Aftermarketing

17 June 2026  ·  Issue 0003

Hey, hey Aftermarketer

Happy Wednesday! There’s a fair bit this week, so grab a brew, and we’ll dive in.

Top story

Your customers are on social. Even the ones you swear aren’t.

I had a conversation this week that I’ve probably had a hundred times (literally). We were talking about socials and the dreaded “I just don’t see garages and motor factors being on social” came up.

You know how I responded?

By banging my head into the wall…ok maybe not – but at this point, that feels like the appropriate response.

Instead, I’ll respond in this newsletter.

Aftermarket brands have this terrible habit of sticking to what they know, trying something new, failing at it (cause they treated it like what they knew), writing that thing off and then going back to….what they know.

Unfortunately, that’s not working out very well for their marketing budget.

And the reality is, everyone is on social media. Literally everyone.

So, to think that being handy with a torque writes you off from Facebook. Or running a motor factor means you’d never touch Instagram. I’m unsure if these are serious thoughts.

That’s like assuming your local sandwich artist doesn’t fancy TikTok…just because they work at Subway? It’s just a very bizarre thought.

And considering social media is now where most people get their news, rather than the telly (do we still watch that?), this just solidifies that traditional routes to information are shifting and social is at the centre of that shift.

The big shift

Search stopped being just Google

We’ve touched on the rise of Zero-click in this newsletter now for the previous two issues, but for all the newcomers (hi, welcome), it’s essentially when someone searches and gets the answer right there and then without every clicking through to your website.

And as we’ve touched on a new study from Sparktoro and Similarweb found nearly 70% of Google searches now end with no click at all.

Take out the clicks that go to Google’s own bits and pieces, and only about 27 in every 100 searches actually reach the open web.

Ten years ago that figure was comfortably over half.

And it’s not only Google.

Daily searches on TikTok are up 40% on last year.

People search on YouTube.

More and more they just ask an AI and take the answer it gives them.

Google’s now rolling out information agents that go off and hunt things down for you, even act on them, without you lifting a finger.

Meta’s building the same sort of ask-and-get-an-answer search into Facebook.

How we search isn’t just a single search bar in your browser, and websites are seeing less of the end results. We’re now taking multiple routes, across multiple tools and platforms. Which means searches can come from anywhere – and our strategies need to keep up with this reality.

What that means for you is simple enough. Ranking number one on Google still helps, but it carries less than it used to, and Google’s not the only place worth ranking.

So the job becomes working out what your customers actually type, across every place they might type it, then making sure you’re the answer. Which you can’t do unless you know them properly. (More on that at the bottom).

Worth sitting with

LinkedIn just told us how buying decisions really get made

LinkedIn teamed up with Bain on a report digging into how B2B buying actually happens.

Buyers are three times more likely to pick a supplier that a peer or customer recommends than one promising a better product or a lower price.

They’re four times more likely to go with one they’ve had a good experience with before.

And 40% of deals stall not because a competitor won, but because the buying group couldn’t agree and nobody wanted to be the one who made the wrong call.

Read that across to our world. The garage owner choosing a parts supplier, or a software partner, isn’t reassured by your spec sheet. They’re reassured by someone like them saying “yeah, they sorted us right out.”

So that’s the homework this week.

Get one customer to tell the story of a specific thing you fixed for them, in their own words, and put it somewhere a prospect sees it before they ever speak to you.

Five-minute job

Check your Google listing. Google might’ve added a number you didn’t.

Over the past week Google’s been bulk-adding WhatsApp numbers to Google Business Profiles.

Some of them are wrong, like landlines that can’t take a WhatsApp message at all.

Not everyone got the email letting them know, and for a few days there was no way to even delete them, though that’s since been fixed.

Own your audience

Build the community. Don’t rent the room.

I banged on about communities last time, and I’m not done. Bluesky’s just added them to the platform. Both public ones and invite-only ones, each with its own feed.

Whether Bluesky pulls it off, I’ve no idea. Clubhouse had a go, and look how that went, but the platform almost doesn’t matter.

People want to pull their interests into one place and have a say over their own corner of the internet. And I genuinely believe this is a shift that is rapidly taking place (just look at Skool, for example) and also something that aftermarket brands can use to gain access to their customer base.

We’ve built communities for clients, and people do turn up to them (thousands, in fact).

So you don’t have to go create a community on Bluesky (our audience aren’t hanging out there in droves) but I would be looking at how to own your community, what to host there and how to launch one, in the near future.

If you want to see how that’s done in our CRM, V8, then hit me up and I can show you round!

A few more worth a minute

Preference is the word. Instagram’s rolled its “Your Algorithm” feature out to the main feed, so people can tell it what they want more of and less of. Control on top of the algorithm. Which means the old move of posting the motorsport content that won you your following has had its day. You post to what your customer’s actually wrestling with, not what you fancy making.

Video keeps getting cheaper to make, on purpose. Edits, Meta’s free CapCut rival, is getting a desktop version and an AI assistant. YouTube’s launched a live concert series too. When platforms start handing out free video tools, it’s because they want more video out of you. Live’s the bit I’d keep an eye on. Shopping, experiences, Twitch, TikTok, they’re all leaning into it.

The platforms are reining AI back in. TikTok’s banned AI-generated voices in shopping livestreams. It’s part of a wider tightening, with LinkedIn and YouTube doing similar. The human stuff wins as the synthetic stuff gets pegged back. Which is half the reason Reddit’s such an underrated one for B2B. It’s all over AI answers precisely because it’s real people talking, not a brand broadcasting.

Quick hits

That’s your lot for this week. Reply and tell me which customer persona you came up with. I read every one, and it’s the best way for me to write you something properly useful next week.

Same time next Wednesday.

Sara-Mai ✌️

PS. I’ve just released a video on how to create engaging video that converts aftermarket clients. You can watch it here: youtu.be/ewTsI4UjaXc