The automotive industry is no stranger to rapid and disruptive change. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic devastated auto-industry growth, with experts predicting that recovery will take years.
Since partnering with Suzuki Romania four years ago, Stefanini Infinit has strategically assisted with the brand’s local growth by covering strategy, digital, digital transformation, creative services, media, and BTL.
Following a high complexity selection process carried out in 2020, Suzuki Romania decided to maintain Stefanini Infinit as its existing agency.
The Business Challenge
The year 2020 was a special one for Suzuki. The Japanese brand celebrated the 100th anniversary of the diversification of its production from weaving machines to the mobility solutions that today are under three divisions: cars, motorcycles, and marine boats.
Over the years, Suzuki has brought products to market that have focused on their customers’ needs and that have been adapted to the market context. In this context, 2020 was a historic year, with Suzuki being the first car manufacturer to “hybridize” its entire car range.
Unfortunately, with 2020 came the COVID-19 pandemic, which required Suzuki to readapt and reimagine its selling process.
Together, Suzuki Romania and Stefanini Infinit co-created a plan to digitalize the Suzuki business even more than they already had to better understand customer needs. This strategy necessitated improving the lead nurturing process.
How We Helped
Suzuki Romania has contributed to the brand’s success in Europe and has registered significant growth locally in the last few years with the launch of its most popular model, the Suzuki Vitara. Both the brand’s strategic collaborator, Stefanini Infinit, and the Romanian partner network contributed to this success.
“When activating in a strictly regulated market, differentiation is an important factor; as a result, we have selected an agency capable of delivering concrete results by implementing the strategic direction of the brand in the era of electrification,” said Nicoleta Gerea , Branch Office Leader of Suzuki Romania.
Prior to 2020, Stefanini Infinit and Suzuki Romania had already established the strength of their partnership, which had led to August 2019 being recognized as Suzuki Romania’s best month in sales. From January to August 2019, the brand had already sold 4,215 cars, reaching a market share of 3.6 percent. That August, Suzuki made 1,327 new car registrations and a total of 5.7 percent market share (both figures according to DRPCIV data).
To promote the new Suzuki hybrid, Stefanini Infinit launched a campaign supported by integrated, digital assets like importer sites, dealer sites, and landing pages, as well as dedicated contact forms that collected leads’ information. The landing pages served as important assets that promoted the campaign while allowing users to select dealers based on location, the types of vehicles they were interested in purchasing, and more. When users submitted a form, their information was directly transferred to a sales person who could then start the sales process.
To expedite this process, Stefanini Infinit deployed its tool, Clarimatic.
Solution
Clarimatic is a lead management and pre-CRM tool. It adds transparency to relationships between:
a. The ad agency delivering leads
b. The marketing department managing the agency’s performance
c. The sales teams processing the leads
d. The consumer
By focusing on the first interaction with a user who is interested in the brand, Clarimatic helps brands build relationships with prospective customers before the relationship is formed. The tool optimizes the sales process by acting like an incredibly centralized tool for all the sales people in Suzuki Romania’s dealer network, such as partners and distributors. This way, all sales people in the dealer network can see all the digital leads being created, act on them efficiently, and transparently.
The tool also lends transparency to the marketing process, providing real-time insights that dictate the types of improvements to make to the campaign, such as changing audience targeting to improve the quality of leads that are collected.
Clarimatic then puts all the leads generated by a business into one place, no matter if the lead comes from a digital or physical source, paid media, social media, organic traffic, or other channels. It also adds visibility by showing the source of different leads.
Through the insights generated by Clarimatic, Suzuki Romania was able to optimize the way it sells by offering an excellent user experience, making 3,960 sales in 2020.
All in all, Clarimatic enables faster lead-to-client conversion – it all starts with the client entering their data on the landing page.
“Advertising in today’s digital age must be a perfect, tailored mix to each client, between strategy/creation, media/marketing, technology/tools latest generation, and data science/data analytics,” said Alex Cernatescu, the CEO, Co-Founder & Global Head of Strategy at Stefanini Infinit. “It is very important, especially when serving an account the size of Suzuki Auto & Moto, to be able to cover all these areas in a way that allows both an adaptable creative approach and the ability to create a ‘living,’ transparent digital ecosystem measurable at any step by the customer.
At Suzuki (as well as at Infinit), the customer is in the first place – comfort, safety, ease of brand relationship, products and services are the most important, hence the compatibility with Stefanini Infinit and with the measurable success we had up to now, but especially the solid foundation on which we can build the future together. Thank you, Suzuki, for your trust in the company and our group.”
About Stefanini Infinit
Stefanini Infinit is one of the fastest-growing digital creative agencies in Europe. Founded in 2007, Stefanini Infinit was recognized in 2011 by Forbes as the largest independent digital agency in Romania and joined Stefanini in 2019. Having served more than one hundred brands, the agency is staffed by best-in-class experts who are thought leaders on the local and global digital marketing scenes. In fact, its key experts are global speakers and trainers across multiple industries and have participated in more than 250 events in 20+ countries.