9 points worth checking on tire shop marketing

The nine points worth checking

Tire shop marketing comes down to nine points worth checking. Everything below expands on them.

What you are actually selling into

Three properties of tire demand shape everything below.

It is local. Almost nobody drives past three shops to reach a fourth. Your market is a radius, and the radius is short.

It is urgent or scheduled, rarely browsed. A person either has a problem now, or a changeover they have been meaning to book. There is little middle ground and almost no impulse purchase.

It is compared on price for the goods and on trust for the work. The tire has a public price. What you do with it does not. Marketing that competes on the first term is competing on the one you cannot win.

The channels that fit that shape

Notice what is missing. Broad brand advertising, social content unrelated to service, and anything aimed at people outside the drive radius. Those consume budget and produce nothing a bay can use.

The seasonal calendar

The year is not flat, and marketing spent at the wrong point in it is wasted almost entirely.

The general principle: sell scheduled work in advance, and in the spike weeks spend your effort on capacity rather than on demand you already have.

Reputation, handled honestly

Google, Facebook and Yelp reviews decide which nearby shop gets called. The rule is absolute: do not pay for reviews, do not offer anything in exchange, do not filter which customers you ask, and do not write them yourself.

The FTC's Endorsement Guides, at 16 CFR Part 255, set out what is expected and what is not permitted when a business solicits and uses online reviews, and the Consumer Review Fairness Act governs what you may put in a customer contract about reviews. Read both in full before anyone in your shop designs a review program.

What you can do is straightforward.

Reputation is downstream of the work. A shop with a comeback problem cannot market its way out of it, and the money spent trying would have been better spent on a calibration schedule.

Advertising claims

Anything you say in an advertisement has to be supportable under the FTC Act, and a price that implies a finished job must deliver one. Disclosures cannot hide in wording nobody reads. The FTC's Advertising and Marketing Basics guidance for small businesses is the reference.

In this trade, installed-job pricing is more honest and more persuasive than quoting a tire price and pricing the work separately at the counter.

The customer who priced it online this morning

This is a permanent condition and it belongs in your marketing rather than in an argument at the counter.

Say plainly in your materials what an installed job includes: the tire, mounting, balancing, and valve or sensor service. It also covers torque to the vehicle manufacturer's specification, disposal of the old set, and a shop that will look again if something feels wrong.

That differs from a box on a doorstep. Stating the difference first beats defending it after a customer anchors on a number.

Decide in advance whether you fit customer-supplied tires, and publish the answer. Both positions are defensible; being unclear is not.

Measure per booked job

Impressions, clicks and followers cannot be put on a lift. Track two things.

Cost per booked job by channel. Give each channel its own tracking number — one line for the Google Business Profile listing, one for the website, one for any paid ads — or set up call tracking that reports the source for you, and ask every caller how they found you. Record the answer with the booking and divide the spend by the bookings. Most shops find that two channels produce almost everything and the rest are habits.

Booked jobs against capacity. Marketing that produces more demand than your bays can take is not a success. It converts into long waits, and long waits convert into the reviews you did not want. Growth in demand should be matched to growth in capacity, which makes the marketing question inseparable from the operating one.

Growth without breaking the shop

Three sequencing rules keep growth from turning into damage.

Where marketing meets the rest of the business

Promise only what you can do, so menu decisions in the services and packages guide come first.

How the shop answers the phone and books the job is part of the flow in the operations and workflow guide, where most marketing spend is lost.

What you can say about price follows from the pricing and profit guide. What you may claim at all is partly a compliance question, mapped in the licensing and compliance guide.

Two capacity constraints sit behind all of it. Bay capability is set by the machines described in the equipment and setup guide, and the people who can use them unsupervised are the subject of the hiring and training guide.

Common questions

The questions below come up whenever a shop reviews what it spends on marketing.

How much should a tire shop spend on marketing?

No page can give you a figure, because it depends on your capacity, your existing reputation and how well known you already are. Start from what a booked job is worth to you in contribution, work backward to what you can afford to pay for one, and let that set the budget. The check is capacity: if your bays are half empty, spending to fill them is justified; if they are full, the money belongs in keeping customers rather than in finding new ones.

Do I need a website?

You need somewhere that shows hours, location, services, and how to book, and that loads quickly on a phone. That can be a website or a well-maintained listing. What you do not need is a large site nobody updates.

Should I run price promotions?

Sparingly, and never on the goods alone. A promotion on an installed job in a shoulder month is a capacity-filling tool. A tire price promotion in a peak week gives away margin on work you would have had anyway.

What is the highest-return marketing activity?

Contacting your own past customers before a changeover season. They already trust you, they need the service, and the contact costs almost nothing. It requires records, which is the real reason most shops do not do it.

How long before marketing shows results?

Local search presence and reviews compound over months rather than days. Direct contact with past customers works immediately. Plan for both, and do not judge the slow one on a fast timescale.