While SEO is the cornerstone of a good marketing strategy, SEM turbocharges your online presence by featuring prominent paid ads. SEM dramatically boosts your site’s conversion rate because the paid ads direct leads straight to specific service pages and inventory listings, where they can begin the shopping process in earnest.

In addition to making your brand more prominent in SERPs, SEM brings your message to multiple platforms to create a well-rounded marketing campaign and reach shoppers wherever they’re looking. Here are the prominent SEM ad types:

Pay-Per-Click Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) are the paid ads featured in search results and are one of the most popular SEM tools. PPC gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to reach a greater number of qualified leads with a targeted message, such as store promotions and new inventory arrivals. You can tailor your PPC ads to your budget by presetting your ad spend, and you only pay w ...[more]

Employing an SEO strategy for your website isn’t just a good idea; it’s crucial to staying on top of consumer trends. Even if you already have a pretty good idea of what your customers are searching for, SEO ensures you’re staying relevant to any modifications in their search queries.

With summer well under way, many Americans are planning to embark on (or are returning from) annual road trips, and that means their vehicles will need maintenance and tire services. With a well-planned SEO strategy, you can connect with consumers who are looking for the exact tire brands and auto services you provide.

Be Specific with Your Keywords

While keywords make up the foundation of SEO, your ultimate goal should be to focus on the quality of each word versus stuffing your site with keywords. Afterall, general keywords such as “tire shop” and “car repair” may not be powerful enough to get your website noticed, especi ...[more]

If you’re a multi-location tire shop, you understand the importance of brand continuity – upholding a standard across all locations. After all, you want your customers to feel like they’re visiting the same store no matter where they shop.

Brand continuity should also extend to your online presence, where your business can be found across multiple channels, including your website, social media pages and online business listings. As more channels are introduced to the internet, some brands make the mistake of trying to be everywhere at once without devising an overall brand strategy. This usually results in a lack of consistency between channels, which undermines the company objectives. While good marketing can draw customers to individual platforms, brand continuity is needed to pull all the channels together and create a cohesive approach to online business.

Continuity is the application of consistency plus improvement – in ...[more]

You may use social media in your personal life, but what is your business doing to promote itself across social media? Are you creating a consistent message or brand that your followers recognize and are engaging with?

Social media can be daunting when it comes to your business, and it may make you wonder whether you actually need to be using it. According to HubSpot, 71% of consumers are more likely to make purchases based on social media referrals. That means they are looking at your profiles and posts and expecting to learn who your business is. It can be hard to know where to start, but it helps if you break your strategy down into small, bite-sized steps.

Audience

One of the most important aspects to understand is who your audience is and what social platforms they are using. Every social platform brings in a different crowd: Facebook users tend to be older than Instagram users, so you need to determine the age group of most of your custome ...[more]

April is International Customer Loyalty Month. While customer loyalty should certainly take priority every month, we recognize this is a great opportunity to analyze your loyalty and retention strategy.

First, it’s important to know the difference between a customer who’s loyal versus one who frequents your business because it’s convenient in terms of location, services, inventory or pricing. Convenience-based customers only stick around until they think another business is offering a better deal. Loyal customers form a relationship with your business and are likely to stick around for years, if not a lifetime.

The idea of convincing a customer to stay loyal for life can be daunting, but it’s much more manageable if you simply focus on convincing them to come back next time. After all, 37% of consumers report they will make five or more purchases from a business before becoming loyal^{1 ...[more]}

Cyberattacks continue to mount against small and mid-sized businesses.

Keep your business safe from cyberattacks by recognizing attempts to infiltrate your software.

Over the last two years, cyberattacks have increased significantly due to the surge in digital business. Cybercriminals are studying online systems for gaps and weaknesses that will let them exploit the online security. Q4 was the highest peak of cyberattacks in 2021¹, and 2022 is expected to see a growing concern for the cybersecurity of businesses.

The TCS team is creating cybersecurity guides to ensure your business has the resources. Our January cybersecurity blog warned our partners about common phishing emails and the signs of email fraud. We recognize that as time goes on, cybercriminals invent increasingly unexpected ways to get around your security walls, and we want to address ...[more]

With the rise of smartphones and social media, communication channels have never been more open and easily accessible. You probably use multiple channels a day without even realizing it: calls, emails, texts and social platforms.

It isn’t just you that is now easier to contact than ever - your business is as well. This is great for lead generation because you are casting a wider net for potential customers, but it’s important to ensure you’re utilizing these channels to their full potential. Without a solid strategy, it’s easy for some channels to slip through the cracks, resulting in your customers having a poor experience on one channel versus another.

Managing these channels as a unified strategy is called omnichannel communication, and both you and your customers rely on it to stay connected in today’s world. Consider this: Your team may be great at remembering the customers who come into your store, including their needs an ...[more]

Our lives have become largely reliant on the internet - whether it be personal or professional, we perform most of our day-to-day tasks on a computer or phone. Banking, storing photos, emailing, etc. all create a plethora of information right in our personal devices, and cybercriminals want access to all of it.

According to a 2020 report from Kaspersky, 1 in 5 adults who use the internet reported they had experienced cyber fraud. This can seem alarming and may make you wonder how you can possibly combat these sleuthing criminals and keep them away from your business. We aren’t sharing this information to scare you; we want to help arm you with the tools to spot a potential crime and prevent your business from falling victim. Bustling and busy businesses are easy targets for these types of crimes, as employees who are moving quickly don’t always notice the subtle signs of a scam.

PHISHING EMAILS

Phishing is one of the most common type ...[more]

Did you know that email fraud is the cause of 91% of data breaches?

Cybercriminals are becoming increasingly clever in their methods to gain access to sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers. While you may think that cyberattacks only target large corporations and your business will never be affected, the truth is that small to medium businesses are top of the list for cybercriminals because they often don’t have a strong security system.

The good news is that 100% of these email fraud attacks are preventable if your team has the training and preparation. Cybercriminals target busy, fast-moving companies like yours in the hopes that your team is distracted and will click on a foul link or give away sensitive information.

There are three steps to identifying and avoiding a harmful email:

1. Stop
2. Look
3. Think

1. STOP

Incoming emails never seem ...[more]

Importance of High-Quality, Compatible Business Software

Whether you are a small tire dealer in a rural area or a large dealer with multiple locations in the middle of a bustling city, TCS Technologies is committed to helping your shop thrive so you can focus on the most important part of any business: your customers. We know that to run an effective business, you need to have the best software solutions at your fingertips.

What makes a software efficient and work for your business, versus one that is working against it? And why does your business need software to increase efficiency and streamline customer interactions and transactions?

The software you use to manage your store, needs to streamline business operations and allow your employees to work efficiently every day. Your business’s management software should maximize your efforts and do the heavy lifting for you. Another key purpose of in-store software is to make customer interact ...[more]