In just a few months at the beginning of 2024, a series of major events have occurred in the automotive circle one after another.
Since the success of bringing Xiaomi at Lei Jun's press conference, almost all the bigwigs in the car circle have collectively appeared in their own brand of self-media and live broadcast rooms to do marketing in person. Whether it is new energy representatives Xiaomi, Weilai, Ideal, or BYD, Great Wall and other old car manufacturers, the CEOs who were used to being behind the scenes have been pulled to the forefront.
From Li Xiang, who "hard-controlled Lei Jun for two and a half minutes", to Li Shufu, Yin Tongyue, and Wei Jianjun, several "sixty-year-old men" also "debuted" to try to sell cars live broadcast, looking at the marketing of the entire automobile circle, "volume boss" has become commonplace. More than 200 brands have shown the latest and most innovative marketing cards, interpreting the survival rules of the "traffic era" with an unprecedented marketing revolution in the automotive industry.
Behind the marketing involution is the epitome of the increasingly fierce competition in the automotive industry. The era of "one-size-fits-all" for automobile marketing conferences, spokespersons, and data has ended, and under the huge competition, automobile marketing has officially entered the "era of personalization".
So, at a time when automobile marketing and the market are accelerating changes and reshaping the pattern, how to obtain long-term traffic growth through marketing and successfully break through in the highly involuted competition? The "2024 Toutiao Auto Marketing White Paper" jointly released by Toutiao, Big Computing and Ipsos may point out a clear path for auto brands.
01 The first step of smart marketing: find the right person and the right niche of goods
Gone are the days when car brands "opened the door and waited for customers to come", and the foreseeable knockout competition has begun, and under the pressure of continuous escalating competition, car brands have to say goodbye to traditional "lead marketing" and turn to online marketing to solve the problem. From short videos to live broadcasts, auto brands have been catching up with the trend of marketing and stepping into the "no man's land" of digital marketing.
Smart brands are starting to look for certainty in their marketing in the midst of the sea changes in the industry. In a way, the essence of marketing is to guide users from the process of understanding the brand, building brand trust, and ultimately achieving brand loyalty. In other words, no matter how the industry changes and how the media changes, the first step of marketing is still to find the real "right" users.
The traditional method of "finding users" in automobile marketing is a one-way advertising output model, but nowadays consumers are becoming more and more personalized, brands need more and more correct media to reach users, with the help of the platform's rich user resources and marketing capabilities, so as to achieve twice the result with half the effort.
According to the data of the "2024 Toutiao Auto Marketing White Paper", Toutiao generates an average of about one million new car content per day, and Toutiao's car users as a whole show the characteristics of large scale, high income, fast growth, high consumption, high proportion of high-knowledge molecules, hot spots, high stickiness, strong purchasing strength, and love search. Judging from the specific data, Toutiao's monthly active car users will reach hundreds of millions in 2023, accounting for as much as 50% of Toutiao's total monthly active users, and the demand for car purchases has skyrocketed, and the growth of car purchase demand of car users has reached 581%. Among them, 75% of the family has an annual household income of more than 200,000 yuan, and the TGI of the undergraduate population has reached 121, and the TGI of the master's degree and above has reached 166.
With the gradual improvement of the global trend of digital marketing of automobile brands, brands are paying more and more attention to user behavior and user communication, and Toutiao's performance is also very good. According to the report, Toutiao users spend nearly 2 hours a day browsing car content, and Toutiao has become one of the main non-vertical platforms for users to obtain car information, and users pay more attention to new car information, vehicle evaluation and comparison, and car purchase guides and other practical content. And today's users have developed the habit of actively obtaining car-related information through the headline hot list and search channels, the penetration rate of the hot list is about 6 times that of large-market users, and the search penetration rate of car-interested users is as high as 63%, which is about 3 times that of large-market users.
Under the two-way demand of users and brands, Toutiao is accompanying car companies to move forward on the road of exploring digital marketing exploration.
Plant a plane tree to attract a phoenix. A more suitable user traffic pool can bring more interested customers to the brand, so as to achieve "cost reduction and efficiency increase". "Good brand + good platform" is becoming the only rule for the success of automobile marketing business. In addition, with its objective and neutral platform image, abundant global monetization resources and diversified and high-quality influencer content, Toutiao has become an important medium for brands to advertise and users to obtain information on car purchases. If it is said that under the requirements of "marketing efficiency", the trend of future marketing is to find users and accurately deliver, then the "victory" of automobile marketing seems to be in today's headlines.
02 Winning with Strategy: Find the Right Marketing Methodology
Finding users is only the first step in marketing effectiveness, and brands still have a long way to go from "reach" to "conversion". The new generation of consumers has put forward more requirements for the automotive market, which also means that automotive brands need to change their marketing strategies and service models.
