Connecting social and website
Both the company website and social media are online platforms and there can be a partnership between them. While each is its own entity, they can partner in reaching your audience. This can go for email newsletters as well. If each element is separate and are never crossed, then consumers may never know about all the ways they can access information from your company.
Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.-based Mountain View Tire & Auto Service uses its website to allow customers to set up appointments.
“We get an average of 150 appointment requests and 30 estimate requests through our website each month,” said Scott Greggory, vice president of creative services for Madison Avenue Marketing Group, which handles Mountain View Tire's website marketing.
“Our site also has a new instant tire estimate tool. It lets visitors browse tires and check prices. And the prices change instantly as the customer adds extra services or accessories, so they know exactly what their pre-tax total will be. Then, they can print the tire estimate and bring it into one of our stores.”
He said the site gets about 5,000-6,000 visits per month from Search, which is about half of the site's monthly traffic.
“Fifteen percent of our visitors (up to 2,000) come from external directories,” Scott said. “It's very important that we maintain complete control of our external listings so that they're always accurate, and that we manage the reviews from those websites.”
I asked Scott if he thinks it's a good idea to have a social media sidebar on the website. He said no because “we want people coming to the website from social media, not leaving the site to go to social media pages.”
However, Mountain View Tire does use YouTube videos on its website. Scott said Madison Avenue Marketing created the series of “Mountain View Tire Tip” videos for the company.
“While they live on our YouTube channel, we formally debuted each one over a five-month period as separate blog posts. Then, we used Facebook to drive additional traffic to each post. We also included links to each video in issues of our email newsletter,” Scott said.
The video is changed on the home page of the website about once every month or two. Scott said one of the big perks of the videos is that their listings stand out in search engine results and “prospective customers are more likely to click on a video than a traditional listing. YouTube is the second largest search engine, so we'll be incorporating more online video in the future.”
He added, “The website is the hub to which all other marketing efforts point. It's where people can make appointments, request estimates, check tire prices, print coupons and find our stores, so we want them to stay on our site.”
When looking at how the website and social media can work together, Scott said, “We think our Facebook page does a nice job of supporting our brand identity and helping us stay in front of a certain group of people, but we consider any Web traffic it generates to be a bonus. It's not our primary focus.”
Ultimately, both a website and social media have a place in a tire dealership's or auto service shop's online strategy because different consumers have different needs. They will want to reach out to a tire dealer in the way they feel most comfortable, which can include social media, website, emails, phone calls and in person. It is up to the dealer to decide which avenues they are willing to have available to be reached.