The South African automotive industry decline has led to seven leading European and USA based automotive brands exiting the market since 2008.
Since November 2016, Suzuki Auto South Africa bucked the trend in the declining market of new car sales. While other established marques lost market share and closed dealerships, Suzuki has become a multiple award winner, opened new dealerships and, most importantly, increased market share month on month for the period.
In early 2016, Suzuki had less than 1% of the market share, selling, on average, 450 cars a month. Their advertising and marketing budget was focused on traditional media, events and activations, and they merely dabbled with digital media.
Although Suzuki had social media channels, these weren’t a priority, and their campaigns weren’t integrated with their other marketing efforts. Everything happened in isolation, and the sales and dealer bodies were operating in silos. Because of this, campaigns didn’t reach their full potential, and without dealer buy-in, Head Office was often treated like an enemy instead of an ally.
Added to this, their marketing budget was significantly lower than their benchmark competitors and was cut by a further 38% for 2016/17 financial year.
The effect of all of this was that despite massive effort from all parties, the campaigns and sales lacked cohesiveness.
Goals
As Head of Marketing and Product Planning for Suzuki, Charl Grobler, took charge of the situation and approached the business with a new perspective.
The first step was to set sales goals, per model, for the year, and to share the goals as well as the product roadmap with the agency and sales teams to synchronise marketing and sales efforts.
The second step was to document these goals and communicate them to the dealer body.
This seems simple, but it was the first step towards producing a truly integrated strategy which worked towards clearly articulated goals that work for every element of Suzuki - from external agency, to head office, to dealer body.
Changes
So, what changed? Everything.
In 2016/ 17, Suzuki used their marketing budget to:
We reviewed everything and critically evaluated if this was the best use of the budget, and if it would move us closer to our goals.
To allow us to understand what was working and what wasn’t we needed to dramatically improve our measurement of campaigns and to better understand our customers. For this to be achieved we needed to:
Their biggest shift was to move completely away from TV lead campaigns, and to start doing digitally measured campaigns.
Their key changes in this digital re-haul:
• Defining the Suzuki Buyer Personas for the brand and each model (this is more niche and specific than a target audience) for each persona we mapped out their path to purchase or buyer’s journey.
• Content marketing:
• Blog - publishing two articles a week on a variety of topics, aimed at the Suzuki buyer personas.
• Social media - reporting, linking the social campaigns to website pages and blog articles, having a cohesive strategy across platforms.
• Lead generation:
• The content attracted the audience by offering them useful and helpful information specifically focused on their pain points.
• Lead nurturing:
• Once we knew who they were and what they wanted we could offer them more of what they were after.
• Digital metrics and measurement to manage all campaign elements:
• Through the content and lead tracking we gained insights into what people were consuming, what they liked and disliked. We continually refine the content based on these insights.
So far, this year, Suzuki has won the following prestigious awards:
By fully integrating our goals and efforts across the board; in the dealerships, head office, and the agency; we showed remarkable results and bucked the industry trends.
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Here's a link to the award winning Suzuki case study