Automotive marketing, the new way to sell cars

The automotive industry is a changing industry, which has come a long way. From the Model T to Tesla’s testing of autonomous driving, there have been and are major trends that are shaking the auto industry.

One of them is that the customer journey of the customer willing to buy a car has been substantially transformed.

At the beginning of the last millennium, it was common for a potential customer to go to the dealerships of a certain brand to look for information about a vehicle that interested him. But, according to Google research, the customer’s journey is becoming less physical and more digital.

Today, doubts and questions about the suitability of the vehicle, its technical capabilities, its sustainability and the prices and payment methods are consulted and resolved online.

So, with potential customers investing much less time in viewing cars at dealerships, digital marketing is taking on another relevance in the field of car sales.

In this post, we will see how digital marketing can help the automotive industry sell – by shaping automotive marketing that is attentive to these new habits of potential customers.

Establishing a presence

An Autotrader study stated that the Internet is 20 times more influential on potential customers in the automotive industry than other media (especially thinking about Generation X and millennials).

This influence can only have increased, especially if we consider that anyone interested in buying a car has an internet connection.

As people rely more and more on internet search engines to reach the cars they are interested in, dealerships can no longer fall back on print media, billboards and other traditional advertising.

Nowadays, to be truly competitive, it is essential to have a website or landing page (a website oriented to a specific objective, usually performance) optimized for search engines and cell phones.

The user’s experience is also key – since your site will be the first, or perhaps the only, point of contact the potential customer has with your brand.

Have a well optimized landing page

A good example of a landing page is KIA’s for the test-drive. Although this landing page no longer runs (it was a campaign last year), it is a good example of how to build an optimized landing page.

In the page you can see that there are no links that lead out of the landing, so to exit you must click on the button “close” of the tab or complete the form for the test drive.

The title is oriented to the benefits that visitors can get from the landing (and in a different color to the CTA buttons and the rest of the text).

To see more about landing pages, you can visit this link, which offers some tips on how to build an efficient and optimized landing page.

Create successful advertising ads

According to a study conducted by Google, 69% of users were influenced by video content (Youtube, for example) when deciding to buy a car, far exceeding traditional channels such as newspapers, magazines or even TV.

Recently, Autocity launched a branding campaign that will make you not forget your name and avoid laughing.

For its part, Toyota’s innovative campaign for its Camry (called “Sensations”) leaves us some lessons in creativity.

In that campaign, Toyota used the audience segmentation tool to show videos according to the mood expressed by the tweets of a certain user: for example, if someone tweeted a happy emoji, the advertisement showed him a video with a happy emoji.

Generating interest

Rising car costs (not only in product, but also in maintenance – gasoline, insurance, taxes) and the rise of carsharing (carpooling or ridesharing) are reducing interest in buying cars.

At this point, it is already a confirmed fact that the Millennials are buying fewer cars than previous generations.

So it is important to generate interest in buying.

As we said above, the automotive customer spends more time online. And it is in this digital ecosystem that automotive marketing can make its contribution, meeting potential customers with interesting content.

So how do we generate interest among such a digitalized audience? In the last year alone, the display of this type of content has doubled.

Below are the three types of content with the highest conversion rates.

• Test drives
• Feature videos
• Videos of walks

Managing leads

Automotive marketing must pay attention to customers who do not make their purchase in a short period of time, but need more time to decide. In order to take advantage of this flow of customers, it is necessary to manage leads and make room for email marketing.

The communication sequences that constitute lead nurturing are very common in digital marketing, and have much to contribute to the automotive industry.

Indeed, they can help sales teams capitalize on those potential customers who might, without these efforts, disperse and end up buying from the competition.

A contact list can serve as a starting point for setting up campaigns or newsletters and sending them to potential customers.

From there, and with the use of metrics (click and open rates, for example), you can segment the prospects so that the sales teams work on that base information, capitalizing on the entire flow of potential customers.

Giving rise to real conversations

One of the most influential trends in digital marketing is marketing automation – the implementation of software to automate marketing actions that would otherwise have to be done manually in a longer time and with a greater expenditure of energy. And at the height of this trend, we find chatbots.

Chatbots are software that automate customer service, that is, software that speeds up conversational marketing – conversations with the customer.

This software has a lot of potential to streamline the automotive industry’s conversations. It can make them happen at the time the customer wants and from the device that suits him best.

Real conversations in real time, without having to go through a tedious form that leaves them waiting and, in most cases, without an answer.

These technologies reaffirm the need for users to converse with brands, as it has been proven that they multiply the conversion rates of landing pages.

The best part? Although they are no longer a novelty in the European or American market as they were one or two years ago, they are in the Latin American market, allowing companies to be innovation references with the use of this technology.