The showroom has moved into the living room

Michael Stein is Head of Marketing at Semler Mobility Denmark (SEAT, SKODA, Audi & Volkswagen).

Michael has been initially setting the pace for Semler Group Denmark as Head of Marketing for Volkswagen DK before becoming Head of Marketing for SEAT, SKODA, Audi and Volkswagen. Through continuous innovative thinking, integrated communication and technology platforms, he has positioned the brand portfolio more solidly than ever before.

Michael represents the CMO of tomorrow with an innovative mindset, solid digital skills, and a natural curiosity and flair for new trends.

 

…Danish consumers are among the most digitised
in Europe. 95% of all car buyers use digital channels throughout the buying process.

– Google Consumer Barometer Study, 2017

A McKinsey & Company study about Automotive retail from 2014, found that the average number of store visits has declined from 5 to just 1 from 2006-2013. Google supports this in the study ‘Measuring the full Automotive Journey – Fast & Digital 2017’, who found that there were only 1,6 dealer visits before the purchase in 2017 compared to 5 in 2005. This trend reflects massive digitisation throughout the Danish population, where the predominantly part of the consumer journey now is digital — a migration that Semler Group has observed and which has been directional for their marketing transformation.

According to Michael Stein, consumer expectations for brands to deliver a great digital user experience are higher than ever before – “…Prospects want at any time to be able to access and engage with relevant and value-added content, that helps clarify the choice of car. Volkswagen Group DK believes in mobile-first and integrates technology and content distribution to provide a superior digital marketing experience consistent across channels. Campaigns are recency planned and executed from an always-on perspective by the support of marketing automation platforms.”

DENSOU and Semler Group have collaborated for the past three years in the co-development of the dolocal platform. An automated advertising platform that enables local dealerships to activate display and social media campaigns, hyper-targeting prospects within local districts.

Here is a short recap of the reflections and deployment process from Michael Stein’s perspective:

Objectives and obstacles

• Initiating a digital maturation process across internal marketing entities that reflects and encapsulates a more predominantly digital consumer behaviour.
• To transform the organization to think and act digital-first in all paid media marketing aspects.
• Manage and execute a brand portfolio strategy based on recency planning and multiple always-on campaigns.
• Identify a digital development partner that understands our marketing and business objectives and has the capabilities and skills to deploy a local advertising platform.

Onboarding

• DENSOU understood our technical and business-related pains and effectively converted them to relievers and gains in deploying a customized automated local advertising platform for HQ and car dealerships.
• DENSOU’s approach to the partnership included a tremendous amount of humbleness, accessibility and curiosity to learn and develop from our shared experience.

Outcomes

• The dolocal application has been adopted across all brands (Audi, WV, SEAT and Porsche) and supports our digital transformation process across marketing entities.
• So far, we have successfully run more than 5.000 local display and social media campaigns through dolocal
• Our sales modelling data shows that local digital campaigns through dolocal drive sales far more efficiently than local print advertising.
• Local dealerships with limited paid media marketing experience can run campaigns and observe a significant increase in sales and aftermarket conversations.
• Local dealerships with limited paid media marketing experience can run campaigns and observe a significant increase in sales and aftermarket conversations.
• The dolocal application contributes to a vast increase in qualified traffic to our local dealerships and landing pages. A more significant proportion of this traffic constitutes a larger share of unique landing page visits and store visits.

See next case here

For inquiries concerning our platform solutions please contact us at platform@densou.dk