Kia Motors and Through Channel Marketing Automation

Challenge

With 70 years of progress and innovation, Kia is one of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers. Producing more than 1.4 million vehicles a year. Kia vehicles are sold and serviced through a network of more than 3,000 distributors and dealers covering 172 countries. 

With sales and service locations across the United States, Kia needed a way to execute marketing campaigns to increase customer in-store traffic and customer loyalty. This challenge was compounded by dealerships making non-compliant independent marketing decisions that compromised brand identity.
 

Solution

We began by evaluating both corporate and dealer sales and service center marketing initiatives and resources, then formulated a national Through Channel Marketing Automation solution. This approach provided direct partners with access to a large array of content and allowed sales and service managers to leverage buyer history and behavior data to deploy campaigns quickly. In addition, our approach helped franchise dealers to execute brand compliant, multi-channel marketing communications with personalized incentive-based offers to drive traffic to their sales and service departments.

Our custom web-based application provided local dealerships, regional business centers and corporate users with multi-level campaign performance metrics and custom data reporting to generate unique insights that assist in strategic planning for future marketing initiatives. Through integrated access from the corporate intranet, sales and service managers can move through the marketing process and provide confidence to the OEM that these communications will be aligned with the corporate brand.

By using our applications co-op marketing functionality Kia was able to provide financial benefits to the to dealers based on sales volume which supported adoption of the process and drove traffic to the dealership locations in support of meeting their revenue goals.
 

Results

What did an integrated Through Channel Marketing Automation solution do for the overall success of Kia Motors?

• Through on-going educational training, webinars, monthly feature and function communications we boosted dealer participation to 66%, while reducing use of non-compliant independent marketing collateral.
• By implementing brand compliant, personalized incentive-based marketing communications, we were able to increase in-store traffic by 22%.