Search.
Neal Maier is Co-founder of Tread Partners, an agency that specializes in marketing for the tire and auto repair industry. With a history of running shops and an entrepreneurial spirit, Neal has developed a nuanced understanding of the challenges businesses face in customer acquisition and retention. His expertise is in creating tailored marketing strategies, particularly leveraging a unique framework named DRIVE, helping businesses engage with customers at every lifecycle stage. Neal offers a blend of practical experience and innovative solutions to foster growth and longevity in the automotive market. His insights have been transformative for many multi-location operations seeking to navigate the complex landscape of digital marketing.
In this episode…
Imagine being able to pinpoint exactly why customers keep coming back to your business – or why they don’t. What if there was a way to align every marketing dollar with a clear goal across your company’s entire lifecycle?
According to Neal Maier of Tread Partners, the innovative DRIVE framework can revolutionize how tire and auto repair businesses approach customer engagement and marketing. DRIVE entails visually mapping all the different marketing tactics and activities a business engages in, and understanding where they fit in the customer lifecycle. It involves laying out all the marketing pieces on a board and identifying where there might be blind spots. The framework allows businesses to evaluate their marketing efforts every 90 days and make informed decisions about where to allocate their marketing budget. The DRIVE process is meant to be a quick 15-minute exercise, but it provides a comprehensive view of a business’s marketing efforts and helps identify areas for improvement or new tactics to try.
On this episode of Gain Traction, Neal joins host Mike Edge to talk about a fine-tuned approach to marketing within the tire and auto repair industry. He shares how the DRIVE framework streamlines marketing efforts and ensures that no customer is left behind. Neal also discusses the importance of human connection in an increasingly automated world and provides a glimpse into the future of industry-specific marketing at the Traction Summit.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [1:51] Why focusing solely on new or existing customers may be imbalanced and ineffective
- [6:11] How automated systems may fall short of maintaining customer attention
- [11:58] Why constant evaluation of marketing efforts is necessary
- [15:18] The complexities of measuring marketing ROI
- [19:59] The value of scrutinizing marketing expenses
- [23:13] How to attend the Traction Summit of 2024
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mentions:
Related Episodes:
- Discussing Generational Tire Shops with Randy O’Connor, Bobby Gillespie, Kayla Heiar, and Kyle Moore
Quotable Moments:
- “I miss the interactions, but I do not miss hearing my own voice.”
- “The customer lifecycle is certainly no different; there are so many complexities about this business.”
- “It’s cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one, depending on your business model.”
- “Why leave customer retention to chance when it can be so much more than just sending reminders?”
- “There’s no one right way to market either; it comes down to that customer lifecycle every time.”
Action Steps:
- Implement the “DRIVE” framework to align marketing efforts with your customer’s lifecycle stages: This addresses the challenge of uncoordinated marketing and ensures every tactic supports progression from potential to loyal customers.
- Evaluate marketing strategies every 90 days to adapt and improve efforts. Consistent evaluation helps identify what works and what doesn’t, maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing spend.
- Focus on acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones for balanced business growth: Balancing acquisition and retention avoids the pitfall of a unidirectional strategy, which can lead to missed opportunities or unsustainable growth.
- Use a variety of metrics to measure the marketing ROI, especially for tricky channels like billboards: This overcomes the difficulty of quantifying returns on certain marketing investments, ensuring all efforts are justifiable and results-oriented.
- Embrace periodic changes and be willing to cut underperforming marketing tactics: Flexibility and responsiveness to data prevent financial waste on ineffective strategies and encourage innovation and continuous improvement.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to the Gain Traction Podcast, where we feature top automotive entrepreneurs and experts and share their inspiring stories. Now, let’s get started with the show.
Mike:
Hello, folks. Welcome to the Gain Traction Podcast. I am Mike Edge, your host. We have a special podcast for you today. I am hosting the co-founder of Tread Partners, Neal Maier. Before we get started, this episode is brought to you by Tread Partners in the ReTread Marketing program. So what is a ReTread Marketing program? It is a customer re-engagement program using IP targeting to win back your best lost customers. It is a one-time, 120 day program that generates a 10 to one return on investment. Tread Partners get your best lost customer back to spend money with you. These are customers that are currently in your point of sale system right now. So for example, if you invest $4,500 today, you’ll receive a return of $45,000 within 120 days from that very same target list of best Lost customers. Tread Partners works only within the tire and auto repair industry.
