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Male Media Opps: Monro turns to SEO to continue reaching consumers stuck at home (Score 58)

Due to a coronavirus-related decline in store traffic, Monro "tightened" its marketing spend, accelerating its shift toward higher ROI digital channels. This effort includes optimizing the company's SEO performance for key product categories like tires. These initiatives resulted in ~50% of Monro's stores now ranking in the top three online search results, leading to an increase in online consumer actions. Overall, the company's targeted digital marketing and advertising investments, along with a new digital phone system, allows Monro to acquire and retain customers at lower costs with stronger results. Not only did this affect eCommerce sales, it led to more online appointments and phone calls.

Monro experienced a 26% decrease in comparable stores sales in the past quarter, execs report in its most recent earnings call. The company closed 36 underperforming stores in the past quarter, along with the six that were closed the quarter prior. Monro primarily sells tires, which are in low demand at the moment since so many consumers are stuck at home and not driving as often as normal. 

Unfortunately, Pathmatics does not report SEO spend; it does, however, estimate that Monro has generated 8.5k digital impressions YTD, allocating around $100 toward desktop display ads placed via DataXu onto thecarconnection.com. This marks a significant decline from the $5.3k spent by this point last year. Monro's full 2019 spend grew by more than 6x to $133.1k from $18.2k in 2018.

This drop in spend makes since considering the company is lowering its overall ad spend and is reallocating it toward SEO. Its usage of this channel leads us to believe Monro's traditionally male target demographic currently skews toward Gen-Z and millennials. Kantar data reports the company also utilizes print (newspapers) and radio media.

Agency & martech readers - Monro may shift its roster around once it recovers from the blow the global pandemic has dealt to it; keep the company on your radar for future work. Jump 450 handles digital work.