Finding your tribe with carsales Audience Hubs
Tailoring the right content to the right audience has long been a strategic carsales hallmark… but how can this content assist to sell more vehicles?
Enter carsales Audience Hubs.
Placed in prominence on the carsales home page, the Audience Hubs focus on specific automotive categories, attracting highly engaged buyers that are actively researching vehicles that suit a specific lifestyle.
First released in January 2021 with a focus on strong user journeys on mobile and desktop, the three initial categories – ‘Tradie’, ‘Adventure’ and ‘Family’ – have been joined by a fourth that’s specialised to the current automotive hot topic: Electric Vehicles.
Launched on World EV Day in September, the carsales Electric Hub follows the precedent set by the others, centralising key editorial news, reviews, lifestyle features and advice onto one convenient landing page.
“The Audience Hubs evolved because we felt that we had strong editorial content across the board, but it was scattered across the website,” explained carsales Commercial Product Manager, Nikki Pecora.
“The Hubs have enabled us to create communities around some of the most popularly-searched vehicle categories.”
Double edged benefits
As well as enabling consumers a more seamless user experience and more efficient research options, Audience Hubs allow advertisers the opportunity to truly target their chosen tribe.
“What we’ve found with the Hubs is that we are building more awareness of these categories in the consumer’s mindset, and this supports them to move actively towards the consideration phase of the funnel,” Pecora explained.
“This delivers advertisers an engaged, tailored audience to speak to.”
And from the media partnerships created so far, it’s not just OEMs that the carsales Audience Hubs appeal to.
“These specialised categories have opportunity for complementary businesses, such as Shell, who see value in the highly targeted, quality audience the hubs provide,” said Pecora.
Continued feedback through user experience and testing ensures the Hubs’ functionality continues to evolve. For example, electric intenders can sort searches by vehicle range. On the advertising side, traditional packages such as landing page buyouts are available, but the product is designed to be highly flexible and tailored to the client.
“We have three and 12-month packages that include items such as hero placements, native tiles, sponsored content and video pieces, link ad placements and guaranteed carousel placements, so the Hub sponsor can be sure of high exposure, not only on their chosen Hub but also across the carsales website,” said Pecora.
“We are also able to tailor a package so it’s bespoke to any client’s requirements.”
Continued development and a focus on user experience ensure that the carsales Audience Hub concept continues to evolve, and several additional Hub spaces are being considered to ensure carsales consumers can access the content they need… and ensure your brand is front-and-centre when they do.
You can discover more about the carsales Audience Hubs product here.
Watch this space
In the coming weeks we will be introducing an exciting new look and feel for the ‘Hubs’ spaces, offering new layouts and functionalities designed to make your product stand out to the right audience. We will provide more details on this exciting development in the coming weeks.
See more of our media and OEM solutions here.
