Maruti Suzuki’s Marketing Strategy: Full Case Study

ABOUT MARUTI SUZUKI

The Company was incorporated as Maruti Udyog Ltd by Dr. V. Krishnamurthy. The Car Manufacturing Company, Maruti was founded in 1981. The production work commenced in 1983 with the Car ‘Maruti 700’.In 1982, a Joint venture agreement (JVA) was established between Maruti Udyog Lt. and Japanese Automobile Manufacturer, Suzuki.

Its headquarters is located in New Delhi, India, and has three other manufacturing operations in India in Gurgaon (Haryana), Manesar (Haryana), Gujarat.

MARUTI SUZUKI – The digital marketing revolution

Countless micro-moments in digital media are at present, influencing the audience and has a significant impact on the buyer’s journey. Consumers have grown incredibly smart and they would not invest in a car without undertaking research online at every stage of the customer journey.

“A large number of automobile buyers tend to watch online videos before buying a car,” says Tarun Garg, Executive Director, Marketing, Maruti Suzuki. A report stated that video, search and brand or dealer websites remain to be the most substantially influencing factor remodeling the automotive industry.

It is in this circumstance that business leader Maruti Suzuki became determined to take action and shift focus on digital marketing. With online being an indispensable source of resource for research and India hosting over 460 million smartphone users, Maruti recognized it was time to experiment and innovate content designed for the digital world.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Maruti targets every person who searched for anything related to cars, car services, and vehicles. Demography plays a crucial role for Maruti to determine its target audience. In India, it is observed that people searching for cars are in majority among the age group of 21 to 65. It pays keen attention to the audience’s seating for which car they should buy or what are the features of a particular car. Maruti makes sure to provide accurate and most description information about their cars and services.

Maruti Suzuki says that nearly half of its Nexa customers are under the age of 35 and its first-time buyers make up for 70 percent of its total sales. So it makes sure that anyone searching for NEXA on the internet should immediately get Maruti’s official site on the top instead of any other car services providers like cardekho and cars24. Maruti has a variety of cars according to its audiences like Alto India’s most fuel-efficient car which can be afforded by lower-income groups as well, WagonR positioned as a brand that goes well with people who want to lead an economic and interesting lifestyle, Swift positioned as the car with style, modern looks, and young attitude and similarly, Swift Dezire positioned as an entry-level sedan for the aspirational class. This shows how much Maruti focuses on its audience so that it can serve a variety of people among different demography.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

Maruti is one of the most successful automobile companies in India has worked immensely on optimizing its platform to rank on the search engine. Whenever someone searches for Keywords like “ Cars, Best Cars or anything related to Car and vehicles” the chances of results showing Maruti’s article are very high. And this is all possible because Maruti has put a lot of effort into SEO.

As per Ubersuggest, a keyword tool by Neil Patel, Maruti has a search volume of 135000 while 55837 people click on SEO results in India.

The average web page that ranks in the top 10 has 290 backlinks and a domain score of 75. These stats are really amazing.

The graph below shows the monthly search volume of Maruti. As per the latest results in the month of August, Maruti had a total of 135000 searches, out of which 54726 were mobile searches while 80274 desktop searches.

Ubersuggest gives an overall idea of keywords for which Maruti is being searched over the internet. The graph below shows different keywords and their search volume.

As you can see above, the keyword “Maruti Suzuki” has a search volume of 550000 which is followed by “Maruti share price” which has a volume of 450000. These are the top keywords related to Maruti that people search on the internet

Keywords in URL (marutisuzuki.com)

The organic keywords for which Maruti ranks are 116092, which is simply amazing. This shows how much effort Maruti has put forward for its SEO. The website gets a monthly traffic of 503722, which is again brilliant.

It also gets 37083 backlinks from other websites, which works as a backbone for Maruti in ranking no.1 on google search.

Below is the list of keywords for which marutisuzuki.com ranks.

Below is the list of top pages for which marutisuzuki.com ranks.

Backlinks of Maruti

Maruti gets backlinks from over 37083 unique domains, which is excellent. All these backlinks work as a backbone for Flipkart in ranking number 1 on the search engine.

Backlinks for Maruti have increased rapidly over time. The graph below shows how from December 2019 to August 2020, backlinks have grown from 3453 to 37083.

Keywords on the web pages

Keywords that include cars or services provided by Maruti like’ ‘Nexa, Wagon R, Swift, celerio’ tell the search engines that these pages have the content related to these search queries.

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES

Maruti Suzuki is very much active on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. It has around: 4,86,848 followers on Facebook, 35.4K on Instagram & around 122.4K on Twitter.

Like the youth, Maruti Suzuki too has a different kind of love for Instagram, and the multiple accounts just prove that. Apart from the official Instagram accounts Suzuki has two other Instagram accounts one is Maruti Suzuki Arena which is more about the showrooms and the journey of Technology, Design and Connected Experience and the other one Nexa which solely focuses on their model Nexa. They have a follower base of 212K and 290K respectively,

SPECIAL DAYS

When it comes to Social Media and Occasions, the social media team of Maruti Suzuki leaves no leaf unturned. They don’t miss out on occasions be it universally celebrated occasions like Mother’s Day or Chocolate Day to days of national importance like Republic Day & Independence Day. The brand connects the occasion with their product very well and in a very unique style.

