BYD Australia
Driving Historic Growth in a Stagnant Auto Market
Background
BYD, the world’s leader in new energy vehicles, presented Yango with a bold challenge – deliver growth unlike anything the Australian Auto market has ever seen, while maintaining BYD’s entrepreneurial edge. To do this, Yango needed to ditch the traditional automotive marketing playbook and forge a new path with innovative, untapped strategies.
BYD entered the Australian market in September 2022, with a mission to provide new vehicle technology to Australians at an accessible price point. While existing EVs carried a premium price tag of $80,000+, BYD shattered this barrier by offering high-quality EVs for under $50,000. With such a competitive offering, BYD knew they could speak to a broad range of customers, however, to gain market share, they had to challenge the dominance of established automotive giants.
In just 2 years, BYD has delivered over 25,000 vehicles, an achievement executed more quickly than any other auto brand in Australia. This record growth was supported by an intelligent, innovative media strategy alongside Yango and Audience360.
The Approach
BYD challenged Yango around 3 core pillars:
- Increase quality website traffic: Attract visitors who are more likely to convert.
- Build brand awareness: Establish BYD’s presence in a market dominated by legacy competitors.
- Achieve rapid sales growth: Drive sales at a pace that leaves the industry struggling to keep up.
To disrupt the current landscape, Yango needed to utilise media in a revolutionary new way and we knew data was key to unlocking rich audiences with minimal wastage:
- Firstly, to build awareness, we leveraged third-party data broadly targeting Auto Intenders with the goal to nurture and push them through the funnel.
- Next, we applied first party data, retargeting users who had already been to the website, supporting them to either book a test drive, or purchase online.
This approach proved limiting. Third party audiences typically require a longer conversion timeframe, conflicting with our need for rapid sales. Simultaneously, with BYD being new to the market, website visits were still low, so our first party audiences were exhausted quickly.
We needed to expand on this approach, to make sure we were reaching users not only at the top and bottom of the funnel, but also those who had shown, through data, that they were in the market to purchase a new car.
To find these high-quality auto intenders, we went to Australia’s leading automotive website, Carsales.com.au. However, the platform’s competitive advertising environment presented challenges to the cut through and resonance BYD could achieve on the platform.
This is where Audience360 came in. Through Audience360’s exclusive data partnership with Carsales, we were able to access datasets for relevant audience segments in a decoupled environment beyond Carsales itself.
Audience360’s quality and granularity of data meant that Yango was able to tailor messaging for the full range of BYD vehicles, from compact hatchbacks to spacious SUVs. The segments included:
- People looking at BYD
- People looking at EVs
- Intenders for Medium SUVs <$60k
- Intenders for Medium Cars <$60k
- Intenders for Small Cars <$40k
This data empowered us to disrupt the traditional car buying journey, which is complex and diverse, intercepting high-intent customers at key moments in their research phase.
We funnelled users directly to the BYD website, where they could purchase their chosen model in just three clicks, eliminating the need for a secondary round of research on Carsales.
The key was to surround these audiences via multiple touchpoints, not just when they were researching on Carsales. Display and Social were the obvious first step for us, however, we wanted to leverage untapped opportunities with this data that our auto competitors had not yet considered. We deployed IP targeting across Connected TV, and we were the first to market to apply second party data overlays to Digital Out of Home, delivering a true full funnel campaign with minimal wastage.
This second party data approach was the key to unlocking BYD’s rapid brand and sales growth, propelling them toward their goal of becoming Australia’s leading electric vehicle provider.
The Results
This campaign propelled BYD to unprecedented heights, exceeding all three of our key objectives, achieving historic growth in a stagnant auto market:
Increasing quality web traffic:
Traffic to the website surged, with a significant increase in visits to product pages and dealer locators. This translated to higher lead generation, customer inquiries and ultimately, sales:
- 48% of the audience exposed to the campaign booked a test drive.
- 118% increase in users on site when comparing January to June in Google Analytics.
- 56% increase in Display Engagement Rate when comparing the same period. This further highlights the quality of users we targeted through this partnership.
Brand Awareness
Awareness skyrocketed following this campaign.
We saw the largest YoY increase in unprompted awareness in the EV category. With most brands, including market leader, Tesla, remaining flat, BYD achieved a remarkable 26 percentage point surge in growth:
Furthermore, we were able to achieve:
- Strong uplift in search interest when looking at the last 5 years in Aus. We have seen ‘BYD’ & ‘BYD Car’ become the first and third most searched terms across the EV category, with +83% and +164% YoY growth respectively.
- Awareness on carsales.com.au has also improved, with searches for brand terms rising from 366k in November to 681k in June, an 86% increase.
Rapid Sales Growth
BYD experienced unprecedented sales growth, gaining significant share of the AU EV market by converting prospects and driving high-quality traffic directly to purchase directly on BYD’s website.
- BYD is the fastest auto brand Australia to reach 25k sales (2 years)
- And it’s still growing – sales have doubled so far in 2024, with overall net orders rising by 98.5% when comparing January to June.
- We saw the largest MoM increase (51%) in May, coinciding with our implementation of Audience360 data across CTV.
This historic campaign has not only set a new standard but has also propelled BYD towards our audacious goal: Leading Australia’s new energy vehicle revolution.
What can we do for you?
If you have a campaign to run or challenge to solve, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch and leave your details, or feel free to call us direct.
