Challenge:

2022 represented a challenging year for the automotive industry due to manifold reasons.  

From a macroeconomic perspective, consumers started to face high inflation resulting in people becoming more price sensitive, visible through an increase in financing-related search queries as well as rising interest in second-hand cars.  

Those who decided to buy a new car after all, experienced a shortage in car supply leading to longer waiting times.  

This situation applied also to KIA, with some of their flagship models being sold out while not being able to sell other models that were actually in stock. 

Additionally, the automotive industry in Israel continued to become more fragmented and therefore competitive, with 13 new car brands entering the market only in 2022. 

With Kia being one of the most popular automotive brands in Israel the aim for 2022 was to continue this trend and increase the number of orders, despite the challenges faced.

Solution:

In order to overcome both externally driven as well as internal challenges, a clear focus on efficiency had to be set by strongly collaborating across digital disciplines and aligning global as well as domestic activities. Additionally, a tech infrastructure that allowed for seamless processes had to be set up. 

We focused on local lower funnel activities that were optimized in real-time creating an optimal synergy between our most performance-driven channels Search, Discovery, GDN as well as META. 

Depending on the current stock situation we pushed in real-time the available models to those users who already showed intent for this specific car model or a similar one and presented the benefits of sometimes less-known models in stock. 

These lower funnel activities were accompanied by our organic social as well as SEO activities, adding a cost-efficient and long-term impact to the marketing mix. 

Global activities, taking mainly place on YouTube, ensuring an upper funnel coverage that helped generate further awareness for new brand model launches and attention-grabbing sponsorships.

Results:

Due to this very performance-driven and holistic approach both the number of leads (+13%) as well as the number of orders (+9%) increased strongly, representing not just a quantitative but also a qualitative increase in results for KIA. At the same time, the CPO was decreased by 21%, helping us overcome the reduction in the budget for 2022. In total the CVR was increased by 30%, making 2022 a very efficient year for KIA.  

In addition, orders for the initially less popular models Stonic and Seltos were increased by more than 50%, representing a big success in pushing these in-stock models.