The Tire Review team visited the Dominican Republic for Continental Tire’s 2022 Gold Dealer Meeting, and while we were there, it was our goal to get a pulse on the industry by tracking down tire dealers and asking them our most burning questions.
This week, that question is: What is your most successful marketing tactic?
Full transcript of the episode below:
Maddie Winer, Editor, Tire Review:
Hi, I’m Maddie Winer and I recently went to Continental Tire’s Gold Dealer meeting in the Dominican Republic. While there, I ask dealers what their most successful marketing tactic is between digital and traditional marketing. There are so many ways to get the word out about your business. Here’s what they had to say.
Cory Brown – Cory’s Point S Tire & Auto Service, Rapid City, South Dakota:
I have found that the best marketing tactic is to continue making your current customers happy, which generally speaking means you’re doing promotions, rewards, program of some kind and discounts to your existing customers. Now, as far as getting new customers goes, that also ties back to your existing customers because a happy customer will bring in potentially other good customers. So we will market to friends and family of our existing customers, and that has been our most successful marketing tactic because people will be, if you make people happy, they’ll be your advocate. So they’ll go to their friends and family and say, Hey, we’ve got this new, bring a customer in program, $25 off a mechanical service or a set of tires or whatever that may be. And they’ll advocate for you if you have a good, happy existing customer.
Zack McMurray – Van’s Tire Pros, multiple locations in Northeast Ohio:
We do a lot of marketing, we do a lot of print still. We definitely rely a lot on Google searches and we do a really good job at trying to focus on getting customer reviews. Currently, we’re with Podium. That helps make that a little bit easier for us. But we have a lot of Google reviews and we know that that’s a good place where a lot of people find us. But we still focus a lot on print as well. We have a large trifold, full gloss, good card stock piece of advertising that we send out that not only has some tire specials, some coupons and ideas for the customer to be able to hold onto it for the full year. So we want it to have a good look and feel to it. Not something that’s going to be pitched, but we see so many people bring those in and we’ll see it even months after it comes out. So it does a really good job for us.
Kerry Gross – Gross Tire Center Inc., Garden View, Pennsylvania:
Being at our current location for 76 years, we’re a land mine or land, I’m sorry, landmark. We’ve been there at that current location longer than most people have been alive. 89 years in the business, four generations. I mean, that’s almost unheard of. And my son is 17 years old and taking the automotive course at the high school. He’s being groomed to be GE generation number five, and I dare you to find that somewhere else today. Dare you.
Ben Leipold – Leipold Tire, Cuyahoga Falls & Stow, Ohio:
The primary is word of mouth and is friends and family that come to the shop. Well, we, my father started the business in 1975, so my father, my brother, and my oldest son are my Falls location. I’m at my still location with my younger son but have, but we have customers coming in that are in their eighties and nineties. That started with my dad at the beginning. Now we have their kids, their grandkids, their great-grandkids. It’s just family generations that come through the shop. And obviously, we have social media, we have different kinds of ads and stuff we do as well, search engines, but a lot of it comes on to us, repeat and regular customers that spread the word.
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