Auto Care Interview: “Aftermarket Digital Marketing That Actually Sells”
Interviewer: Michael Chung, Senior Director of Market Intelligence at the Auto Care Association.
Click for Mike’s LinkedIn profile
Jon Hedges of Hedges & Company recently sat down with Mike Chung from the Auto Care Association, for an interview on Mike’s Auto Care Indicators podcast.
Mike is the Senior Director of Market Intelligence at Auto Care, and his podcast identifies and explores data that monitors and forecasts aftermarket industry performance. This includes global economic data, industry indicators, and new data sources.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. The entire interview can be watched on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or on the Auto Care website.
About Hedges & Company, a digital marketing agency
Mike Chung: Hello and welcome to another episode of Auto Care On Air Indicators. I’m Mike Chung, and I’m very happy to introduce Jon Hedges to our program. Jon, welcome to our program.
Jon Hedges: I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for the invite!
MC: Absolutely. And we’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with you for the last few years. Projects like the eCommerce Joint Study with Auto Care and MEMA, headed up by Jefferies, and including contributors like you. And we really appreciate that you’re such an engaged and active member of the Auto Care Association. Tell us and our viewers a little bit about yourself and your company.
JH: I’ve been in the industry since 1985, in marketing and general management. And it’s an industry that I love. We started Hedges and Company—my wife Julie and I—about 26 years ago. We’re a digital marketing agency, 100% dedicated to the automotive aftermarket. We were the first Google Premier Partner, the first Microsoft advertising partner, the first Amazon advertising partner and Meta partner in the automotive aftermarket, and we’re very proud of that.
Google considers their Premier Partners to be in the top 3% of all digital agencies.
Google trains and tests Hedges & Company, and certifies us every June. Hedges & Company has to follow best practices, and we have to know what’s new and what’s coming. We get access to beta test programs before they’re rolled out to the rest of the world. We also get additional data, additional information, and additional support when needed, directly from Google, to help our clients.
What is digital marketing in the automotive aftermarket?
What is digital marketing in the automotive aftermarket?MC: You talked about digital marketing, and being a digital agency. Can you tell us what does that mean? What is digital marketing? And a little bit about sort of the size, the scale, the scope of digital marketing in the aftermarket?
JH: Sure. Digital marketing is selling parts via eCommerce, generating online exposure for a brand, generating leads, sending emails, all on the internet. It’s reaching consumers whether they’re on their phone or on their computer, whether they’re searching on Google, on Bing or on Amazon. It’s whether they’re watching a video on YouTube, or whether they’re looking for company reviews.
Hedges & Company clients are found everywhere online
JH: We want Hedges & Company clients to be found when the customer is looking for aftermarket parts and accessories. They usually have a very specific profile, are searching for a particular part, a particular accessory, and a lot of times for a particular vehicle. That could be anywhere online: on Google, on the Weather Channel, on MSNBC, anywhere.
MC: So just to kind of clarify, we think of marketing as getting the exposure, providing a message to your intended audience in a variety of media. And perhaps in times past, it could have been billboards, it could have been newspapers, it could have been magazines, print media, for example. The difference with what you and your team do is, it’s all digital. So, like you said, computers, phones, and all things electronic.
The early days of eCommerce in the automotive aftermarket
MC: Jon, you mentioned that you’ve been in the automotive aftermarket for some time. And so as the internet was being formed, tell me a little bit about the impetus for going full bore into digital marketing, specifically in the automotive aftermarket.
JH: Well, I’ve been in the aftermarket since 1985. When I was at Summit Racing, and this would have been the mid-1990s, we started building a website. I registered the domain summitracing.com in 1995. At first, the website was just to request a free catalog, ironically! And then, as as we learned more, and as technology progressed, we started building an online catalog with a shopping cart. This was back when 90% of Summit Racing’s sales came from orders from inbound phone calls.
Building one of the first online digital catalogs for parts and accessories
JH: We quickly discovered building an online catalog, oh, wow, we need a whole bunch of data. And this was in the early days of the internet and nobody had that much data. So in the off-season, we would take 30 or 40 phone salespeople, set them at computers, take all the paper catalogs, and people would just start typing in part numbers, dimensions and descriptions. And then we started selling online, we just thought that was amazing. So it just it grew from there.
The size of online parts and accessory sales
MC: So you were really a torchbearer for the industry and everything that it’s become with consumers being able to purchase parts online. We worked together on this eCommerce Joint Report that I mentioned. I’m going to throw a couple of numbers out there to set the table for the next stage of conversation. In 2025, we estimated about $44.6 billion in aftermarket parts are sold to the consumer through the online channel. About half of that, give or take, is through the third party marketplaces. We know those as Amazon, Walmart, eBay. It’s a very healthy growth curve with about 6.7% year-over-year CAGR for a 10-year period. And when we think about the overall automotive aftermarket, light duty alone is about $414 billion. So $44 billion-ish out of $414 billion, nearly 10%. So it’s nothing to sneeze at. In terms of the importance of digital marketing, tell us a little bit about the importance of having a digital presence and how agencies like Hedges & Company really flourish and thrive.
