Integrating Location Data Into Auto Marketing Strategies

The Indian automotive sector has grown to emerge as the world’s fourth-largest auto market, on the back of a strong commercial vehicle and two-wheeler market. Industry reports predict that the sector, along with component manufacturing, is likely to reach over US$ 282 billion by 2026. Despite this, challenges, abound as dampened consumer sentiment, economic volatility, the influx of global players and cost pressures influence the market dynamics. 

With autonomous driving, connected technologies and smart mobility on the rise, the auto industry is at a pivotal point of a massive digital transformation. For companies who want to succeed, these trends promise exciting times ahead, with opportunities to differentiate and create long-lasting customer relationships. One-way brands can battle the existing challenges, create a competitive edge and remain relevant is by leveraging location intelligence. 

Although automakers have embraced the ‘location’ component in their engineering and customer outreach for years, it’s often misunderstood, with a distant and inconsistent relationship. Location intelligence, when integrated with multi-layered customer data, can help auto marketers turn data into actionable insights that not only impact the bottom line but also deepen the consumer-brand relationship by creating new and cost-effective models of engagement. Location data collected through customers’ smart devices and connected systems can show movement in the physical world weaving patterns into consumer behaviours, preferences, habits which enable future predictions on user expectations, competitive intelligence and emerging marketing trends.  

Creating contextualized, targeted and memorable campaigns: Effective marketers often realize, that when it comes to identifying audiences on a scale, the creative process may be straight forward, yet retargeting to build loyal relationships can be complex especially if the product is personal, expensive and long-term, such as a two-wheeler. Followers on social media might not be a real indicator of potential or existing clients. However, spatial technologies and data built around ‘likes’, comments and searches on social media channels, combined with real-world consumer actions like in-store visits can help marketers develop relevant, better-focused and customer-centric marketing campaigns that can lead to a likely purchase in the near future. Alternatively, mapping geolocation data, brands can understand relative share of wallet, competitor visits and loyalty levels. This can provide OEMs with a whole picture into consumer’s behaviours, to develop strong loyalty and rewards campaigns. 

Measuring marketing campaigns: When offline consumer behaviour with location data, can prove effective in measuring ROI for media dollars on marketing strategies and advertising campaigns. By bridging the gap between online and offline consumer actions, location intelligence acts as a media-agnostic measurement metric. It can help reveal how campaigns are generating value across channels. It can also help marketers to analyze if they are driving customers to book that next car or two-wheeler.

Changing retail experience: Insights from customer movement can help marketers visualize and understand how they move in and around retail stores. OEMs and brands can deploy geofencing to study how shoppers showrooming in a nearby location, consume digital ads, influencer reviews and promotions on best brand models, competitive deals and festive offers, thus driving footfalls. Location data can intricately help track patterns around how customers get to dealerships, behave in-store and how they act when they leave, thus helping brands to reinvent dealerships as experience centres that engage the customer before he steps in. For people who have never engaged with the brand before, this is a great way to bring them in and engage at ground level.

Driving complimentary services: With technological reengineering and high-tech multimedia systems deployed through ‘internet of things’ generating high amounts of data, automakers are presented with an opportunity to glean information on driving habits and generate a subsequent desired action. By tapping into ‘location’ as a proxy, marketers can maximize communications with drivers to encourage appropriate after-sales service. Using in-dash systems and granular landmarks on high definition maps in remote locations such as highways or airports, brands can guide customers to the nearest points of interest such as repair shops, car wash stations, gas stations, etc., thus managing the vehicle ownership life cycle effectively. 

With location data, auto marketers have an opportunity to tackle many of the existing challenges relating to discovering, engaging and activating customers at the right place and right time. It provides the ability to understand what evokes customer actions and a context to these actions. Using location to understand the customer demand in a way that helps drive personalized brand experience represents a new wave in automobile marketing. 

Nikhil Kumar

Guest Author Nikhil Kumar is the Country Head, India, HERE Technologies. He has experienced many leadership roles in the geospatial sector for over two & half decades across the domestic and international arena. He is also actively engaged with various industry associations such as FICCI committee on Geospatial Technology, AGI, SAMA and regularly represents HERE at multiple speaking platforms and forums.