iMotors: 1 581 qualified leads for 4 Chinese automotive brands on Meta and TikTok
When one company holds 4 brands, ordinary advertising burns the budget on overlaps and dilutes every brand. We split them into separate funnels — 1 581 leads with a phone number for a call + ~19 000 conversations in messengers. Since October 2024 — ongoing.
Get a consultationFour brands, one company — four ways to waste the budget
Four brands, one company, one marketing department — and automatically four ways to waste the budget. Wuling, JMC, Omoda, Jaecoo — each has its own customer, its own car price, its own deal cycle. Running «shared advertising» for them means putting the campaigns into competition with one another for the same audience and paying for it twice.
On top of that — the reality of the auto niche: a showroom lives on sales from test drives. Advertising can drive thousands of clicks and still produce an empty showroom — if those clicks do not turn into a person who actually shows up. In the Chinese-automotive segment, where a buyer compares 4-5 brands at once and comes in «just to look», this is critical: a lead without a phone number is a lead without a chance.
Split the brands into separate funnels under a single metric
Split the brands into their own funnels so each gets precise positioning, while everything runs under a single metric — a lead with a phone number. Not a click, not an email, not «interest».
What we did and why
Separate ad accounts — this is not tidiness, this is money
If you put all 4 brands into one ad account — the Meta algorithm starts showing JMC ads to someone who already clicked on Omoda, and vice versa. You pay twice for the same person, while the «premium crossover» positioning blends with «commercial truck» inside the buyer's head. We set up the main iMotors account (for the company's general communication) + separate accounts for each brand (Wuling, JMC, Omoda, Jaecoo) under their own positioning.
A lead with a phone number ≠ a lead with an email. These are two different levels of readiness
«Left an email» and «left a number» in the auto niche are two different niches. Only a number means the person is ready for a call and genuinely close to the showroom. The goal of all campaigns is tuned precisely to this type of lead — the algorithm learns to bring those who give a contact for a call, not anyone who clicked. This is exactly the line between «many enquiries, an empty showroom» and «fewer leads, but managers at work».
TikTok — for Wuling only. Deliberately
Adding Omoda or Jaecoo there would be a cheap way to «try a new channel». The affluent audience of the premium segment sits on Meta and compares by specifications rather than swiping short videos. Wuling, with its mass-market positioning, does work on TikTok. Every channel must earn, not «be present».
Awareness for brands new to the market
Jaecoo, Omoda — relatively new names for the Azerbaijani customer. They google «Omoda vs Hyundai» and make the decision by comparison, not by brand. That is why we ran awareness content separately: show the car, explain the differences, set up the comparison in our favour in advance. Without this layer, advertising would only reach those who already searched for the brand by name — too narrow a funnel for a newcomer to the market.
The cost of a mistake in the auto niche is higher than it seems
One wasted month on a premium brand = dozens of test drives that never happened = customers go to the neighbouring dealer and do not come back. In the Chinese-automotive segment, where a buyer compares several brands at once, they do not come back at all — because they chose the neighbour. That is why you cannot «test on the fly» here: the structure must be right from the very first month. This is exactly why we started with a complex 5-account architecture, not with «a simple single account for everything».
The numbers for the period
In automotive with several brands, a single ad account is self-cannibalization. The brands take impressions from one another, the budget burns on overlaps, the positioning dilutes down to «a Chinese car». The solution is always one: separate accounts, a single metric — a lead with a phone number.
Selling something expensive and long-cycle — a car, real estate, a premium service?
Where a lead is measured not by a click but by readiness for a call — we know how to build that funnel. Leave your name and number — we will analyse your situation.