Commentary

Autotrader Taps Mobile For Latin Market

In the day’s final presentation, Jose Puente, director, product strategy, at AutoTrader, talks about how the company leverage mobile for its Hispanic customers via its Spanish-language AutoTrader Latino offering. Given that the Latino audience typically over-indexes on mobile, the company launched text messaging, iPhone and Android apps, and an Augmented Reality 2D code, among other facets including Facebook to better reach the target audience.

Text messages from codes placed in the print AutoTrader Latino magazine sent people to the companion Web site. We notified dealers when an anonymous user had texted in about a car from their dealership to respond in real time through the site and provide that shopper additional information or special offer. They found about 40% of car hoppers would click to call when they got a follow-up message from a dealer.

The company started program in 2009 and ran for a year and a half. In surveying users, it found 81% said it made them feel confident in buying a car. And 46% of all its digital traffic was coming through mobile. How do you monetize mobile? Puente says the company still struggles with that. SMS campaigns drove most of the monetization, through message from dealers and OEMs.

Autotrader was spending $70K a year on SEM but Puente note all the growth was coming in through mobile, where it was spending relatively little. He added that leveraging all the attributes of devices is key to mobile marketing so strategy is multi-pronged. “Mobile is the Internet we always wanted,” he said.

 What’s next? Were going to take all learnings and integrated Latino brand into main brand and make it into a bilingual site. AutoTrader will focus on developing apps on consumer side but also on B2B side to help dealer and manufacturer customers benefit.

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