Evaluating Marketing Content of the Automotive Industry | Episode 07

In this episode of Consumer Central, Toph evaluates competitors in the automotive industry to understand how well their marketing content aligns with actually consumer behavior.

If you'd like to see one of these customer journey maps for your industry, click here.

Transcript:

Hello, my name is Toph. Welcome back to Consumer Central - where we are eliminating blind spots for businesses and marketers by revealing more of the customer journey and competitive landscape than you could ever see before.

So today we are going to look at a massive industry - the car industry. What we're going to share with you today, we see with a lot of different companies. It is where they focus on different topics from a marketing standpoint than what consumers are actually interested in.

So to start off with, we are going to take a look at Buick, then we're going to take a look at Chevrolet.

To start off with the Buick Encore, what's really interesting is with Buick, the resellers absolutely own the market share. So, cars.com and autotrader.com own the market share. With Buick Encore, look at all the green. Look at all the competitors' coverage of topics consumers are searching for.

For the the car resellers, used car resellers like auto trader and cars.com etc, where Buick is missing out is - people are looking for "is Buick encore a reliable car?" They're asking, "How many miles will a Buick encore last?" Buick is not answering these questions, but their target market is asking about it.

We thought we would point out another very interesting thing - Buick is absolutely getting crushed when it comes to the topic of "cross over SUVs."

Let's go take a look at this. So take Auto Trader and Cars.com out of the equation because we understand that that's the resale market.

But look at this: KIA, Nissan, Lincoln, Acura - all outranking, far outranking Buick. So this is one of those examples when you can't just concentrate on how you want to sell - just trying to sell, and create content around, your brand name of Buick encore.

People are looking for crossover SUVs and KIA, Nissan, Lincoln, Acura all understand this and are creating content for these key terms. They're creating content to align to that target market's behavior and the questions they're asking and also the searches they're conducting. We don't have time to go into all that, but I just thought that was a very interesting one to point out.

Let's go take a look at the same concept for Chevrolet.

Again they're getting crushed by the reseller market, but what Chevrolet is not participating in is the ecosystem of search terms and questions around the pickup truck. People are asking a lot of questions along their consumer journey for pickup trucks (as indicated by their consumer behavior)

They don't necessarily search only for, you know, Silverado or F 150 in Ford's situation.

So, understanding consumer behavior is key because look at this market share that Chevy is missing out on since they're not aligning to consumer behavior for the simple concept of pickup trucks.

So until next time from Consumer Central. We wanted to take a look at the car market today but if there's some data you would like to see in a specific vertical, let us know and we will run a consumer behavior map just for you.