Auto buyers are putting the automotive world on notice: They’re serious about the electric vehicle (EV) future, and what was once a fringe market, today is going mainstream—and fast.
By next year, U.S. auto buyers will have more than 130 EV models to choose from. How will they decide? It’s a question digital marketers will have to answer if they want to capture the attention (and sales) that the growing EV audience represents.
According to a recent study by The Harris Poll commissioned by Urban Science, more than a quarter of auto buyers (26%) say they will be ready to accept “only EV options” by 2025. That number swells to 50% by 2035.
The Urban Science Dealership Transformational Index sheds important light on the subject. It shows a year-over-year drop in auto buyers’ attitudes toward dealer relevance. The data surrounding that metric raises critical questions for today’s digital marketers. What messages are resonating with EV shoppers who increasingly find dealerships less relevant in their shopping journey? What will motivate them to go to a dealership as part of their shopping process? What “triggering terms” will get them to act? How can you know that the people you’re marketing to today haven’t already purchased from a competitive brand yesterday?
A brand’s (and dealership’s) best chance at winning the fight for awareness, consideration—and the ultimate measure of success, sales—requires taking action now. And it starts with better EV marketing, which depends on having better data at every touchpoint: from campaign design to execution and on through to measurement.
To get the most out of your EV marketing, consider the following data-driven strategies.
Know where the EV market is growing
Although battery electric vehicle (BEV) growth is 30-50% across all states, those numbers can be misleading, because that growth is not spread evenly.
For example, New York is experiencing a 48%-plus year-over-year change, while Los Angeles recorded the highest volume change (900,000-plus units) in that same period, according to LMC Automotive. The key is to be sure you’re not wasting dollars in markets that don’t have the potential you’re looking for.
The graph above shows the past, present and projected future regarding where EV segmentation has been and where it’s going. Over the next decade, EV segmentation will begin to step dramatically away from high-end luxury and become concentrated in non-luxury vehicles. Today’s digital marketers need to augment those types of macro-level facts with data that can identify EV in-market shoppers with unique specificity. Only then, can you be confident that you are targeting your messaging so that it is both effective and efficient.
Find the right data partner
Beyond understanding geographic and consumer opportunities, marketers are still faced with the challenge of reaching EV audiences. While that may sound simple, when it comes to the EV market, that’s a more complex proposition than it first appears to be.
That’s because the EV market is rapidly changing from catering to luxury and early adopters to focusing on more affordably priced options.
Because there isn’t much historical data regarding EV buyers, the best approach is to rely on partners with rich experience in automotive and data science. Find partners using years of daily lead-level sales data and data-enriched predictive modeling.
Many brands are enjoying an increase in first-time buyers of EVs, but it’s important that you don’t become complacent. Many first-time EV buyers are early adopters and/or those with higher household incomes than those who will buy EVs in the future. It’s critical to work with a partner who has engine-level data that can then be leveraged to create EV audience segments that take all these behaviors into account. That allows confident marketing to target households that are predicted to be in-market for an electric vehicle or plug-in hybrid in the next 90 days.
Let data drive you forward
The number of variables impacting the EV shopping and buying equation are many and ever-changing. Digital marketing efforts need to be every bit as flexible. They must understand and embrace cross-shopping dynamics, where and why shoppers are leaving one brand and gravitating to another, and the critical interception messages and media that need to be put in place to affect desired purchase behavior.
A common mistake is to rely on marketing efforts that formed the bedrock of early digital attempts to analyze where shoppers were going, such as looking solely at clicks, traffic and builds when evaluating a campaign.
Today, it’s critically important to also leverage the power of data to identify offline sales. Only with this combination of metrics can you begin to understand the effectiveness of your EV advertising fully and accurately, and how to optimize it for an even greater positive impact on your EV sales.
With shoppers at the crossroads of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and EVs, it’s essential to go beyond simply counting sales to also analyzing the type of sales your marketing is bringing in. Of the sales that were made, how many stayed within your brand? How many purchased an ICE vehicle vs. an EV? If they purchased an EV, what patterns emerged across your creative messaging and targeting? Perhaps most importantly, did you lose them to an EV alternative? Properly segmenting these customers and knowing who to suppress and target is critical.
The more you measure and the deeper you dig, the greater intelligence you can apply to your future digital marketing efforts. By using data as an ally in your campaigns, the learnings you discover can feed into a cycle of continuous improvement—one worth repeating to create the EV sales you’re after.
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As the director of ad tech performance at Urban Science, Carl Matter thrives on the opportunity to bring people, technology, data and understanding together.
