Product and marketing are inter-influential if they are not considered as different parts of the same body. In the process of creating a new product, the experience crafted in the product itself and in the marketing communications all stem from the same values. At least that was the case for AutoMate, and our customers enjoyed the coherence that achieved.

Proposition

As explained in Part 1 that concluded from the user research, trust was the outlining factor behind choosing a desirable car service provider, and it was the key to delivering a satisfactory customer experience by maintaining the mutual trust. The core values of AutoMate are trust & transparency, that are built and delivered by the product features, and complemented as a brand in the marketing communications.

Brand Values

Manifested in Visual Language

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

The Marketing Plan, and Experiments

The unique feature of Standard-Price Services provided not only a focus for the marketing campaigns because of its clear offerings, but also as a foundation for many testings on the copywritings, creatives, and target audiences.

Again, Segments, and Segments…

Marketing campaigns were created based on the segmentations of audiences, services, with experiments on copywriting and visuals to achieve the optimisation on ad performances. This was an ongoing effort to drive the growth marketing supported by user data from the AutoMate mobile app. The marketing funnel was also further completed by original contents and social marketing to increase to leads generation.

Another turning point for AutoMate’s growth was learning the fact that each service is different in nature, so as the needs and user behaviours, and essentially a somehow different customer journey. Therefore services are another dimension of segmentations, other than the dimensions of users and vehicles. Then the direction for analytics and performance marketing became more clear, that is to look for the correlations across services, users, vehicles, and to focus on the best performing outliers.

After a series of testings, one of the most significant results was improving the conversion rate of annual inspection service from 0.5% to higher than 15%. This process was repeated to extent these pillar services to sustain as a steady revenue level for AutoMate.

Customer Journey & Personalisation

The line between product and marketing was in fact so blurred because both are developed from the customer journey. This is the most important concept that always points to more ideas that drive growth. Built upon the customer journey, there are a complex but structured set of marketing campaigns, and delivered by of course automations. And yes correct, it will be a personalised customer experience after all.

Data-Driven and Beyond

One of the main challenges occur to AutoMate in marketing was the attribution of brand awareness. In contrast to performance marketing, the impact of awareness campaigns remain certain sense of ambiguity. The impact are relatively indirect or take more time to reflect thus hard to justify the costs, but they are not negligible as they may seem.

There are ways for startups like AutoMate to earn brand awareness with limited resources, such as leveraging other brands through collaborations, earned media, nurturing community, and stunts that highly focus on a message that stands out in the crowd.

Convergence of Product and Marketing

Through this case study of building AutoMate from zero to one, we can see how product design process and growth marketing strategies are highly inter-influential to each other. They are both at an iterative process of constant discovery, experiment, re-alignment. Data-driven mindset is important for its power to provide insights and pin-point the problems very specifically.

However the good old creative process is still crucial to give light to the design solution, and ultimately bring the market disruption that aspired by business. The convergence of product and marketing has been seen not only in early startups but also in scaled products to achieve better customer experience and in return higher values in return.