Tune up your Advantage

The first step of any Internet effort is understanding where you stack up. Let me provide you an analysis of your Internet Presence. If you are considering starting or have been using Social Media already my FREE analysis can set you in the right direction or give you a second opinion.

The “Tune-Up” includes:

• Review of your website and the social media elements currently being leveraged on the site.
• Review of current local online marketing efforts (where is the site listed today? e.g. Google maps, etc.)
• Review of current social media efforts (what sites are being leveraged, and how.)
• 30-minute phone consultation to address your social media goals/concerns.
• Written summary of findings and recommendations to improve current efforts

Take the first step and let me help you generate awareness and traffic for your store cost effectively.

Call ( 760.420.8734 ) or email me today

I thought it would be useful to discuss how all the Guerilla Marketing tools come together for the local bike shop. The example below was for the promotion of a bi-annual bike swap meet.

Bring new Customers to your Shop

Results:
More than 200 people came to the swap meet. People traveled up to 100 miles to participate. Present customers were able to sell old bikes themselves or consign bikes to the shop for the day. For the day (Sunday) sales were up almost 100% compared to the average Sunday during the Fall season. ~50% of the customers that consigned their used bikes to the shop used the cash toward purchasing new bikes over the next 10 days.

Tools used:

Shop Newsletter – Shop has a monthly news letter where the Swap Meet has been highlighted each month. A special short newsletter was sent on the Friday before the Sunday Swap meet. This special newsletter had a 30% increase in opens compared to normal monthly newsletter (38% compared to ~25%)

Consignment Used Bikes – The week before we took in an extra 10 bikes to increase our listing of used bike on Craigslist. Each bike listed on Craigslist had an image Ad discussing the Bike Swap Meet. Traffic from Craigslist for the week before the Swap Meet increase over 300% and equaled the normal traffic to the shop website from Google Search (~1,500 unique visitors).

Craigslist- Listing of a “Free Swap Meet” was promoted in both the local craigslist and the three other surrounding local craigslist areas for two weeks prior to the Swap Meet.

Shop Blog – Increased posts about the shop and new products coming from Trek. Unique visitors to blog were up ~50% for the week and traffic from blog to website increase ~20%.

Facebook – Event was placed on Business page and individual Facebook page over the two weeks prior to the event.

Twitter – Event was “tweeted” from the shop twitter account day before the event and then retweeted to several other twitter accounts – This activity was tracked to ~4000 followers.

Google Analytics – All internet activities were tracked for next day information of what was working and what was not working

Background:
This was the third swap meet for the bike shop. Other than the promotion effort outlined above there was no additional advertising money used for the event.

Conclusion:
The swap meet continues to be a great event to both drive existing customers to purchase new bikes by selling old and bring new awareness / new customers to the shop. The use of Craigslist was amazing for both the promotion of the swap meet and awareness of the bike shop.

Here is an example.  At El Camino Bike Shop their blog both highlights the shops interest in 29er mountain bikes and the expertise of one of its owners, Will Schillenger (Otherwise know as 29er guy).  The blog gets about approximately 40 to 60% of the traffic of the shops main website, and by linking product information from the blog to the store website drives traffic to the store. El Camino Bike Shop has seen customers out of their normal geographic region call and make the trip to El Camino Bike Shop to purchase products because of their blog.

El Camino Bike Shop website
El Camino Bike Shop Blog

But what if I told you that you could double your traffic to your website, bring new customers to your shop, bring old customers back to your shop more quickly to purchase new bikes, make a little extra cash, and is a free service that only takes about an hour a week, then would you be excited?

The key is to use Craigslist to advertise a small number of your present customers consigned bikes and direct the Craigslist Ad to your website.

If you are having a promotion, add information (and a link) to your promotion at the bottom of each Craigslist ad and you see a substantial rise in interest for that promotion from people that would never have become aware of your shop or promotion.

There is a reason that newspapers are going out of business and it is Craigslist. You need to use it in your everyday promotion of your bike shop.

Craigslist menu for bicycles