Top Automotive Digital Marketing Case Studies
As the automotive industry embraces the digital era, it sets examples for companies to navigate online marketing effectively. Each automotive digital marketing case studies illustrates a unique approach and reveals the diverse ways that companies have employed digital marketing. They have enhanced their brand visibility, engaged the target audiences, and achieved their marketing goals through their strategies.
This blog post highlights the five remarkable automotive digital marketing case studies where automotive companies demonstrated an exceptional strategy. They understood their digital marketing assignments and displayed innovation, creativity, and strategic prowess.
McLaren’s McLaren vs. Aerodynamics
In 2012, McLaren introduced the new features of aerodynamics in their Spider model. McLaren strategically utilized digital platforms such as YouTube to highlight their advanced aerodynamics technology. The automotive digital marketing team of McLaren gave the idea of creating a series of videos about the awesome features under the name, “McLaren vs Aerodynamics”. Through their campaign, McLaren set the goal of prompting their “wow” factor in their customers. They set their eyes on converting their potential customers into buyers.
The company’s effort brought fruit when they got 108K new subscribers on their official channel. Liked by hundreds of thousands of people, the series of videos were shared plenty of times. Even the teasers created enough buzz for the McLaren. It turned their social media fans into the purchasing customers of the supercars. Similarly, Mclaren targeted the video game industry in 1997 for promotion of their Mclaren F1 promotion. The launch of “Need for Speed 2” featured the F1 game in it as their top-speed car. So, digital marketing is not new to McLaren. They have been utilizing it efficiently for decades.
Porsche’s Virtually Porsche
Despite knowing that not many people have access to VR, they took the chance. Instead of relying only on 2D videos, they took a step ahead and immersed their customers into the virtual world. The automotive digital marketing team of Porsche created their own VR app to give their customers a virtual experience of their new Panamera 4 E-Hybrid.
To overcome the limited access to VR technology, they themselves created 5,000 Porsche-branded Google Cardboard viewers. So, the viewers just needed to place their phone inside the cardboard viewer and they could enjoy the video. The results brought into the company were astonishing, as it resulted in 2.2x more virtual drives compared to actual test drives in the US alone.
Citroen’s You Like It, We Make It
Another story that happened in 2012 urged me to include it in our automotive digital marketing case studies. In 2012, the Automotive digital marketing team of Citroen came up with the idea. They let their customers design and introduce new features in their special edition cars. They took customer engagement seriously in their new campaign named, “You Like It, We Make It”.
Citroen ran a crowdsourcing campaign with their partner agency Brandwidth on Facebook. They called out their customers and fans to decide the design of their special edition car. The people shared their ideas on the platform. The company got over 24,000 designs resulting in the model, “Citroën C1 Connexion”. It became Citroen’s first Facebook crowdsourced car. They got satisfactory results from their crowdsourcing campaign as they sold 500 cars after the first launch.
Audi’s Super Bowl Campaign
In 2011, Audi became the first automobile company to tap into the Super Bowl commercials. The automotive digital marketing team of Audi took benefit of the fact that 59% of the viewers use social media platforms and share images of the ongoing game. Audi partnered with the Onion and Snapchat for the promotion of their Audi A3. They created humorous photos and captions related to the game.
Snapchat exploded in popularity with the memes. Audi tapped into the humorous aspect of the game and used it to promote their car. They urged the consumers to follow their social media channel on Snapchat. Audi’s Snapchat recorded 5,500 new fans during a single game. There we 100,000+ views on Snapchat and 2,400 campaign mentions on Twitter alone. This way, Audi created brand awareness among Millenials and generated online conversations.
Tesla’s Cybertruck Armor Window
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, socially engages on his social media platform with the general public which creates a buzz. Followed by 155 million people, his tweets get comments and shares in no time. In 2019, Elon Musk launched its Cybertruck with an armored glass. In the launching ceremony, he asked his lead designer Franz von Holzhausen to smash the window of Cybertruck with the metal ball. It turned out different than their expectations. Unfortunately, the glass broke and Musk had to control the situation.
But was it really how it looks like? Was the breakage on purpose? People are divided in their opinions. Some consider it as a part of his automotive digital marketing strategy. But that incident resulted in 200,000 new orders without any campaigns. If the incident was on purpose, then definitely it was a master stroke. The critics also promoted his Cybertruck without knowing.
Elon Musk handled the situation very calmly on social media. He was very casual about the incident as his response was, “Guess we have some improvements to make before production ha ha.” In his case, his social media account works well for him. Now he has bought the previously known social media platform “Twitter Blue” and has changed its name to “X Premium”. He effectively uses his platform for Tesla’s marketing.
Future Innovations in Automotive Digital Marketing Strategies
The future of automotive digital marketing has just started. We can expect to see further innovations in technology. The introduction of new technologies will open new gateways for the digital marketing of automobiles. One such example is the McLaren MCL-60. Mark Turner, the CEO of McLaren is going to embed the digital advertising within their race cars.
There will be digital panels in cars. They will allow multiple brands to be displayed on the MCL60’s exterior in a rotation. This will increase the scope for McLaren’s 40+ partners and their exposure to the viewers. So the field is very wide for the opportunities and we will see new innovations from time to time.
Conclusion
To conclude, by looking at automotive Digital Marketing case studies, we can learn lessons to refine our own digital marketing strategies. This will help drive success in the ever-evolving automotive landscape.
