Brand management

5 ways manual content creation is killing your automotive marketing ROI

An expansive approach to content marketing is more important than ever in your automotive marketing strategy.

With the average car buyer spending close to 15 hours researching potential vehicles across multiple channels (2022 Car Buyer Journey Study by Cox Automotive) and the competition for their attention incredibly fierce, a diverse content portfolio across each customer journey stage is key to driving traffic through your doors.

Mock content marketing funnel for automotive industry advertisers and companies - Papirfly

Beyond guiding prospective customers on the path to securing car sales, the strength of your content is equally essential to:

  • Stand out in the crowd: Cut through the noise and position your dealership as the go-to destination in your market
  • Lead the conversation: Showcase your expertise in electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and sustainable mobility to become the trusted voice customers turn to
  • Build lasting relationships: Create meaningful connections that keep customers coming back for their second, third, and fourth vehicles

While the demand for content continues to surge, keeping your marketing ROI healthy is crucial. With automotive leads now costing an average of $250 each (Liontreegroup, 2022) – a number that’s climbing – marketing teams face mounting pressure to optimize their spending while meeting consumers’ growing appetite for information.

Here’s your challenge: Manual content creation eats into your profits. Beyond the obvious costs of time, software, and labor, hidden expenses lurk beneath the surface. Brand inconsistencies, varying content quality, and campaign delays all chip away at your marketing returns, creating a costly cycle that’s hard to break.

Below, we break down 5 ways that persisting manual content production is hurting your ROI – from the obvious to the more subtle – and explore how on-brand content creation software can revolutionize the cost efficiency of your marketing operations.

Importance of content in Automotive marketing statistics - Infographic - Sources: RulerAnalytics, Cox, Conductor & Content Marketing Institution

1. Content production becomes time-consuming and resource-heavy

Above all else, relying heavily on manual content creation methods means you spend more on your marketing operations:

  • Hours producing individual assets from scratch
  • Money hiring specialist in-house creatives or outsourcing work to an external agency
  • Licenses for design software, video editing tools and other content creation platforms

When you consider the significant volume of content you must generate to nurture discerning car buyers at each stage of the customer journey, these costs can very quickly pile up. 

This puts more pressure on your marketing campaigns to drive leads and car sales to make up for the substantial investment you and your team have made preparing them.

2. The scalability and diversity of your content is limited

The immediate costs of manual content production may be the clearest impact on your marketing ROI, but it also has wider ramifications on the volume and reach of your content.

Research shows that today’s car buyers devote more time and use more channels in their search for their ideal vehicle than ever before:

The need for multichannel marketing for the automotive industry to capture car buyers and consumers - Sources: MOTORS, CarGuru, Google & Cox

The days of buyers simply browsing car dealerships are long gone. To grab your audience’s attention and cut through the noise, providing a truly multichannel marketing experience is crucial, across both online and offline channels.

Relying on manual content creation limits your ability to meet this demand. With only so many hours in the day and resources available, this approach forces you to be more selective over what channels you focus on – meaning you miss opportunities to engage potential customers.

Meanwhile, your competitors with more automated content production are better placed to dominate search results, social media feeds, advertising space and beyond. This can cause your market share to plummet, hurting the power and performance of your marketing efforts. 

Furthermore, with your time and resources tied up in creating your routine assets, this could be preventing your brand from harnessing more innovative types of automotive marketing, such as:

  • Augmented reality (AR) test drives
  • Virtual reality (VR) showrooms
  • AI-powered car configurators
  • Interactive video content

By automating the production of your day-to-day, standard content, you free up the capacity and funds to jump on these powerful trends.

3. Personalizing and localizing collateral becomes more complicated

As well as customers requiring a wider range of content to guide their choice of vehicle, they are also far more expectant of personalized customer experiences:

Personalization in automotive marketing statistic - 71% expect personalized engagement from brands - Source: McKinsey

Car buyers also prioritize different qualities when researching vehicles. For example, according to research from Kantar, US and European consumers focus on cost and reliability, while in China, they rate driving performance and fuel efficiency higher.

The more your marketing campaigns are tailored to the specific needs and nuances of your dealerships’ local markets, the more likely they are to resonate with your target audiences, encourage more clicks, and drive dealership visits.

However, manual content creation makes this extremely challenging to fulfill. Depending on how many demographics your models appeal to and the scale of your dealership network, this can make it impossible to properly adapt assets on time and on budget.

The result? More generic, one-size-fits-all campaigns that fail to connect with customers, leading to low engagement and conversion rates.

4. The time-to-market for your campaigns and promotions significantly slows

Next, the time-consuming nature of manual content creation does not only elevate production costs – it also creates delays for your campaign execution.

Whether you’re developing promotional materials for a new vehicle launch or a time-sensitive campaign in one of your regional dealerships, creating this content from scratch can significantly slow down the process, as well as require more thorough proofing and amends.

With so many options available for modern car buyers, any slip in the efficiency of your marketing can mean a missed sales opportunity. Buyers who may have been interested in your new model may have moved onto your competitors by the time your campaigns are underway.

By moving away from manual production and embracing automotive processes, this can empower your in-house creatives and agency partners to create and deliver content faster to your global dealers, who can then localize it for their specific audiences.

