The sales lead is still the dealer’s just need
the car is getting harder to sell, the car companies have to spend more on marketing.
Easy car COO Liu Xiaoke remembers that in the era of car blowout, the main engine factory only needs to produce cars, the channel network is widely spread, and with the overwhelming advertisement, the car must sell well.
In recent years, the entire automobile market has become saturated, superimposed on the cycle of macroeconomics and consumption decline, the capacity of the main engine factory is idle, the dealer inventory is high, and the car is getting worse and cheaper.
In 2018, the sales of the passenger car market in China ended a positive growth of 28 years, a historical decline of 5.8%. In 2019, according to the prediction of the Automobile Industry Association, it will continue to decline by more than 5.4%.
The income of car companies has fallen, and the budget available for marketing has also decreased, but it has also been concentrated on the head platform. Liu Xiaoke told them that they will value marketing effects, such as buying sales leads.
The marketing platform uses content to attract users and sell user leads to dealers. This PC era business model still seems to be the dealer’s immediate needs today. In fact, as dealers in big cities gradually moved away from the core, they were more dependent on getting customers from the Internet than ever before.
The business of sales leads is traditional, but it is the moat of the head platform. The cost of accumulating users in the PC era is low, and the early dividends of the Internet have been enjoyed. If the rising stars of the mobile era want to catch up, they need to invest a lot of money and higher-level services to grab the share of the head. The business balance is not easy.
Of course, for the head platform, if you only sell sales leads, or sell an ad exposure, the ARPU (per user revenue) value is not high enough. The platform costs a lot of money to maintain user stickiness and extend access time. In order to increase the value of the platform, it is ultimately necessary to innovate around the user’s model.
As the Internet enters the deep mobile era, user reading time becomes fragmented. The visual impact of the large format and the publicity of the entire network have not achieved the previous results. The marketing ideas are also shifting from traditional selling fixed positions and planning solutions to user operations and precision touch.
According to the data of the car, about 46% of the users in the Chinese car market are not the first to buy a car, but to increase the number of users. Beijing sold nearly 500,000 last year, and the number of new licenses was only 60,000, and 85% was for new purchases. Second-time car purchase, consumers’ demands are more clear, and decision-making is more rational. The big data accumulated by the vertical platform can track and predict the user behavior, provide related products and services, and ultimately guide the user’s purchase decision.
Liu Xiaoke believes that around the user, providing services to manufacturers, this is the core value of future car advertising marketing. “You have the ability to grab users, this is the most critical.”