Next Wednesday, these billboards will start to blossom throughout the Tri-Cities to promote the new TriCityWheels.com website we launched back in March. It’s the first time ever that the two publishers of the Kingsport Times-News and The Johnson City Press collaborated to promote a common product with the TriCityWheels brand. The original boards will start in Johnson City right up from Winged Deer Park, there will be another on the Jonesborough Highway headed into Johnson City and two others on the South side of town.
Craig Augenstein has been working with me on this project. I used to play music with his brother Eric – one of the best I’ve every played with. Eric experienced something extraordinary and recreated himself here. Craig himself is a great bassist and used to play with Spank. He made his way through a term at WTFM and he’s been working for Lamar for several years and doing a great job for their company.
Interesting side note – I found out you can search billboards by their number. Here in the Tri-Cities they have five-digit ids that can be viewed from this cool web interface.
This past friday, The Press hit the streets with their new print publication distributed to over 30,000 homes. The Kingsport edition has about a 36,000 recipients and each of these magazines are produced every other week and distributed free throughout the Tri-Cities, but the real magic is happening on the web.
Last week, this new regional automotive database surpassed 2800 used vehicles and we just added motorcyles too. Smith Brothers Harley Davidson and Kingsport Cycles have closed a lot of business from the new website that now has over 675 sessions per day with over 6700 unique IP addresses visiting the site each month. Total sessions are well over 20,000 for the month. Most importantly, there were over 280 email leads distributed to our dealers at no charge and our sponsors, advertisers and online users couldn’t be happier – many of these references led to new sales and that feels very satisfying on our end.
We’ve had a small support group review the site and are getting some interesting feedback too. Soon, we’ll add a few more features and another layer of promotion in the coming days, but it’s gonna be nice to see the billboards in Johnson City. We’ll have an excellent opportunity to track our traffic and see if this new effort will help grow the brand and its usage.
Special kudos to all the guys on our staff. We have an elegant software platform custom-coded for the people of our community. The architecture is simple and targeted and more importantly, there are plenty of great promoters behind this project at both newspapers and we appreciate your efforts and continued support.
Take a look and see if you can find yourself a new convertible for the summer. I’m looking for something new myself. The only thing keeping me from a new car…payments. Besides, I’m still cool with my Jeep, but someday…