Three Online 'Must-dos' for Tire Dealers - Tire Review Magazine

Three Online ‘Must-dos’ for Tire Dealers

Three areas online are of critical importance to today's tire dealer: mobile websites, Facebook Graph Search and managing local business listings. Find out how to optimize all three.

We had the pleasure recently of speaking at the annual Independent Tire Dealers Group dealer conference – a great group of folks who truly epitomize why independent dealers remain the dominant channel for selling tires in America.

Our topic was social media/online marketing, and our challenge was covering such a large, important subject in a relatively short period of time. We decided to focus on three areas that we believe are of critical importance to today’s tire dealer:

Mobile Websites
Consider this:
• More people on Earth own a mobile phone (5.1 billion) than own a toothbrush (4.2 billion). I’m not sure how Mobile Marketing Asia knows how many people own a toothbrush, but in addition to providing a truly unusual factoid, they are pointing out the undeniable ubiquity of mobile phones. 

• Also consider that more than half of mobile phones today are smartphones – a percentage that is growing by leaps and bounds.

• Seventy percent of all mobile searches result in action within one hour.

• Ninety-five percent of smartphone users looked up local information, and of those, 61% called and 59% visited the business.

It is important to understand the difference between a mobile-optimized website and a website that will pull up on a mobile phone. A mobile-optimized site gives the consumer everything he or she needs immediately and in an easily viewable format on the phone screen. 

For a tire dealer, this means click icons for the phone, email and directions to your nearest store, as well as your current promotional offers.

This is totally different from your standard website, where the consumer has to search around and resize the information to find what they are most interested in – buying tires!

So we are talking about two different sites – one for mobile searches and your traditional website for the larger desktop and laptop screens. The Googlebot-Mobile crawler recognizes searches from mobile phones and directs users to mobile-optimized sites. Perfect 100% recognition is not here yet, so in the meantime, make sure your mobile site links to your traditional site and vice versa.

Facebook Graph Search
Facebook Graph Search is a game changer. With Graph Search, a person can check his or her Facebook friends’ views on brands. 

Let’s say you are a consumer considering buying tires from Acme Tire. You can find out if any of your friends “like” Acme Tire and get their opinions.

Traditional search engines return relevant content from the entire web; Facebook’s Graph Search returns highly personalized content from the searcher’s own personal network (social graph).

Graph Search will launch system-wide later this year. What should tire dealers do to prepare? First, if you are a multi-store business, manage your corporate page but also build out pages for each store location. Make sure the store information is complete and correct, and links to your corporate page.

Secondly, build your fan base! Facebook advertising is a great way to do this. The more fans you have, the more potential references you will have in Graph Search. Also, engage with your fans; the more interactions a page receives the more likely it will appear in Graph Search results.

Manage Local Business Listings
Changes in search algorithms have made it easier than ever for small businesses to harness the power of local search. According to Google, 73% of all online activity is related to local content.

Tire dealers need to find relevant niche directory sites and make sure their profile is updated with the most recent information. The top citation sources for automotive repair are: yelp.com, yellowpages.com, local.yahoo.com, superpages,com, bbb.org, automd.com, yellowbook.com, angieslist.com, edmunds.com, and mechanicadvisor.com.   

It is estimated that more than 80% of consumers do online research before they purchase tires. If you pay attention to these three areas, you will make sure they will find you through local business listings, see what their friends have to say about you, and be able to find your key information quickly and easily from a mobile phone.


Christine Taylor is vice president of social media marketing for JTMarCom,a Nashville-based marketing agency that helps companies with online reputation management and integration of social media into their traditional marketing programs. With a combined 35 years of experience in the tire industry, the agency places a special emphasis on working with tire and automotive aftermarket companies. Follow Christine on Facebook and Twitter (@chrisgtaylor). She can also be reached at 615-714-5469.

 

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