Tread Partners specializes for you. To learn more, visit treadpartners.com. Also, as many of you know, I like to give a shout-out to previous podcast guest and one that I would encourage you to listen to was my first panel discussion with Randy O’Connor, Bobby Gillespie, Kayla Hire, and Kyle Moore. Tune into that one. You can also find that one on our YouTube channel. It’s the first video podcast that we did as well. So check that one out when you get a chance. As I mentioned, my guest today is Neal Maier, co-founder of Tread Partners. Neal, welcome to Gain Traction.
Neal:
Thank you, Mike. It’s kind of exciting to come to the podcast and not have to be the one asking the questions.
Mike:
I was about to say you’re sitting in a different spot because you used to host this along with me and we trade off with different guests in the beginning. So do you miss it?
Neal:
Not at all. I miss the interactions, but I do not miss hearing my own voice. I think everybody has a little concern about that, and I listen back, hear all the mistakes I’ve made, so no, I’d rather listen to the mistakes you make.
Mike:
Thank you. Glad you’re here to listen in. Well, let’s get started because we’re going to take this thing in a little bit different direction. I like to think of it as it’s an opportunity of education that we’re offering today, and it’s a freebie, but hopefully it enlightens a lot of our listeners, get those wheels turning and makes them think about some of the things that, quite frankly you have discovered over the years of doing digital marketing for the tire industry and auto repair industry and where you see it going. But more importantly, I think your program, we call it DRIVE, right? And it’s a particular of looking at marketing, correct?
Neal:
That’s it. That’s it. When I think back to my days of running shops, one of the most difficult things to wrap my mind around was where I should be marketing and what I should be doing. And a lot of those challenges led us to Tread Partners today, led us to create the agency we’ve built. One of the stumbling blocks that we’ve just continued to see is we’ll have a talk with a really successful operation who solely focused on just maintaining their existing client base. They don’t do anything to attract new customers. On the other hand, we’ll encounter a group that’s the complete opposite, right? They’re solely focused on bringing new customers in the door, but then after that first visit, they just hope and pray that that customer comes back for a second, third, fourth visit. And really-
Mike:
Well, a lot of them just rely on… which there’s a lot to be said about what I’m about to say, but a lot of them rely on their own service to remind people, “Hey, we gave them great service. We know they did. They’re not going to forget us.” But the reality is, we’re human. We do forget.
Neal:
That’s right. And if you’re a single location owner operated shop, you can get away with a lot of things and you can rely on your reputation and the relationship you build with your customers because everybody is happy to take their vehicle back to Jim’s Tires and Repair because Jim’s there, and that’s that warm face.
Mike:
That’s a good point.
Neal:
I’ll introduce my kids to it. In a multi-location setting, that is much more difficult. Now, the groups that invest heavily in building culture and working with their team members to really uphold that same feeling, that effort pays dividend. The struggle still is how do you ensure that you have all the marketing pieces in place to drive that customer back time and time again and to catch them when they fall out of favor with you. When they get distracted, go someplace else, buy a new car. And really, there are so many things that are complex about this business. The customer life cycle is certainly no different.
Mike:
Right.
Neal:
When you think about… We chart that progress as a potential customer, that’s the person who doesn’t do business with you, but they become aware that your business exists, that crucial first step, that first visit then moves on to repeat customer. Beyond repeat, we have an opportunity to create a loyal customer, and then we have to watch for the lost customer. So there’s really five stages in this.
Mike:
So what about those folks that tell me… I’ve heard this out in the road before, but they’ll say, “I’ve got the software. We already do the texting, we do the email campaigns. We stay in touch with them that way.” What’s wrong with that?
Neal:
Well, it’s certainly the step in the right direction. That’s a huge key to being successful at retaining customers. However, turning it on often isn’t enough. So sending a reminder periodically that I need an oil change or that it’s been a year since I’ve had a front end alignment, those sorts of reminders are important, but they get lost. We all get thousands of emails and now we get tons of text messages every day too, and those things just get lost.