Marketing automation time-saving benefits - Save 6+ hours per week on content creation tasks - Source: Firework

5. Inconsistencies creep into your branding and content

Finally, in addition to increasing times-to-market, an overly manual approach to content creation raises the risk of inconsistencies in your branding and content quality. 

If your content creators don’t have a firm grasp of your brand guidelines, or simply make a basic mistake, your materials may fall short of your brand’s identity and quality standards. 

Consumers should feel confident before committing to such a substantial purchase as a car. Any break in brand consistency can derail your attempts to foster this trust. If your branding deviates from location to location or channel to channel, it projects a disorganized image to your prospects – which could be the difference when choosing between you and your competitors.

If this persists over time, it can dilute the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and lower conversion rates.

Plus, the threat of human error means your marketing leaders must devote more time to review assets before they are published. This additional time and energy also eats away at your marketing ROI, and can further delay your campaigns.

Automotive brand consistency statistics for revenue, added value and lead generation - Sources: Marq, Linearity & SmallBizTrends

On-brand content creation software: The key to maximizing your automotive marketing ROI

Now you understand how persisting with manual content creation waters down your marketing ROI, it is apparent that a more automatic approach is required to improve the efficiency of your operations, maintain a presence on all relevant marketing channels, and localize collateral for your diverse dealer markets.

That’s where on-brand content creation software can make a massive difference. By placing innovative, accessible design templates at the heart of your content production processes, you can transform your marketing output’s speed, scale and consistency.

6 benefits of on-brand content creation for automotive marketing - Papirfly infographic

Streamlined content creation through intelligent templates

When creating assets from scratch, ensuring that core brand elements, such as logos, icons and color schemes, are correct adds a lot of time to the creative process. Good-quality design templates provide a clear framework that cuts asset creation time from hours to minutes. 

This enables you to scale up your content production at no additional cost. As a result, your brand can be present at every touchpoint for today’s buyers, building your familiarity and market share in a customer base spoiled for choice.

With the ability to develop infinite templates across all formats – from online video content and social media posts to brochures, posters and billboards – this technology can significantly slash the costs attached to your content production, boosting the returns generated by your campaigns.

Using Papirfly for on-brand automotive content creation - 80% reduced effort and $200 average saving on agency spend

Empowering dealerships to produce their own campaign materials

The accessibility of effective on-brand content creation software means that anyone can use this technology to create high-quality, branded assets, regardless of their design skills.

This reduces your reliance on in-house creatives or external agencies to produce the bulk of your content. Once your templates are set up, front-line employees in your dealerships can use these to quickly generate the required content, rather than waiting to hear back from HQ.

With the routine content of your dealerships taken care of through these templates, this frees up time for your specialist creatives and agency partners to push forward with more complex content, be it AR content, VR experiences, or gamified driving simulators.

Empowering car dealerships with on-brand content creation - Papirfly infographic

Locking down consistency across all assets

Utilizing templates molded to your brand guidelines ensures every asset you produce across all channels aligns with your overarching corporate identity.

The result? Customers can enjoy a more consistent, coherent experience wherever they engage with your brand, establishing the trust needed to ultimately sell cars.

Furthermore, in-built approval workflows directly inform whoever is responsible for signing off marketing materials as soon as they’re ready to review. This streamlined process means campaigns are launched faster, allowing you to better capitalize on market opportunities.

Enabling fast, cost-effective localization and personalization

As noted earlier, modern car buyers place a high value on personalized, localized content. On-brand content creation software allows users to instantly adapt assets to meet this expectation.

  • Languages can be translated instantly for international dealerships and customers
  • Templates can be set up with personalization elements – such as spaces for customer names – that can be applied many times over
  • Localized imagery and designs can be locked down so only relevant examples are available to each region

These dynamic elements mean that content can be adapted for specific audiences in a couple of clicks, rather than paying fortunes on local designers for your individual dealerships.

Consequently, content across your dealer network will speak to people’s precise needs rather than take a one-size-fits-all stance. This helps raise the relevance of your campaigns, increasing the likelihood they drive traffic to your websites, landing pages, and dealerships.

Amplify your ROI with on-brand content creation

With a broad content marketing portfolio essential to stand out in a crowded market and engage customers on their long journey to purchasing a car, taking steps to streamline content production is vital to maintain a healthy marketing ROI.

The power of on-brand content creation in action: BMW

For an example of how on-brand content creation software can revolutionize your marketing ROI, look no further than what it has achieved for BMW

With an expansive network of automotive dealerships covering countless languages, locations and audiences, the BMW team found that creating content at the required scale was a costly, inefficient process. They struggled to retain their brand identity at every touchpoint, while slow administration left campaigns on hold.

By introducing on-brand design templates, paired with a centralized Digital Asset Management (DAM) library, their frontline workers were empowered to produce localized content without fear of compromising brand guidelines or needing to learn complex design software.

The outcome? BMW’s identity is upheld in all locations. Time to market has decreased. Brand management and sales workflows run smoothly. And, most importantly, their marketing ROI has accelerated to previously unattainable levels.

At Papirfly, our solutions empower automotive brands in the U.S. and beyond to create content at an unprecedented scale, all with consistency at their core.
 
From on-brand template technology that streamlines content production across all channels to DAM solutions that establish a single source of truth for your brand.

Papirfly automotive brand success story - How BMW NE enhanced the speed, scalability, and consistency of content creation with Papirfly