Key Takeaways

‍

Content Focus — Provide Auto Shoppers with Insightful Car Overview Videos: Car overview videos became an important part of the auto shopper purchasing journey and can’t be overlooked. 46% of Canadians consider car walkaround videos being the best alternative to visiting a dealership. At the same time, 75% of auto shoppers say video influenced their purchasing decisions; 46% discovered a car they weren’t previously considering. While creating video content, it’s worth remembering that auto shoppers are looking for unbiased reviews. Hence it’s important to remain objective and provide only fact-based information. Auto shoppers are looking for videos that go into detail about the car’s specs and features and provide comparisons with similar models. 

Content Focus — Experiment with Different Types of Walkaround Videos: Ford, Nissan and Mazda devote considerable efforts to filling up their YouTube channels with relevant car walkaround videos. While Ford creates dozens of short, computer-generated feature overview videos geared towards current Ford owners, it also invests in production-heavy “Head-to-head” series. The latter demonstrates how Ford cars perform against other similar class vehicles. Videos in the “Head-to-head” series on average receive 126K views, which is significantly higher than “Knowing your vehicle” videos.

Bloggers — Partner with Auto Review Channels: While Mazda doesn’t produce as many overview videos as Ford or Nissan, it effectively leverages auto blogger’s content. Mazda curates playlists with car review videos by auto bloggers, providing its followers with an easy and unbiased way to learn about its models. Mazda assembled 9 playlists for different car models. Each playlist has ~13 different videos, some of which has as many as 900K views.

Content Focus — Show Off the Car Interior: As BMW found out during the launch of its all-new 8 Series vehicles, viewers are very drawn to the car interior videos. A video highlighting car interior drove 8X more site visits than standard TV ads and 20X more site visits than the ad focused on the car’s exterior.

‍

46% of Canadians consider car walkaround videos the best alternative to visiting a dealership.  

‍

‍

Car feature explainer videos followed by car model comparisons are the most preferred types of car videos by auto shoppers.

Features specs explainers

‍

Car models comparison

Source

‍

Car walkaround videos make up a considerable portion of YouTube content for Ford, Nissan and Mazda.

‍

Ford produces a video series called “Knowing Your Vehicle” that go into the detail of each car feature as well as “Head-to-Head” videos that compare Ford vehicles against other brands.

Knowing Your Vehicle

Views: 3k

‍

Head-to-Head

Views: 136K

‍

“Head-to-Head” videos get significantly more views (avg. views ~126K) compared to the “Knowing Your Vehicle” series.

‍

Nissan creates short (<2 min) walkaround car videos in both English and French.

Views: 185K | Total videos: 38 | Avg. views: 19.8K | Avg. duration: <2 min

Mazda created and published 19 walkaround videos in one year.

Views: 1.1K

‍

Views: 871 

‍

Mazda also has curated playlists of its cars being reviewed by auto bloggers. The brand has playlists for 9 car models.

‍

Each playlist on average has 13 walkaround videos from different content creators.

‍

Some Mazda walkaround videos get as many as 900K views.

By collaborating with creators Mazda gets to:

• Share content creation efforts
• Tap into creator’s following
• Provide unbiased reviews

Views: 900K 

‍‍

Views: 385K 

‍

Views: 363K 

‍

BMW ran an experiment to determine which car videos performed better. For the launch of its all-new 8 Series vehicle, the brand ran three YouTube ads focused on the car interior, exterior and general overview (Source).

General Overview

‍

Interior

‍

Exterior

‍

BMW found that the video focused on the car’s interior drove 8X more site visits than standard TV ads and 20X more site visits than ads focused on the car’s exterior (Source).

‍