Pep Boys leverages Yext to improve search visibility and engage local consumers

The Challenge

Since Manny, Moe, and Jack founded the company in 1921, Pep Boys has aimed to be the best place to shop and care for your car. What began as one auto shop has grown into a multi-billion dollar nationwide retail and service chain with over 800 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico. The company provides service for more than six million cars and car owners each year, and more than 26 million Rewards members have signed up to earn points — on car repairs, routine maintenance, and Pep Boys purchases — that they can then spend on other parts, tools, or services.

In light of this, Pep Boys wanted to engage local consumers and ensure its brand is always top of mind—and at the top of search results— when customers search for auto care.

The Solution

Pep Boys selected Yext to manage, verify, and power it’s brand verified information across 100+ prominent maps, apps, search engines, directories, and social media networks in Yext’s Knowledge Network, including Apple, Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, and Yahoo.

“With Yext’s technology, we can make updates in real time across one or all of our business listings on every site in the Knowledge Network,” explains Rachel Silva, AVP Marketing. “Yext helps Pep Boys ensure our brand information is always accurate, consistent, and filled with rich content to improve the brand experience and bring more customers into our stores.”

The Difference

Pep Boys recognized that customers might engage with its brand beyond listings and noticed Instagram’s high user engagement rate as a potential way to reach more customers and also to amplify brand loyalty with existing ones.

Unfortunately, Instagram has some major limitations in its search function: the site lets brands track hashtags and @mentions, similar to Twitter, but it does not enable searches by location. Since many users don’t bother including a branded tag or hashtag in their post, brands miss out on a critical segment of their customer base—the local customers who are actually visiting and engaging with the brand at local store locations.

In order to uncover this hidden user base, Pep Boys has leveraged Yext to solve the search limitation issue. Yext integrated Instagram into its social media customer engagement program, which is aimed at tracking and responding to relevant brand and non-brand posts or content across active social networks to increase total followers and engagement. In addition to the content that users post with branded hashtags and @mentions, Yext pulls in user-generated content that is geo-tagged at Pep Boys store locations, even if the user does not include a hashtag.

According to Emily Smith, Online Marketing Manager, “We also leverage Yext’s real-time tracking and response capabilities to respond immediately to customers who have urgent questions and concerns, or who were less than satisfied with their brand experience,” Smith explains. “Car maintenance purchases are often considered grudge purchases, so our connecting with customers in a timely manner means that we can improve their experience and convert many into satisfied customers.”

The Results

With Yext, Pep Boys has tracked over 9,300 Instagram posts in real-time and has received over 60,000 Facebook ‘Were Here’ Check-ins. The most popular hashtags include #pepboys as well as unbranded but location-tagged hashtags #carshow and #ClassicCars. Instagram monitoring helps identify influencers who post quality content, to educate and encourage these users to be brand ambassadors. Pep Boys also uses Yext to engage with its own employees who tag photos at work and often appreciate receiving attention from their company.

“By leveraging Yext to improve our social media presence in general, we are able to attract the attention of new users who have not interacted with our brand before and thereby grow our customer audience,” says Silva.