Mike:
Well, I like to tell people, Neal, the reality is there are products, and I’m saying tires and not a repair. That’s something I know I’m going to have to have regardless. But let’s just say something like golf or hunting supplies or something like that. I don’t have to have it, but I like it, right? And I may be engaging with a company and I might tell them, “Yeah, I’ll take your text,” or, “Yes, I opt into your email,” but I’m telling you, I am probably the worst guy to sign up because within 90 days, I don’t even know if I look at them anymore, I’m deleting. It becomes white noise to me, and this is still a company I like. There’s nothing they did other than it’s just phased out for me. Does that make sense?
Neal:
100%. And the research has shown that it’s in the long run, it’s cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one often depending on your business model. But if your oil change heavy, that first visit from a customer still may not net a positive, right? You still, when you encounter or when you calculate the marketing cost and that cost of acquisition, you really might be depending on either a really good first visit or that second visit to make you whole on that process. So why leave that to chance?
It’s more complicated than simply adding a retention system. That’s the first step. But the pieces that come after that really come down to the details, it’s the experience. It’s how your counter looks, it’s how your staff acts, how the consumer views your business after that first visit has everything to do with whether they come back again. So some of these things absolutely can be automated, but other pieces really need to be thought through. And when you start to take all these different marketing pieces that a typical business engages in, you think about the website, you think about an automated scheduling system, you think about tire search and online tire purchase, all those pieces weigh into this. So we developed our DRIVE framework, which is a path to take all of those different activities, lay them all out on a board, and understand where they fit in that customer lifecycle and where your blind spots are.
Mike:
Well, and if I could give a visual of, now I know this board, it’s basically you’re taking every potential tactical strategy that you could have in marketing. It doesn’t matter if it’s TV all the way down to a postcard, to an email, et cetera, or even it could be community involvement, which includes maybe investing in local high school or something sports, all of these things are written out on tabs basically, and you’re pulling them over based on where your customer is in that lifecycle. So that way you visually get to see where do I have a budget for this? And if I don’t, so what? I can move to the next one. Maybe it’s another tactical thing that I can afford this month for this batch of customers in the lifecycle. And I think what… if we could give a visual to people, and I’m sure you’ll give out some information at the end where they can find it, but where the visual is that you’re trying to touch each customer layer no matter what with whatever budget you have so that you never lose contact. Is that a good way of phrasing it?
Neal:
Absolutely.
Mike:
Absolutely.
Neal:
And I think the key to wrapping my mind around this is thinking about a decision one of our clients was faced with, they have a set marketing budget. They have an excellent opportunity to run some billboards, which in some markets, depending on traffic patterns and your store locations, some markets, it’s an excellent idea. So they’re faced with the decision of doing that versus going out and using our ReTread system, going out and targeting and trying to win back their best lost customers. How do you weigh that out? How do you decide which of those is the better opportunity? And really it is not a numbers game. Instead, it is just purely looking at all the activities and saying, “Hey, what else am I doing?” Well, in that case, that shop or that group of shops was already running radio. So we look at that as in that discover phase, helping to build awareness, helping just spark an interest in the business.
Mike:
Know we exist.
Neal:
That’s right. That’s right. So it becomes a little easier decision when you start to think about where your dollars are being allocated.
Mike:
Mm-hmm. No, that’s a great, great point. I think when I see that chart, I’m visualizing it right now, the dealers that I’ve spoken with about it, they thought that that chart really gave them the visual of the marketing that they do that they’ve never done. In other words, that they’ve never laid it out like a blueprint in a sense. And then have all the parts over here on the side and then add in what parts you want and figure out does it make sense. I think if I’ve heard people correctly, I hear a lot of dealers, they can be successful, right? Revenue’s up. So when they think, “Man, I don’t want to touch anything in my marketing because I’m not really sure what’s working and what’s not,” so their attitude is, “Hey, it must be working because my revenue’s up and I’m making a bigger profit this year,” et cetera.