JH: Being visible online is just incredibly important. You you can’t avoid that. You you have to be online, you have to be visible.
About nine out of 10 consumers are doing online research, where they’re going to buy online, or if they’re going to buy in a store. It may be just going online to see if it’s in stock at the store they’re going to visit.
Consumers are online all day long
JH: The online world is everywhere we are. People are on their phones all day long, they’re on email, they’re on social media, that’s where everyone’s at. And you have to be aware of that. You have to be visible online.
And for brands, it’s important to have a good website, and by “good,” I mean good information, reliable information, correct fitment, clear product descriptions, it’s understandable. Having a good website influences a lot of people towards a brand. Even if you’re a brand not selling direct to consumers, you have to have a good website and you have to market your website. You need to be in front of consumers.
The measurability of eCommerce in the aftermarket
MC: Great points. And from the days of paper catalogs you talked about, you’re very familiar with the fields of data and the importance of the accuracy of that data. And that could be another discussion entirely. But something that you touched on, in terms of our digital lives: We’re on computers, we’re on our phones, we’re researching, we’re going to a store with phone in hand to say, ‘is it here?’ Or, ‘let me learn about this product.’ So you mentioned something kind of interesting earlier, that measurability of being able to track activity with searches and so forth. Can you can you expand on that for us?
JH: Sure. And this goes back to my catalog days, which was direct marketing. We always liked to be able to track, if you spend a dollar, what did that do? Where did sales revenue come in from? How much came in?
And online marketing lets you measure even more. When you’re marketing a company, marketing a line of products, marketing a website online, you can track a lot. If you’re doing paid search marketing, you can certainly track what you spend, but you can also track incoming phone calls, you can track incoming orders, you can track store visits. We connect to client CRM (customer relationship management) systems and track people going into stores and their purchases. So it gives you a lot of flexibility.
If you’re concerned about SEO and organic traffic, if you’re concerned about AI visibility, you can track impressions. You can track traffic that comes to your website, you can track the quality of traffic. So this kind of visitor that comes in from this particular source, how much time do they spend on the website? How many pages on average do they visit? What’s their conversion rate? And on and on. It it is just a mountain of data that can be collected and analyzed.
Data and setting goals
MC: Jon, it sounds like there’s so much fascinating data that is being collected. So you talked about how many people are going to a website, where are they coming from? How long are they there? What types of things should companies keep in mind as they analyze data, from an analytical perspective, from a data quality perspective? What kind of guidance do you give to companies when they’re going through this data?
JH: That’s an interesting question. I would say pay attention to, first, what are your goals? What do you want to measure? There’s so much data out there, and some of it has nothing to do with what you want your outcome to be. So make sure you’re tracking data, and trying to affect change based on what your goals are.
Then, I’d say pay attention to the source of the data. There are a lot of ways to get data on who’s coming to your website, who who clicked on your ads, things like that. We like to pull data direct from the source. That’s Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, direct from Amazon, things like that.
I’ve seen reporting either in self-standing reports or inside some web platforms that will give you numbers too. And sometimes those numbers match up and sometimes they don’t. And a lot of times that comes down to attribution. And so that can give you some misleading information.
Meta—Facebook and Instagram—has its own metrics on sales. They can be a little aggressive on what they take credit for. It’s important to understand there are different ways to collect data, there are different ways to look at data. Really pay attention to the source of the data.
Setting the right goals for eCommerce and marketing
MC: Those are very interesting points. And I’m going to just kind of dive in a little bit to that first one you mentioned: pay attention to your goals, identify your goals. It could be conversion rate. So goals could be, ‘I want to have this many more visitors,’ ‘I want to increase my number of unique views, unique individuals coming to my website through this channel.’ And perhaps that could be a metric. It could be, ‘I want to increase my conversions, I want to increase my top line sales, and then see what my ROI is.’ It could be this many more sales, and it’s because of this much advertising, shall we say? Are those kind of use-cases?
JH: Yes. What is going to move the needle? Do you want more page impressions? Well that in itself is not necessarily a great goal. We can really improve page impressions, but if people don’t stick around or they don’t buy anything, does that really matter?
Look at things that will really help you reach a goal. And watching the goal and watching the data helps you adjust. It helps you manage how you’re going to get to that goal.
So if your goal is a 5% sales increase, 10%, a certain dollar sales increase, now you’ve got something that you can come up with a strategy for. Now you’ve got something that you can track along with all the data that leads into achieving that goal. Some brands may want to track visits to their website. But if they don’t sell direct, maybe they want to keep track of the visits that they send to their distributors, their resellers, and take credit for it. And you can do that.
And some other companies may want just to generate qualified leads and then follow up with phone calls, or follow up with a mailing, or something like that. So the more specific you can get, the better.
And sometimes we get new clients that really aren’t sure of what their goals should be, which is totally fine. We’ll help them figure out, well, what’s really going to impact your business?
Thanks to the Auto Care Association for this interview
Hedges & Company wants to thank Mike Chung and Jacki Lutz at the Auto Care Association for setting up this podcast interview for the Auto Care Indicators podcast. The Auto Care Association has many other informative podcasts in their On Air series.