Here you go

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Maruti Suzuki (@marutisuzukiofficial)

PROMOTION

When it comes to marketing, promotion of your product in the right way is very important. And to promote one of it’s a new feature – #AutoGearShift (AGS) technology, Maruti Suzuki uploaded a video where they linked changing gears of the car to a Child”s Play in a very smart way.  Watch it here for yourself   

View this post on Instagram

  A post shared by Maruti Suzuki (@marutisuzukiofficial)

And to support this up they uploaded different videos to talk about all the features & benefits of Auto Gear Shift Technology, like this :

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Maruti Suzuki (@marutisuzukiofficial)

View this post on Instagram

  A post shared by Maruti Suzuki (@marutisuzukiofficial)

CAMPAIGNS

Sometime back Maruti Suzuki had come up with a new campaign to promote its premium hatchback Swift. The company opted for social media to run and promote this campaign by sharing some motivating stories in the form of videos.

Which involves a famous personality like Mary Kom

PAID MEDIA ADVERTISING

Google AdWords

The uppermost benefit of Google AdWords is that it serves the purpose quicker than SEO. Both Google ads and SEO are search engine marketing approaches to produce more traffic and leads. However, a well-executed AdWords campaign can operate much faster for a business to get to the prime spot. Maruti Suzuki has leveraged this digital marketing strategy to attract google searchers to their websites. The brand has done extensive research on relative keywords and has strategically ranked for the same.

Few search terms for which Maruti Suzuki’s website ranks in the top are:

1. Most fuel-efficient car in India.
2. Buy the best car under 5 lakhs.
3. Top selling cars in India

CHATBOT

Maruti Suzuki and Isobar, a digital agency have worked out India’s first Integrated Chatbot. Collectively, they have introduced an innovative video banner with an inbuilt chatbot on certain digital platforms. The chatbot will allow the brand to engage with its users and encourage first-level inquiries. The extension of this new feature will educate the customers about ‘A whole new world Maruti Suzuki’. The chatbot also redirects the users to their main website, allowing bi-lateral communication with the appropriate audience.

YOUTUBE ADVERTISING

The brand decided to create ads and content for its digital audience targeting youtube as the platform. For its Ertiga, the company produced a series of ads titled ‘Real-Time Social’ to advertise the car in a fairly different space with real-life experience.

It is a tale of four friends who choose to go on a road trip away from technology and smartphones, the series of ads highlighted the friends traveling a long way exploring the offline world to create Real-Time Social experiences.

The Ertiga Real-Time Social video web series for YouTube, which was short two-three-minute videos gained over seven million views. The Ertiga launch also paved the way for the creation of mobile-first creative ads.

The latest campaign for Maruti Suzuki India’s featuring its most popular vehicle Swift begins with the story of the protagonist Bhupender Sharma, an experienced marketing executive, who unfortunately lost a leg in an accident. The camera chases his journey as he expresses the definition of kamyabi (success). The ads also depict how he embraces sports as a means to regain mental and physical balance.

Made by the marketing company, Dentsu the ad film greets the undying spirit of Sharma introducing the audience to a new brand thought ‘Be Limitless’. Produced as a series, the campaign also highlights the narratives of real-life heroes such as Vikas Dimri, a corporate banker, an athlete who scaled Mt Everest, and six-time world champion and Olympics bronze victor Mary Kom.

COVID STRATEGY

As coronavirus is fast across the world, Suzuki is working on minimizing the impact of the pandemic on sales.
The company’s senior executive director CV Raman said that the company has started focusing more on digital marketing and delivery of cars from service centres directly to customers without the customer having to visit the store.
During the Covid-19 outbreak with everyone being locked inside their house, there were some Corona Warriors fighting out with the virus for the people of the country. Doctors being one of them and they have put in their heart and soul, most importantly risked their life in trying and saving as many patients possible. Maruti Suzuki conveyed the same message in one of their posts with the following message :
“ While we only see one avatar, doctors are also mothers, fathers, spouses, and siblings. In their pursuit to help humankind in these trying times, they often put the care of their patients above their families. “
To salute the spirit of such noble souls and their families on the occasion of National Doctors Day, Maruti Suzuki came up with this beautiful post. Check it out

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A post shared by Maruti Suzuki (@marutisuzukiofficial)

Conclusion

According to sources, the company has nearly 900 Bharat stage emission standards (BSIV) cars in its store and is quite confident of selling them in the following few weeks. However, Raman stated that a scrappage policy is critical and is the need of the hour, as it would drive demand and increase sales apart from improving the air quality.

However, the introduction of BSVI standards vehicles is set to make diesel vehicles slightly more expensive. And only by educating the audience about the importance of BSVI standards, the brand can aim to improve its demand and sales in the coming days. For which the company has picked digital marketing as the means of communication, which should allow the brand to have an edge over its competitors in the days to come.

If you are interested in digital marketing or a student with an understanding of the digital world, you should check out Free Digital Marketing MasterClass by IIDE. 

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