In the era of personalization of automobile marketing, the effective communication between brands and users is no longer a one-way information indoctrination, but needs to use content as a lever and social interaction as a means to find the "exclusive value anchor" of the brand, so as to achieve centralized detonation and out of the circle. For auto brands accustomed to "lead business", how to match content, channels and consumer needs is a difficult problem to be solved urgently, but it is clear that the "2024 Toutiao Auto Marketing White Paper" provides them with a suitable solution: ASP marketing methodology.
The ASP marketing methodology is an auto sales methodology proposed by Toutiao for all car brands on the basis of the dual advantages of crowd value and resource value, and based on Toutiao's high-value user base, it realizes the business link of A (amplification), S (seeding) and P (promotion). From the early traffic exposure, to the strengthening of grass planting, to the later stage of mental transformation, it provides brands with more accurate grass planting, better quality traffic, and more efficient conversion, and comprehensively stimulates new business increments.
At present, the ASP methodology has been effectively practiced and verified in the brand marketing of many car companies.
During the release of a facelifted model of a new energy brand, Toutiao completed the "A" through the promotion of golden resources such as micro headlines, headline numbers, topics, and open screens - expanding traffic, helping the brand to reach potential users extensively, and linking the "Brand Detonation Plan" to help the model hit the hot list several times across two months. Under the multi-point outbreak of popularity, Toutiao once again linked up with automotive vertical experts to output professional content, realize "S" - strengthen grass planting, in-depth interpretation of model facelift highlights, all-round evaluation, contribute to the real experience from the first perspective, and activate user interest. At the same time, it maintains brand popularity with the original hot topic #New Product Listing Price Shock#, stimulates users to search finely, strengthens "P" - mental transformation, and refines keywords through mentions, which is in line with the perspective of brand communication and meets the user's mental penetration.
In the cooperation mode of Toutiao's co-creation of hot content, the new energy brand's new car has received 200 million+ brand content exposures, the brand search index has increased by 845%+ month-on-month, the brand comprehensive index has increased by 29%+ month-on-month, and the real-time reading data of the content is as high as 2.967 million+.
To be able to get out of the circle, the brand-exclusive event must match the growth rhythm of the brand and the product, and maximize the communication value of the brand. In the cooperation with the new energy brand, Toutiao clearly demonstrated the platform's capabilities in this regard.
In addition to the explosion of volume, in the era of "content marketing" where "content is business", it is equally important to help brands tell good stories and effectively convey brand concepts to consumers. In the cooperation with a luxury brand, Toutiao helped the brand create a reasonable and reasonable role, took the initiative to enter the public eye, and became a high-heat, high-value, and high-energy social topic at the moment.
During the launch of a luxury brand's sports model, Toutiao Travel Channel and China National Geographic jointly created the texture IP "Journey of Wandering Scenery", and cooperated deeply with the luxury brand's sports model to explore the wider world and share the memories of scenery. High-quality content attracts high-quality people, and at the same time, it also consolidates the spiritual core of discovery and exploration for brands, and consolidates the brand's differentiation barriers.
After ensuring the quality and quantity of the content, in terms of publicity and distribution, Toutiao also spared no effort, launched the collaborative communication of the three major platforms of Toutiao, Douyin, and Watermelon, and created two major content positions of the official main topic of the event and large-scale theme essays. The strong exposure ushered in the explosion of the brand mentality, and the high-quality content drove the relationship progressively, and the total assets of the model 5A crowd increased by 20.86 million+ during the project cycle.
Keeping potential consumers interested in the brand and thus precipitating into real users has always been the biggest marketing difficulty for auto brands. Toutiao's ASP methodology seems to be an effective way to solve this difficulty.
03 Summary:
The 2024 Toutiao Automotive Marketing White Paper provides theoretical guidance and inspiration for the marketing of auto brands, helping them quickly gain insight into industry trends, optimize marketing strategies in a timely manner, and quickly adapt to the transformation of new media marketing. Brands can also discover new opportunities behind the new market and crowd data in the "2024 Toutiao Auto Marketing White Paper", gain insight into the new trends of auto marketing in advance, and build stronger certainty in the underlying logic of business and business growth.
The future of automotive marketing must be the result of the joint action of brands and marketing fields, and Toutiao is providing more brands with unprecedented opportunities to reshape the perception of brands and products among the public.
Brands need to pay attention to their own characteristics, find the right brand marketing field, pay attention to the adaptability of content and platforms, use "push" to amplify the potential energy of marketing on a single platform, and then help the circulation of content on different platforms and circles, and "plant" a wider range of minds in the hearts of consumers, and finally use search products and interactive innovation tools to help brands "collect" growth, so as to surpass traditional advertising and marketing strategies to reap more efficient marketing returns. In the new era of digital marketing, platforms have become the core place for brands to interact with consumers, and brands can only hold the chips that remain on the "table" if they find the right marketing field for themselves.