Businesses in the automobile industry are lagging behind when it comes to online video. Here’s how they can catch up.
Behind The Times: How the Automotive Industry has Ignored Online Video Marketing
Unruly Media recently published a white paper titled “Stuck in First Gear: The State of Automobile Marketing in Social Video.” The social video campaign titan, which has designed and delivered 2,000 social video campaigns since 2007, found that the auto industry, collectively, is lagging behind others in adopting online video. Unruly Media found that sharing of social video in the auto sector is growing at just one-fifth of the rate of sharing in the social video ad industry more generally.
In addition, Unruly found that only a few companies in the automotive space are dabbling in online video marketing. Apparently, just four large brands account for nearly 75 percent of all auto video shares.
Another notable finding: almost a quarter of all video shares generated by the auto industry occur during the Super Bowl. The majority of companies in the auto industry are devoting the lion’s share of their video marketing to a single day, to the detriment of the entire rest of the year.
The automotive industry just hasn’t acknowledged the value of online video marketing. Marketers in the space seem wary of allocating their precious budgets towards video. The industry’s smaller denizens seem content to let their larger peers dominate video and, according to Unruly Media, have ceded YouTube to brands like Volkswagen.
This is understandable: businesses in a lot of industries are afraid of taking the plunge into the online video marketing abyss. But this fear is unfounded. Online videos need not be complex productions. By making simple, relatable videos, marketers in the auto industry can realize the same benefits their peers in other industries have from online video marketing.
Why Businesses in the Auto Industry Need Online Video Marketing
Confession: we are zealous online video marketing evangelists. But our faith in this medium isn’t based on unfounded conviction. Video marketing reaches consumers and circulates among them. More importantly, compelling videos have a longer shelf-life than other marketing materials. This rationale applies to every industry, including the auto industry.
Unruly Media, in the white paper cited above, examined two Volkswagen commercials that were released around the time of the 2012 Super Bowl. One teaser got around 245,000 shares soon after it was aired and eventually earned almost 400,000 shares. Another was less initially successful and only got 174,840 shares immediately after it was launched. But the video remained popular long after its launch and has now been viewed by more than 1.10 million shares. It’s hard to conceive of another kind of marketing that would be able to retain consumers’ interests and, in fact, expand on its popularity over time.
Here is just one more reason why auto-makers, repairers and sellers need to make online video marketing part of their repertoires. 83 percent of new car buyers visit video-focused sites prior to purchasing a vehicle. A third of these consumers look for videos on specific sites and more than 10 percent look for videos on YouTube.
If you own a business connected with the auto industry, these numbers should be enough to convince you that video marketing is more than an indulgence or a fad – it’s a necessity.
What Kind of Online Video Marketing Works for the Automotive Industry
YouTube has provided small businesses in the auto industry with a relatively easy way to exhibit their products and services. Rather than focusing on gimmicks, marketers in the automobile industry should stick to a basic idea: sell a product by exhibiting it.
Automotive performance videos have shown themselves to be hugely popular on YouTube. Races put on by rival auto-repair and modification shops are the most popular automobile-related videos on the video-sharing sit – not the expensive, slick commercials released by the big car manufacturers. These videos motivate automobile enthusiasts to seek out businesses that either have cars like the ones they see on YouTube, or inspire them to find shops with the technical savvy necessary to turn their current vehicles into something that could conceivably race on tracks like the Texas Mile, inadvisable as doing so might be.
Underground Racing, which “offers a host of services for its well-heeled automotive enthusiasts” in the Charlotte, North Carolina area has used online marketing videos like those described above to benefit its business in a big way. The company likes to show off high horsepower vehicles like the twin turbo Lamborghini Gallardo. One of its videos garnered an astounding 1.1 million views on YouTube.
Car enthusiasts who visit the company’s YouTube channel get to vicariously experience the sights, sounds, and smells of the cars Underground Racing sells. Though they are in their living rooms, they get to feel a connection with the company and its products. Presumably, this makes them more likely to make a purchase or seek out the company’s services.
Conclusion
Underground Racing’s success in the realm of online video marketing is easy to explain: the company is making videos that are combination product exhibition and testimonial. What they are doing is easy to replicate. Though the races they contain and the Lamborghinis in them possess an inherent excitement and may seem, at first blush, impossible to imitate, they are actually little more than particularly noisy and stimulating product demonstrations. And this deceptive simplicity is what makes car enthusiasts coming back for more.