A New Paradigm in Automotive Marketing

The automotive industry is changing dramatically ascustomers shop for vehicles, services, collision centers, parts andaccessories, in new ways. With the growing popularity of online review andpricing sites, consumers are using the Internet more than ever before toresearch products, compare prices, search for promotions, make purchasingdecisions, and provide feedback. Social media has become one of the keychannels in this new connected marketplace of content, communications andcommerce.  Consumers are using socialmedia to find and share product recommendations and dealer reviews, voicecomplaints, display preference, consider peer opinions, capitalize on couponoffers, and engage in ongoing dialogs with their favorite brands.

At hoojook, we believe social media will become one ofthe most important touch points on the digital landscape for automotivecompanies to understand, reach, influence and engage customers and prospectsbased on their personal preferences, behaviors and needs.   It will change the ways companies understandand segment their markets, grow and protect their brands, generate businessleads, and assist and motivate people through the customer acquisitionjourney. 

The multiplication of customer engagement channels andthe increasing use of social media are empowering customers of automotiveproducts and services to take control of the purchase process. With a wealth ofinformation readily available online, consumers are now better able to compareproducts, services and prices—even as they step into dealerships and servicecenters. When consumers interact with companies publically through socialmedia, they have greater power to influence other customers, to either supportor damage a brand.

The shifting landscape is creating important andimmediate opportunities for sales and marketing professionals. They must handlenot only the growing volume of information but also an increasingvariety—including both structured and unstructured data.

In order for automotive marketers to capitalize on thesechanges, they need new ways to collect, manage and analyze the volume, variety,velocity and veracity of data. Automotive marketers must learn to utilize thisdata to generate valuable insights for personalizing marketing and improvingthe effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, deliver a smarter shopping andservicing experience.

Imagining the possibilities

How can big data from social media help automotive salesand marketing? They can improve the effectiveness of traditional automotivemarketing tactics by generating new insights while creating new capabilitiesthat drive better business outcomes.

For example:

• Personalized shopping experience: To help serve acustomer shopping for a new vehicle or sway a customer’s opinion about aservice center, a marketer could analyze all of the conversation and activityhappening on the customer’s social networks. By analyzing the personality andpreferences of the customer, the marketer can push a highly targeted, real-timepromotion to the customer’s social or email inbox. The marketer can even push atargeted message to the customer’s smartphone as he or she shops in thevicinity of a dealership or service center. If the customer has been in anautomotive accident, a collision center representative can reach out and offera personalized and comfortable service. Marketers can also examine broadercustomer search patterns, preferences and purchases to generate meaningful andinteresting offers and suggest complementary services to provide greater valueto the customer while boosting revenues.

• Optimized service offers: A marketer could betterdetermine which customers might need a weather-related service and where. Forexample, a marketer could analyze social media buzz about an upcoming eventsuch as skiing to gauge demand for weather-related servicing needs of vehiclesacross specific geographic locations. The marketer can also push a mobilemessage to customers driving into a snowed out area, to inform them about anear-by facility providing snow chains for cars or a quick coolant/antifreezeservice. Other possibilities include real-time competitive price comparisonsthat can help a dealer set launch promotions to attract consumers away fromrivals.

• Understand each customer at an individual level:

•             Increase the precision of customer segmentation by analyzing the customer’spersonality (buying behavior), influence, and preferences across all socialmedia networks

•             Gaugethe customer’s propensity to buy

•             Send a1:1 communication tailored to the customer’s readiness to “consume” with amessage on any of the social media channels or by traditional communicationchannels such as email

•             Enrichthe customer’s understanding by integrating multichannel data via partners—fromoffline transaction information to social media and third-party data—to developa 360-degree view of the individual and identify emerging trends

•             Optimizecustomer interactions by knowing where a customer is, and delivering relevantreal-time offers based on that location

•             Offerrelevant, enticing promotions and coupon offers to influence customers to visityour location or bite on a service offer

•             Automatethe process of tracking and managing a brand’s online reputation by aggregatingall reviews on the web, amplifying the positive reviews, and managing thenegative ones

•             Enticea competitor’s customers away

•             Winback your dissatisfied customers

Marketing teams can use solutions for big data to collectand analyze customer information from a much wider and rich range of sourcesthan before—including POS systems, online transactions, social media, loyaltyprograms, call center records and more. That information deepens theirunderstanding of customer preferences, helps them more accurately identifypurchasing patterns and enables them to generate more precise customersegmentation. Marketers can then use new insights to deliver highly targeted,location-based promotions, in real time.

The result? Customers gain a richer, more personalized shoppingexperience with promotions and offers that are more likely to appeal to them.They develop brand loyalty. Automotive marketers, meanwhile, are able to retaina competitive edge and boost revenues by maximizing opportunities, as well asconsistently engaging customers across channels and reinforcing their brandsand customer-service experience at every turn. They are also able to measure aspecific ROI on their campaigns.

hoojook is committed to helping the automotive industryleverage social media to more effectively understand and engage customers, togrow revenue, to improve brand loyalty, and to reduce the costs of brand marketing and customeracquisition.  hoojook provides anessential new end-to-end platform purpose-built for the automotive industry tohelp manufacturers, dealers, service provider, after-market vendors and othersin the automotive ecosystem to generate, to cultivate, and to manage leads andtheir brands.  The hoojook platformprovides multiple modules to help the automotive industry navigate itsmarketing and sales in the emerging domain of social media engagement. Thehoojook (patent-pending) Big Data analytics engine transforms the chaos ofsocial chatter into actionable information for the automotive industry. hoojookalso has a solution that automates brand and online reputation management forany business or site in the automotive industry. hoojook is headquartered inSilicon Valley, CA.

 For more info,please visit us at www.hoojook.com