As competition in the local automotive market heats up, brands are stepping up their efforts to outpace rivals in product offerings and pricing strategies. A growing number of automotive brands are recognizing the potential of KOS (Key Opinion Sales) marketing. As an emerging marketing trend, KOS marketing bridges online traffic and offline stores, gradually becoming a core component of brand marketing strategies. With the rise of KOS marketing, how should brands respond to the challenges they face? What marketing insights do we have to quickly secure a foothold in this highly competitive market?
The Rise of KOS Marketing:
A New Opportunity in Social Media
A Breakthrough for Brands
Social media is playing an unprecedented role in shaping consumer purchasing decisions. According to the 2023 Xiaohongshu Deloitte Automotive Industry Marketing Whitepaper, users heavily rely on social media platforms, especially platforms like Xiaohongshu, to obtain car reviews and shopping experiences.
On social platforms with such a high concentration of potential users, automotive brands are not only using these platforms to create buzz and enhance brand awareness, but are also quietly transforming them into powerful sales conversion channels. KOS marketing is rapidly gaining traction, with more and more brands increasing their investment in it. Data from Xiaohongshu reveals that from January to October 2024, daily posts in the automotive category increased by 72% year-over-year, and the monthly number of KOS posts in the automotive industry surged by 6,952%. This demonstrates that KOS strategy is helping automotive brands achieve effective conversion from seeding to sales.
After analyzing the car sales rankings published by RCAD, KAWO found that the top-selling brands, whether new forces brands like Li Auto, HIMA, and Leapmotor, leading local brands like BYD, Geely, and Volkswagen, or joint-venture and foreign brands like Tesla, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz—regardless of their type—have all established KOS account matrices on at least one social media platform such as Xiaohongshu or Douyin. These account matrices include official verified accounts of direct-sale stores and dealerships, as well as personal accounts of store managers, consultants, and sales staff, with the number of accounts ranging from dozens to several hundred.
Challenges of KOS Marketing:
Brand Management Difficulties and Execution Risks
The explosive growth of social media accounts often exposes numerous brand management issues. After researching several automotive brands and dealerships, KAWO discovered that due to declining foot traffic in brick-and-mortars, dealerships urgently need cost-effective customer acquisition methods like KOS marketing. However, due to a lack of collaboration between brands and dealers, they often face several risks:
- Brand Authenticity: While dealers can effectively drive traffic through live-streaming, live selling requires a high level of professional skill and adaptability, especially for luxury brands. Manufacturer training is often inadequate, resulting in sales staff with varying levels of competency and understanding, leading to inconsistent brand messaging.
- Brand Safety: Posting content frequently on social media makes it difficult for a brand’s marketing team to review everything, which can lead to content that doesn’t align with the brand’s voice or tone, potentially harming its image. Moreover, avoiding sensitive words can be challenging, increasing the risk of violations. Additionally, KOS accounts may face disruptions in management or content sharing due to staff changes or operational errors, further impacting brand marketing efforts and customer relationships. This prevents these accounts from becoming valuable, long-term assets for the brand.
- Scalability: As the number of accounts expands from a few to dozens or even hundreds, it becomes increasingly difficult for brands to control content quality and posting frequency. Lead conversion tracking also becomes more challenging. With rising management costs, scaling up may inadvertently reduce ROI.
Core Advantages of KOS Marketing:
Comprehensive Closure and Precise Conversion
In traditional automotive marketing, the connection typically occurs after a consumer enters a store. KOS covers the entire marketing chain, filling the gap between brand awareness and purchase. By leveraging interest-based content, offline sales roles can shift to online, providing more proactive and professional services and guidance to potential customers, thereby facilitating a complete marketing loop. For high-ticket items like cars, where the decision-making process is complex and highly specialized, KOS can provide tailored advice before the consumer makes a purchase decision. This not only amplifies the value through social media but transforms the brand’s role from waiting for customers to proactively attracting them, engaging more directly in their decision-making process, and thus improving customer acquisition and conversion rates.
To implement KOS marketing successfully, automotive brands should focus on four key steps: system setup, dealer training, targeted advertising, and continuous optimization. Firstly, the brand department should establish a KOS account matrix aligned with marketing goals and develop a tiered content strategy. Next, it’s important to train dealers to help them better understand the KOS model and its benefits. This training usually cover account optimization, creating high-quality posts, developing messaging scripts, and improving store traffic and sales conversions, ensuring consistent brand messaging across all channels.
After training, brands shall focus on selecting top-performing posts for targeted advertising to increase exposure and engage the right customers. Incentivizing high-performing content and encouraging internal teams to share best practices will help continuously improve the content, driving accurate traffic to offline stores and building brand trust. Lastly, brands need to allocate resources based on their strengths and weaknesses.
For instance, in The Ultimate Guide to Key Opinion Sales Marketing in China, Li Auto created a dedicated new media department to oversee the strategic execution of its KOS marketing, ensuring content quality and alignment with overall brand objectives. By setting clear KPIs, they successfully linked content creation with brand building, driving more precise traffic and enhancing long-term market competitiveness.
KAWO: Empowering Sales Conversion
with Full-Spectrum Services
As a leading KOS marketing solution provider, KAWO has assisted top brands across various industries with effective solutions and achieved remarkable sales results. KAWO’s services include:
- System Setup & Staff Training: Define KOS project goals, setup KOS account matrix, manage IPs at various levels, and offer custom industry and brand-specific courses.
- Content Strategy & Precise Advertising: Tailored content strategies based on KOS tiers and data performance for precise advertising placement.
- Account Management & Performance Tracking: Centralized management of numerous KOS accounts, intelligent content audit to minimize risks, and performance tracking of content and data.
- Competitor Analysis & Data Insights: Timely competitor analysis and insights based on data to optimize content strategies.
- Conversion Tracking & Iterative Optimization: Monitor consumer interactions, collect sales leads, and continually refine content strategies to optimize account performance.
Taking KAWO’s luxury brand client as an example, within the first three months of launching KOS marketing on Xiaohongshu, the brand successfully generated 11 in-store orders through KOS posts, achieving an ROI of over 3.0. In the following three months, the number of orders increased to 42, with the ROI reaching an impressive 9.05!
Beyond direct sales conversion, KOS, as an internal brand asset, enriches the brand’s content matrix. These posts, while maintaining the individuality of sales staff, are managed by the brand department to ensure they align with the brand authenticity, which enhances brand recognition and consumer sentiment, giving the brand a more “human” feel.
KAWO’s strength lies in providing brands with a standardized SOP, helping brands efficiently and systematically manage their KOS account matrix, ensuring brand safety and consistency while developing a tailored methodology for rapid scaling and maximizing KOS marketing effectiveness.
In 2025, as competition in the automotive market heats up, brands will focus on driving further growth. KOS marketing can help them acquire customers at a low cost early on, and provide personalized, one-on-one service later, building trust and boosting conversions. In this highly competitive landscape, KOS marketing has become a key area in social media marketing. It’s crucial for brands to establish their own tailored KOS strategy. Reach out to us today for a one-on-one consultation with our marketing experts.
