Car and Driver is entering the retail space and they are excited to branch outside of their known enthusiast sector. James Tom, Senior Vice President of Dealer Network & enterprise Sales, Hearst Autos, shares with CBT News what we can expect from the company this year and how it benefits the industries dealers more than you might think.
Combining industry-leading brands, tools, and in-depth auto shopper insights with the largest, most diverse automotive audience, Hearst Autos delivers performance-driven marketing solutions at every stage of consideration. We talk with Tom about Car and Driver specifically to learn how Jumpstart Automotive Media is changing how people typically view them.
Car and Driver can be dated back to the 50’s and it wasn’t until 2015 when this mostly enthusiast content brand noticed that Eighty percent of their market was actually in-market car shoppers.
Tom explains it was at this point they began to adjust what they did and who their market was, telling CBT News, “We started to evolve it to me more shopper-centric. So we’re not going to lose that fun enthusiast flair, but start to give the consumers more of what they were actually looking for when they came to our site. So we started to evolve the content, be much more … Broke it down into nine key categories, things like real-world fuel economy, rear leg room, infotainment, all things that people are researching, trying to find out compared to different cars.”
But their efforts don’t stop there, Hearst also owns companies that give values on cars. That’s when they created Hearst Auto as a way to stitch all of these companies together and give the consumers a starting point that will lead them to hopefully driving a vehicle off a lot.
If you are now wondering how this can help your dealership, Tom says that they actually push the shopper to the dealership’s website when they have zoned in on what they are looking for. “Our goal is to ultimately get them on to the dealer’s website interacting with a dealer. Dealers typically get their best closing ratio from the website so we do have leads we generate from Car and Driver but a good portion of the value is we actually push people into the dealer’s website”.