Or on the flip side, they could be saying, “Something’s wrong with my marketing, our revenue’s down,” and that may not be the case. I mean, you and I have discovered that inquiries and things like that can be up actually, and what’s happening internally may be the problem. It’s when you’re talking about multi-locations and you’ve got what’s going on with the phone, what’s going on with internal services, there’s all kinds of other issues internally. But I think what the trap is to automatically assume it’s working or not working based on revenue.
Neal:
That’s exactly right. One of the many ways Tread works with our clients is helping them identify issues when a location is down or a couple of locations are down, all of a sudden car count drops at a shop. And these are things that nobody talks about publicly. These are all conversations that are behind closed doors. But what happens when that shop suddenly loses car count? Where do you begin and what do you look at?
So years ago, we built out a system to go through and help identify, number one, check all the marketing pieces, make sure they’re working, make sure that something as simple as a phone number not connecting or website broken, right? Make sure all the obvious things are out of the way. But after that, start to dig deeper and look at retention numbers. And this is something that it’s not an easy number to calculate unless you have a system in place that does it for you, but it’s often overlooked and you start to factor in, “Well, gosh, we’ve got all these new customers coming in the door, but it’s not enough.” So one, what’s enough? You’ve got to quantify that goal. But two, you can’t totally exist or subsist on just new customer traffic. There’s got to be repeat. So going in looking hard, making some difficult decisions in this process and just identifying, where’s that opportunity? If I need 50 more cars per month, would I rather go meet 50 new people or would I rather bring back 40 that already know and love me?
Mike:
Mm-hmm. There you go. And these are real questions. So the other thing is, I know in the DRIVE presentation, we tell dealers that you got to be evaluating this every 90 days.
Neal:
Absolutely.
Mike:
And if you’re not, I mean, it’s just kind of our internal rule of thumb, because if you don’t give it 90 days, you probably didn’t give it long enough. And if you cut it too short or you go too long, then you might be wasting money. So let’s look at checkup. But then I’ve had dealers ask me, “Okay, so I’m supposed to look at this four times a year?” Yeah, and it won’t be easy the first year because the first year I think it’s kind of that inertia effect. You really got to kind of get in there. You’re diagnosing just like a surgeon, and you may be cutting and it’s not going to feel good, but all of a sudden you start seeing these results that we’re talking about, and after about a year of doing this, it becomes pretty routine. Then you like it, then you want it, you want it.
It’s almost like that energy you feel when you work out. I use that gym scenario with it because I like to go to the gym once I get in the habit of going to the gym, but once you fall back out of it, it’s tough. It’s that practice of just repetition. But man, it feels good to go to the gym and know that your body feels better, et cetera. I think the same thing with your marketing. If you’re looking at it frequently, and what I mean by frequently is just on a frequency that you know you’re going to stick with, then you know that you’re doing the best you can at any given moment because you’re evaluating all the parts.
Neal:
That’s absolutely right. This DRIVE process and framework really is meant to be just a 15-minute exercise, get all your marketing tactics down on paper, understand where they fit, and then we include some ideas of what else you could be doing. I will say that every time I have one of these conversations with a business owner, I learned something new, a new tactic that I just hadn’t considered that I hadn’t put on the board.
But having that quick report card is so, so beneficial when it comes to making your next decisions. But it also then lays out all the things that we should be measuring. We’re spending money on it, so how can we measure it? And some of them are really difficult, that billboard, so difficult to measure the impact of it. So it’s okay to walk by some of these and say, “You know what? I feel good about it. My team feels good about it. We’re going to keep doing it.” That’s fine. It is perfectly fine. However, there needs to be a path where you can evaluate it and say, “We’re spending all these dollars. Well, if we can’t tie it one-to-one, let’s just count up all the new customers.” And say, “How many new customers did we get before we started the billboards? And how many are we seeing per month after that?”
So fairly simple metrics. There’s no one way to do this. Every situation is different, but just getting that measurement down then gives you the path to say, “All right, next quarter, we’re going to check that measurement again. It was hard the first time we had to figure out how to measure it, but now that we’ve done it, we know. We’ll check it again next quarter. And if it’s not where we want, it doesn’t make sense, now we’ve got a list of things we could do differently.”
