What marketing techniques work well for bike shops?
Another great question, and one that I’ve been researching for the last two or three months. They’re using a wide variety of marketing approaches, and there doesn’t seem to be any across-the-board good advice to be given at this point. The main thing is that everybody’s getting away from the yellow pages obviously. Some of the bigger stores have eliminated the yellow page advertising all together. The Web is critical and there are great services available specifically for the bicycle industry to get a good website up, so they all have to have a website, and the better the website usually the more likely it is to actually produce revenue. They’re using everything from mailers to e-mail blasts, to cable television, radio, newspaper, I mean just pretty much across the board, and it is hard right now to say that any one thing is hugely successful. Now there’s a branch of that that’s very successful, and that is what I would call advocacy rides. So whether it’s an AIDS ride, or a muscular d
