As one of the first luxury car brands marketing in China, Audi has witnessed and promoted the development of the Chinese automotive industry over the past 30 years. To start a new chapter for its luxury lineup on the Chinese market, Audi partnered with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) Motor in 2021. The new brand, SAIC Audi, is well-positioned to keep going upward and providing consumers with cutting-edge products and lifecycle service.
The profound and irreversible changes in consumer behaviors, marketing modes, and consumer-manufacturer interactions have pushed car manufacturers to digitize their marketing platforms. In their joint report on automotive marketing, Boston Consulting Group and Tencent Cloud pointed out that, as the major buying force, over 90% of Gen Z consumers spend more than 4 hours comparing car finance options online, with the time spent in 4S shops dropped by 30% to 40%.
Amid the downturn of the automotive market, manufacturers have experienced a decline in both the quantity and quality of leads, putting the OEM-dealer partnership under serious challenges. It is imperative for manufacturers to digitize their marketing modes to not only efficiently grow their pool of direct customers, but also improve the efficiency of their communication with consumers, who are more interested in active interactions instead of passively taking in all the marketing information.
The digital marketing of manufacturers must solve three major issues:
1.Inefficient connection with customers. Traditional marketing modes hardly achieve satisfactory consumer reach due to vulnerabilities in timeliness and effectiveness. And besides, the fact that only a small part of potential consumers will actively engage in the selection, purchase, and use of cars only makes the result worse.
2.Inaccurate marketing. Traditional marketing modes are less targeted, which means that the marketing channels, resource allocation, and operation methods may not match the target customers. In addition, it is difficult to measure the marketing effectiveness and the cost efficiency is low.
3.Lack of consumer-value operations. Most traditional car manufacturers just cannot wean themselves from the product-centered marketing modes, and fail to take consumer-value operations seriously in the lifecycle of consumer service. They simply lose the opportunities to mine the customer value and turn it into a long-term asset.
Based on Tencent marketing digitalization solution, a digital marketing and operation system is built to attract public and private traffic over the entire customer lifecycle.
In view of the harsh automotive marketing environment and the challenges of digital transformation, Tencent has developed "AR Cube", a full-lifecycle consumer growth model, to drive public and private traffic at key pre-sale, during-sale, and after-sale stages from customer acquisition to customer activation, retention, conversion, referral, and store visits. A digital platform solution is provided to support data-empowered marketing by connecting to all products of the Tencent ecosystem.
The digital marketing and operation system taps public traffic from digital, social, and content media to enhance pre-sale marketing, and attracts private traffic from official sites, official WeChat accounts, apps, WeChat mini programs, and official malls to encourage order placement and provide after-sale service. The OneID system is integrated to facilitate cross-platform access, which helps the company to grow its pool of customers.
Moreover, the digital marketing and operation system is built in a well-rounded data-empowered architecture, making the user-centered digital marketing more efficient. The core part of the architecture is a customer data platform (CDP). It drives private domain marketing based on the capabilities of WeCom for Auto to acquire information from all products in the Tencent ecosystem. Thanks to the data feedback feature, SAIC Audi is able to optimize customer operation strategies, improve customer experience, and achieve accurate and efficient marketing.
This WeCom for Auto-based digital marketing platform built jointly by Tencent and SAIC Audi has effectively increased leads, conversion rate, and orders.
SAIC Audi has successfully built its direct-to-customer (DTC) system to achieve multi-dimensional and efficient connections with customers, which brings the following benefits:
1. A communication platform is established for efficient interactions between the brand, stores, and customers.
2. A new retail mode is created to integrate online and offline services, so that customer needs can be collected from different channels for prompt response.
3. An all-in-one service system is built to take care of customer needs in all marketing scenarios, such as product consultation, marketing interaction, and test drive booking.