traffic, Channels has outstanding social fission capabilities. Unlike any other community platform, a large part of the discussion of Channels content does not take place in the comment area, but is shared in private domains such as WeChat groups, where more intense discussions and higher attention are held.

It can be seen from the retweet ratio that people have different desires to share and communicate on different platforms. According to Li Fang, head of automotive transportation industry planning at Tencent Advertising, the number of likes on video accounts is five times higher than that of other short video platforms.

Let's take Lei Jun's account as an example: his Zambido on the video account is between 1/1 and 1/5. Xiaomi has a whopping 3 billion views in the WeChat ecosystem, most of which are not commercial traffic, but the "tap water" brought by the interactive field between the private and public domains of Channels.

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 the automobile category in the video account reached 17%.

As early as 2020, Bilibili and Xpeng Motors jointly held a conference called "Super Long Long Car Conference". It can be seen from the name of the press conference that young people are the most important reason for car companies to choose station B.

According to a set of data released by station B, at station B, the proportion of male users of car content consumption is high, and more than half of the people over 25 years old have reached the golden stage of buying / changing cars, and they are moving towards the high point of consumption parabola.

However, the car advertising form of station B is relatively simple compared with other platforms. In terms of creative sources, the content of station B mainly includes the OGV content self-made by the platform and the PUGV content created by the UP master; In terms of marketing form, the car advertisements of station B are still dominated by traditional creative TVC.

Xiaohongshu is another auto marketing front that has recently emerged. Accurate insight into people and trends, as well as the collection of female users with spending power and actual car purchase decisions, are the core competitiveness of Xiaohongshu.

Xiaohongshu does auto marketing, focusing on matching the scene functions with consumer needs. For example, in the keywords of Xiaohongshu's passenger car notes in the past year, travel, daily, camping, self-driving tours, and off-road have become high-frequency keywords. Brands can use these segments to market by interpreting different lifestyles.

02 Longer consumption decisions, more demand reached

With the intensification of competition in the automotive industry and the explosion of media channels, the logic of automobile grass planting is also changing. One of the outstanding manifestations is that when consumers are repeatedly exposed to the same content with high frequency, their "vigilance" will increase, and the actual decision-making chain will become longer.

In this regard, in addition to the key marketing actions similar to the CEO's end, in daily communication, businesses need to use more touchpoints to reach high-frequency in an all-round way, and communicate with consumers continuously and long-term in a gentler but more comprehensive way.

From this point of view, whoever can achieve multi-point reach more smoothly may be a more attractive new position in automotive marketing.

Douyin is mainly reached through referral relationships, and Douyin, as a national APP, has the largest traffic pool, obvious billboard effect, and a generally wider coverage of centralized reach.

At Bilibili, the KOLs represented by the UP master assume the core concept leading position, and most of them present a single-point reach based on close attention to the relationship, sometimes supplemented by public domain recommendations such as hot lists. At the same time, Bilibili has a long video knowledge mentality, which may attract some potential consumers to actively search or pay attention to it regularly, which is equivalent to achieving a small range of accuracy and efficiency through the circle layer.

In addition to homepage recommendations and attention recommendations, Xiaohongshu also has the contact point of private message groups. And, because Xiaohongshu's grass planting pays attention to daily life, it may also see car-related content in the pan-content scenario.

Channels that rely on the WeChat ecosystem can reach consumers in a variety of ways.

In the WeChat ecosystem, a fourfold relationship has been formed between buyers and sellers: first, the recommendation relationship, which is driven by algorithms, including functions such as listening, watching, live broadcast rooms, and short videos; the second is to search for relationships; the third is to pay attention to the relationship; Finally, there are social connections, where users can build closer social connections by adding friends.

Relying on these four layers of relationships, as well as the closed loop of social relationships formed with WeChat and WeChat, top talents such as CEOs and super IPs; Vertical KOLs with strong professionalism; Tens of thousands of stores and sales matrix numbers can achieve close interaction with users through multi-form marketing methods such as screen swiping, short video planting, or live shopping guides.

Some car companies that have settled in the video account have achieved phased results. According to Cui Fangfang, the person in charge of the live broadcast of Tencent Advertising Automobile Transportation Industry Factory Store, dealer accounts will increase by 735% year-on-year in 2023, and some companies will get 200,000 clues in the first quarter through live broadcast on the video account.

For example, FAW-Volkswagen has achieved an average of 70,000 monthly leads and 100,000 short video playbacks by making scenario-based videos from the perspective of car owners. FAW Audi has 40 live broadcasts in 10 days, achieving a single traffic of more than 60,000, and the cost of clues in the live broadcast room has been reduced to almost one-tenth.

03 Who will be the next car marketing field?

What the future of automobile marketing will look like must be the result of the changes in the consumption logic of automobiles, as well as the progress of marketing field, that is, the commercialization of the platform.

As for the Xiaohongshu video account of station B, the first two have clearly taken commercialization as the focus of the next development, and the video account has a mature commercialization system and a more complete grass transformation chain to rely on.

Bilibili still emphasizes its unique role as a PUGV-based community platform for medium and long videos in "deeply influencing the minds of consumers". Especially in the automotive field, many consumers will most likely still go to station B to watch the evaluation video of the UP master before making a decision, to understand professional knowledge, as a part of planting grass.

Xiaohongshu's entire user scale and user duration are improving, and the mind as a place for consumption decisions has basically gained a foothold on the whole network. Any industry, any category, almost can't avoid the marketing field of Xiaohongshu, but Xiaohongshu needs to provide brand-specific marketing tools and methodologies.

Specific to the automotive industry, Xiaohongshu may be able to optimize in two aspects. The first is to supplement some in-depth explanation content in addition to scene content to influence consumers more deeply; Second, improve the performance of marketing products and tools suitable for automotive customers, such as search and leads.

As for the video account, its advantages are first of all the advantages of the public opinion field and the matrix of marketing experts mentioned above. For example, when Chery Xingtuxing Era ET was listed, it used 1 head expert "Wu Pei", 9 industry large interpretations, more than 90 talent accounts to spread, and more than 100 sales accounts to spread, and the event highlights and topic effects of "Chery's chairman personally went down for the first time to jointly broadcast live with friends in the circle of friends", and finally the whole network read more than 280 million.

The entire WeChat ecosystem is also constantly improving the infrastructure of commercial products and updating platform services. For example, the launch of the first use, pay later function, online freight insurance, etc.; As well as actively inviting brands and merchants to settle in through traffic support and reducing commissions, and encourage creators to grow. According to the "2024 Creator Marketing White Paper" jointly released by Tencent Advertising Automotive Industry and the Channels mutual selection platform, the scale of creators in the 2023 Channels mutual selection car category increased by 8 times compared with the previous year, and the car transaction value increased by 200% year-on-year.

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

In the automotive industry, brands generally judge the effectiveness of their advertising from three aspects. The first step is impression, i.e., how many people have seen the ad; The second step, engagement, is how many people open the ad and enter the specific product page; The third step, leads, how many people have left personal information and other dealer contacts.

In addition to these three steps, the video account can rely on tools such as Qiwei to conduct closed-loop monitoring of the whole life cycle of subsequent customer addition, communication, and even store visits and purchases. This is probably where it is most difficult to replicate.