According to a recent Nielsen survey, 94% of car buyers use the Internet to select.
The remaining 6%, most likely, use the skills of a cracker, the advantages of night time and a couple of loyal master keys. Users approach the selection process as responsibly as possible, on average using as many as 7 different sources of information, and in order to finally decide on a suitable make and model, they need to spend as much as 103 days. What does all this mean for car brands? If you want to sell, fight for leadership in digital. Adjust the context, place native advertising, and do not forget about on social networks - after all, it is this channel that allows you to maintain contact with consumers for a long time - 103 days, and 1003 days, and until the user suddenly moves to the dead taiga tear you apart.
Automobile companies began to understand this in 2010-2011, deciding to have a full-fledged SMM. The content at that time was made up of whimsically adapted global posts, the first local creatives began to appear. After 2-3 years, the competition has increased significantly - more than 30 brands are fixed in social media, increasing activity from year to year. The emphasis is on the visualization of content, the quality adaptation of global materials and the generation of local activities. The target audience is segmented and prioritized among social media. At the beginning of 2015, the market collapsed sharply, and social networks became the main tool for attracting an audience to the brand, and, first of all, promoting special offers.
The most progressive ones optimized budgets, redistributing them in favor of digital, and the least successful in sales left the market, ceasing to maintain communication with subscribers. So it was necessary to do one of the SMM leaders - the Opel brand. Having stopped working on social media in 2015, the brand is still included in the top 5 of the Russian segment of Facebook. Meanwhile, the rules of the game have changed: Internet users have been actively switching to smartphones, and video bloggers have managed to significantly push out automotive journalists. By mid-2015, most of the popular search queries in the YouTube auto segment led to bloggers, not brands.
Russian users showed a special love for video format, having outstripped all countries except the USA in 2016 in terms of views of automotive-related videos, with 93% of these videos being made by amateurs. And according to users, the position of simple "average people" is closer to people. Brands are also struggling to be closer to their consumers, personalizing communications and reducing the time lag between the user's question and the response of the company representative. Increasingly, they use situational activation, interactive promos, affiliate programs.
But who is the most successful in this fight? In PR communications, everything is simple. You can criticize the TNS rating a lot, but almost all auto brands are guided by it, and the mood of PR directors depends on the brand’s position. Digital does not have such a rating, and it is not clear how to determine who is cooler? Of course, all three of these parameters are not representative enough. The transfer of communications to the digital environment, on the one hand, greatly expanded the ability to correctly evaluate performance, on the other hand, greatly complicated the development of an integrated and reliable digital rating of brands. Kia works simultaneously with the maximum number of channels, Hyundai scored the most subscribers, Lada leads on demand (here without surprises - which is cheaper, and more in demand) in the mass segment, Mercedes - in the premium.
Audi and Lexus are the fastest responding to user comments. Which of these more effectively stimulates the user to targeted actions? Even the brands themselves sometimes do not follow the answers to these questions - when checking the most active pages of automobile companies, no tracking codes and UTM tags were found that would help track the number of clicks made on social networks. And this despite the fact that the transition to the site is one of the key indicators of the usefulness of SMM for the brand in Digital. Soon, the process of accumulating a brand-relevant audience will be exhausted, and the stage will be consolidation of the audience and deeper work with subscribers.
And the winner is the one who can develop the most effective content strategy, integrate SMM into the customer path as much as possible, and be the first among competitors to use new mechanics and tools.