Mike:
And who’s that great management consultant that existed in the forties and fifties? Peter Driker?
Neal:
Drucker.
Mike:
Drucker. Yeah. He says, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
Neal:
That’s right.
Mike:
And I think everybody’s heard that. But I think when I came to one of these presentations recently, the question I asked is how many people like spending money on marketing? And there was a little laugh in the room and nobody raised their hand except for one person out of 300. And I actually complimented him for raising his hand. But the reality is it’s tough because it’s something people don’t like because if you can’t measure it, then it’s no fun and you don’t know. But everybody knows they got to do it, right? I mean, because every major corporation in the world markets, and especially if you’re in the B2C realm, you have to do some form of marketing. You can lose customers and you don’t know why. And it’s really nothing you did wrong. You just got to stay in front of them. But measuring is the key there. And if you don’t measure it, then you can’t manage it.
Neal:
Absolutely. I wish I had this years ago. I wish it had been there for me. And I’ve always worked in small business, I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit, and I just assumed that this was a secret that the big companies all knew. I always figured that they have some path where they understand all of these pieces and have a check in every box. What I’ve come to find out is that’s absolutely incorrect. In fact, it’s the small guys who often have a better handle on it. And three weeks ago I had a conversation with a multi hundred million dollar operation who spends all of their money acquiring customers and zero effort after that. And it tells you that size isn’t an indicator of success.
Mike:
No.
Neal:
This is a way to go compete against the big guys.
Mike:
Well, it’s also interesting because you and I, we had that customer one time that had roughly 15 locations, and we found out through measuring and looking at everything correctly, they were spending an extra $9,000 a month in Google ad spend that they didn’t have to spend to get better results.
But they just assumed, “I’m with an agency that’s big. They know what they’re talking about. They know how to spend my money.” Well, everybody knows how to spend money, but do you know how to measure it to know if it’s bringing anything back? And then we were able to create that success story. But then we run into other folks like our friends in South Carolina, I mean, they do some things different, but they do have their hand on the pulse pretty good, and they understand their business. And again, they’re small, they’re very localized. What I mean by small, even though they’re multi store operation, but they don’t measure things exactly the way maybe me and you would, but they got their finger on the pulse pretty-
Neal:
Paying attention.
Mike:
Yes.
Neal:
Paying attention. And when you look across different business makeups, no two models are identical. There’s a different tire to repair ratio, there’s a different focus. They’re successful for different reasons, and the markets a lot of times have a huge piece to do with that. There is no one right way to market either. So just because everybody says you need to be running direct mail, that may not be a good fit for your business. And it just really does come down to that customer lifecycle. That’s where I bring it back each time. As long as we have successful activities touching that customer at each stage, then we should see the success we deserve.
Mike:
Amen to that. Well, Neal, I tell you what, we’re coming up on our hard time here, but what about how can people reach Tread for more questions or if they have questions about DRIVE and how to implement it, et cetera?
Neal:
Absolutely. So we’ll put a link in the show notes as well. But for the moment, this will be on the treadpartners.com blog. I’ve got a few posts that are coming up right now, so we’ll continue to add content there, and then we’ll also be sure we share it on the Tread Partners’ LinkedIn channel.
Mike:
That’s awesome. Well, man, this has been exciting. I’m glad that we did this, and I know we’re going to do more.
Neal:
Thanks, Mike. I like my side of the camera.
Mike:
Well, I enjoy this side as well. So maybe we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. So before wrapping this up, I want to encourage you, if you haven’t heard already, about the Traction Summit of 2024. It’s hosted in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s August 13th and 14th this year, and you can find more about it and sign up at tractionsummit.com. Neal, thanks for being on Gain Traction as a guest.
Neal:
Oh, thank you, Mike. It’s a pleasure.
Mike:
All right, to all our listeners out there, thank you for being part of the podcast. We are grateful for you. If you would like to recommend a guest to me, please feel free to email me at [email protected]. Till next time, be safe and have a great day.
Announcer:
Thanks for listening to the Gain Traction Podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to subscribe to get future episodes.
Sign up for the newsletter!
Get notified about updates and be the first to get early access to new episodes.