Pep Boys at MediaPost Summit: Leveraging Yext’s Instagram for Deeper Local Customer Engagement

Last week, Pep Boys' AVP of Marketing, Rachel Silva, presented the auto-service brand's Yext-powered Instagram Monitoring campaign at MediaPost's Cross-Channel Marketing Summit. Instagram has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity among brands leveraging social media as a key component of their marketing strategy, but its relative novelty means that brands are still discovering the most effective ways to use the platform to engage their local customers.

Rachel Silva, Pep Boys' AVP of Marketing

As Rachel explained during her presentation, Pep Boys recognized that Instagram presented a unique opportunity for the brand to reinvent their customer engagement strategy. With an industry-leading 4.21% per-follower engagement rate and over 400 million monthly active users*, Instagram enables more organic and personalized interactions with local customers and allows Pep Boys to address customer concerns and complaints in real-time. For an auto-service brand such as Pep Boys, where large purchases are not always happy ones, ensuring a positive in-store customer experience is key to maintaining strong relationships and lasting loyalty. "We use a customer-centric approach no matter where our customers are coming from," Silva said. "We want to increase the lifetime value of the customer."

In 2014, Pep Boys launched its Instagram Monitoring program with Yext, which was already powering Pep Boys' local listings management, including its local pages on Facebook. Through the Yext platform, Pep Boys is able to track all geo-tagged user posts in real-time from one comprehensive dashboard, even if the user doesn't include a branded hashtag or @mention. This has allowed Pep Boys to widen its audience reach and participate in more meaningful interactions by engaging the local customers that are actually visiting their local store locations.

Since launching with Yext's platform to manage their local listings and social media presence, Pep Boys has achieved an impressive 3x return on investment by utilizing the Yext-patented Featured Message capability, and a 200% lift in customer engagement. For Instagram in particular, Pep Boys has seen a 94% lift in per-follower engagement and an average increase of 120 followers per month.

Looking ahead, Rachel and her team are excited to continue leveraging Yext's capabilities in order to maintain their focus on local and mobile marketing and drive more foot traffic into store locations. "We take mobile [commerce] seriously but we think it should be a hybrid of driving store visits and transacting on mobile devices. Our ultimate goal is to drive local traffic into stores," says Silva.

Head to MediaPost.com to see the full commentary on Rachel's MediaPost Summit presentation. You can also get more insight into Pep Boys' work with Yext by heading to Yext's Customer Showcase.

*Source: Sprout Social, Insights, 2015; Instagram, Blog Report, 2015