Few auto repair shop managers or owners got into this industry to focus on marketing. We love cars. We love working on cars. Marketing is usually a necessary evil that we pay attention to, but don’t necessarily focus on.
This attitude has cost a lot of good shop owners their businesses. I’ve seen it first-hand.
Even if you aren’t a fan of marketing, you need to be as hands-on with it as possible for your shop to succeed. And, for your marketing to be successful, you need to pay close attention to the return on investment (ROI) with every ad buy you make. Your ROI needs to be as high as possible for you to maximize your marketing budget and get more customer bang for your buck!
Marketing vs. advertising: Know the difference
The first thing you should know about marketing is that it’s not the same thing as advertising. While all advertising is part of marketing, not all marketing is tied into advertising. An easy way to differentiate marketing from advertising is that advertising is a sprint while marketing is more of a marathon. Or, to put it another way, advertising is a snack while marketing is a multi-course meal.
Marketing’s menu includes a lot of elements, all relating to your shop’s brand – hands down your most valuable commodity. Waiting room cleanliness, customer service procedures, community involvement – all these things shape the way you’re perceived by the people who visit your shop and the people you want to be visiting your shop. It’s a long-term game that requires discipline, persistence and vision.
For your long-term marketing to be successful it needs to be well-coordinated and rolled out in a strategic manner. “Piecemeal advertising,” sending out bits and pieces of unintegrated collateral and one-off promotional offers, might help you get a few more cars in your bays for a week or so but it really doesn’t work in the long-term, which is a lesson we learned the hard way more often than I’d care to admit.
Quality > quantity
While seeing more customers come through your doors might seem like it means that your marketing is working, that’s not necessarily the case. Now more than ever, analytics and having a comprehensive understanding of the true results your marketing efforts are having are key to sustaining success.
Car count or clicks to your website are easy metrics to keep track of but, most of the time, the easiest metrics are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of marketing analytics. Beneath the surface is where you can determine the quality of your efforts instead of just the quantity they’re producing as, again, quantity can be both misleading and superficial.
Having good marketing isn’t just about attracting customers – it’s about attracting good customers and retaining them. When you are selecting the advertising components you will be including in your marketing engine, you should have both internal and external concerns in mind.
All your advertisements should take your existing customers into consideration in addition to the new customers you’re hoping to attract. Gaining a few new cars who aren’t loyal to you and don’t trust you yet simply isn’t worth it if you alienate your long-term clients by offering only new customers one-time discounts or anything to that effect.
Stay the course
Another important thing to remember when you’re putting together a marketing plan is that you need to stick with it long enough to measure and evaluate your results. A shop owner I know recently decided to devote some money towards Google AdWords, which is a direct and relatively easy way to get more views on your website and more cars in your bays.
After seeing mediocre results for a couple of weeks, he abruptly decided to abandon the whole thing – just like that. We will never know how much AdWords would have helped him in the long-run in his market because he was overly-reactionary and didn’t show any patience – a major no-no in the independent business marketing world.
Digital is definitely an important item on your shop’s marketing menu. Your online presence is a lot more than just putting up a website and hoping people find it. You need to make sure the language on your site is written in a manner that is going to be found in search engines. You also need to have active social media platforms directing customers and potential customers towards your business.
So-called “old-fashioned” advertising channels are still relevant but, like AdWords, they need to be maintained and developed over time. We use direct mail at our shop for a very simple reason: it still works. We have been doing it for years and use a lot of the same language we were using when we first started targeting potential clients with “snail mail.” If you just use direct mail as a one-off promotion, it’s not going to work – you need to stick with it, refining your targeting, and expand your reach over time to find the right customers – customers loyal to your brand and not just the coupon chasers.
Consistency is key
Just like running your small business, perseverance is a big factor in your marketing plan’s success. Your advertising is a big dish in your marketing feast, maybe even the main course, but it’s not the entire meal. Consistent branding, effective messaging and compelling content are cornerstones of your shop’s marketing plan and should be taken into consideration any time you place an ad or send out a special offer. Don’t panic and send out a “free oil change” coupon just to get people through the door. This damages your brand and negatively affects your overall marketing plan.
While you can drive yourself nuts worrying about your effectiveness or ROI on a given advertising campaign, at the end of the day, marketing is all about results. If your business is growing in a meaningful and measurable way, your marketing is doing a good job. If you are not – it is not.
Truly understanding the multiple marketing metrics you have access to nowadays is increasingly tricky, which is why a lot of shops rely on professional marketing agencies to help achieve their goals and better comprehend their branding. This is why for those without a solid understanding of marketing and how to evaluate their efforts, it makes the most sense to focus on your expertise – running a shop and repairing cars – and let marketing experts handle your campaigns.
