Why using Promotional Offers in Paid Search Drove Better Results for Tire Dealers
The life of a tire dealer is chaotic at best. If they’re lucky there’s a steady flow of traffic coming into the shop on any given day, and they’re spending time answering questions, providing quotes, scheduling the services needed to get customers happily back out the door in hopes of gaining a good online customer review. There are different tire manufacturers calling on them, trying to get them to push their own tire brand. The average larger scale tire dealer carries 11 tire brands – that’s 11 different tire reps calling on a dealer at any given time, not to mention the other brands trying to convince them to carry their tires too. On top of that, they have vendors trying to sell them digital marketing services to help get consumers in the door to buy tires. With everything going on in a tire shop, it’s enough to overwhelm anyone!
Regardless of the chaos, most tire dealers understand they need to focus a little effort on marketing. That said, the digital space is oftentimes esoteric to them. They want to know they are making the right decisions for their business, spending their marketing budgets on the things that are going to drive the most traffic and keep existing customers coming back through their door. Most of them are signing up for services with multiple digital vendors, not understanding how that can impact how they’re perceived online.
For example, if one vendor is managing a dealer’s social media and another is managing paid search, the efforts won’t be coordinated because the right hand won’t know what the left is doing. When it comes to digital, the message needs to be consistent across marketing channels and platforms. If it’s not, the message becomes disconnected and reduces conversions.
Further, the user experience needs to be cohesive and consistent from the first click to the last. As mentioned in a previous article, the customer journey is rarely a straight line, which adds another level of complexity to a dealer’s digital presence. Consumers are savvy! They know to review more than one resource to research a business online before they spend hundreds of dollars. They’ll look at online directories to check reviews, see how a business engages with customers on social media and check to see if they have any special offers in search results.
Speaking of offers, when it comes to selling tires, the best offer wins! In a study from Marketplace Insights, 52% of consumers purchase tires because of a price, sale, discount or rebate. Running offers is important for local tire dealers whether they know it or not. More importantly, including offers can improve their local search results significantly!
Use Promotional Offers to Drive More Conversions
For channel marketers, if you’re dealers are running search advertising at the local level without combining it with a promotional offer to attract attention, you might want to rethink what you’re doing. In a recent case study conducted by Digital Fusion, a division of Channel Fusion, results for 38 dealers of a major tire manufacturer were tracked. We learned that running a promotional offer in tandem with your paid search advertising will not only drive a much larger click through rate, but it will also reduce what you pay per click by over half.
How Brands can Support their Tire Dealers (and get more sales in the process)
The takeaway for brands? All brands run regular national promotions for dealers. (Keep doing that.) Giving your dealers the ability to apply a reimbursable secondary offer to your national promotion will also help them stand out from another tire dealer just down the street. In addition, think about providing your dealers with evergreen promotions to run in between your larger promotions to help keep driving more consumers into your channel partner’s shops to buy your tires.
If you’re reading this and represent a brand that doesn’t work in the tire space, this same analysis can be applied to any vertical that drives consumers to a brick & mortar store, or even an online storefront – like retail stores, HVAC contractors, motorized sports equipment, or even furniture.
Another key takeaway – work with a digital partner who knows how to measure and optimize results. You’d be surprised how few agencies truly focus on driving outcomes. If your dealer and/or brand agency for your channel marketing program doesn’t provide insights like this to inform your brand’s channel marketing program decisions, it might be time to shop around. Your agency should have a slew of data insights from every campaign they run for your dealers.
Digital Fusion provides turnkey digital marketing solutions for tire dealers as well as dealers in other industries like construction, HVAC and retail. We pride ourselves on helping brands close the elusive ROI loop on their digital marketing dollars to help their channel marketing programs become more profitable. We also know that helping brands gain more engagement from their dealers is another hurdle to overcome. We have lots of ideas to help with that as well! To learn more about Digital Fusion and the services we provide brands and their dealers, email sales@channel-fusion-website.websitepro.hosting or call Dan Dale, Sales Director, at 224-769-0636.
About Channel Fusion
For 20 years, Channel Fusion has been delivering strategy, customer experience and return on investment outcomes for brands and their channel partners with a wide variety of solutions and industry expertise. We continue to invest in the overall ecosystem of our channel marketing offering to ensure our clients provide their partners with an optimal customer experience. Our core technologies and configurable platforms are supported by a team of customer-centric “Fusers.” Let us know if you’d like to learn more about how we deliver desired outcomes for brands and their channel partners.