Imagine this scenario: You walk into your shop Monday morning to find the phone ringing off the hook, a line of customers dropping off cars and a car or two in your parking lot, towed in over the weekend. Just two days later, however, the phones are dead, and your lobby has turned into a ghost town.
For many shop owners, this sequence plays out every week. Many shops start and end the week strong, but suffer through slow days in between. Consumer behavior dictates this pattern. If a customer’s car breaks down on a Sunday, they’ll naturally want to get it addressed first thing Monday. Likewise, if a customer is planning a weekend road trip, they’ll want to schedule maintenance on a Friday or even a Saturday before they leave. Customers also tend to prefer wrapping up maintenance at the end of the work week even if they aren’t traveling.
Although old habits are hard to break, there are things you can do to help shift behavior and generate more business on those slow days. Increasing your marketing is a good start. New digital platforms provide the ability to deliver your offers to target audiences fairly quickly, giving you more flexibility to drive traffic to your shop on the days you need it most. In contrast, traditional advertising channels, like broadcast and print ads, can take weeks or even months to produce. The chart below is one we often use with our clients to show how long it takes to launch specific types of ads in the market. As you can see, social media provides the fastest turnaround, while a shared mail campaign (which features several different ads in one mailed package) takes the longest.
Digital advertising also provides the ability to change your promotions easily if they’re not yielding the results you want. Of course, while speed and flexibility are important, targeting is also key. And digital offers advantages in that area as well, allowing shop owners to target potential customers much more strategically than a radio or television ad, which is often seen or heard by consumers who would never visit your shop because it’s not conveniently located to where they work or live.
Even with the benefits that digital channels provide, it’s important to select the digital tactic that is going to be most effective in achieving your goal, which in this case, is luring customers to your shop when business is normally slow. Messaging is also key and must align with whatever your objective is. Some shops simply want to increase their car count, so they don’t have technicians sitting around on slow days with nothing to do. In that case, discounted oil changes or tire rotations are great specials to promote because even though they’re low cost services, they keep techs busy and could lead to other services in the future. On the other hand, if a shop wants to focus on increasing sales, offering discounts on bigger ticket repairs or 10% off parts and labor might make more sense.
With that in mind, here’s a look at the digital channels we recommend utilizing to help boost your business during those slow days.
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Email Marketing – Email campaigns might be the cheapest and simplest way to drive business to your shop. This low-cost approach also provides a good opportunity to reconnect with existing customers since they’re the group most likely to receive your email. They’re also more likely to respond to your offers than a new customer since they’re already familiar with your shop and services. Most email marketing programs include templates that can be easily customized to feature whatever promotion makes the most sense for you. One option, for example, is a Wild Wednesday coupon with offers good for that day only. You can then program your campaigns to automatically send an email every Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. The other nice thing about email marketing is that you can readily track open rates and click-throughs to gauge effectiveness.
- Pay-Per-Click – What makes pay-per-click (or PPC) particularly attractive is the flexibility it provides, allowing advertisers to easily adjust the budget they allocate for paid search on short notice. For those unfamiliar with PPC, it basically refers to the model advertisers use to capture attention when consumers search for certain keywords on the Internet. Businesses place ads based on specific terms and if a consumer clicks their ad when performing a search, that business is charged for that click. The keywords most in demand fetch the highest prices. So, if you notice that sales are down on certain days, you can easily increase your spend to potentially capture more attention on those days or you can change the keywords you’re paying for if they’re not producing the results you expected. Likewise, you can also decrease your budget if your shop is already busy and you don’t want to generate more demand. The main thing to keep in mind is that there is a finite amount of people searching for auto repair in your area on daily basis. I recommend working closely with your pay-per-click provider to determine the search bandwidth in your area, to avoid overspending.
- Mobile geofencing - Mobile geofencing is the practice of sending advertising content to a user’s mobile device when they enter a specific geographic zone. This strategy is becoming more and more popular because it enables advertisers to reach customers by location when they are searching through a browser or using an app, increasing the chance that smartphone users will see their ad. Through mobile geofencing, you can target businesses and residences surrounding your shop, giving you the chance to connect with customers when they’re at home or at work. In my view, this approach is crucial to driving business on slow days because you’re targeting the customers who can conveniently take advantage of your offers. Just be sure to stick to a two or three-mile radius of your shop since that’s typically where your target market is.
- Targeted Display Ads – Targeted display ads are the banner ads you see pop up on websites when you’re searching the web. They might seem a bit annoying, but it’s hard to deny that they draw your attention. Targeted display ads offer a lot of options – you can target people who have visited your site, by keyword, by zip code or by website. This means that if your goal on a slow day is to increase sales by focusing on luring high-ticket repairs, you could target people who have searched on the term “broken transmission” or have visited competitors’ sites who specialize in those types of jobs. You can then deliver an ad for discounted transmission repair services to those shoppers. The variety of targeting available through these type of display ads increases the odds that your promotions will attract the right people and increase traffic when you need it most.
There’s no doubt that digital platforms provide new opportunities to connect with your customers and boost business on the slower days of the week. But when adopting any new marketing strategy, you might find that you’ll have to endure a bit of trial and error before landing on the right mix of tactics for your shop. Just be sure to track and measure whatever strategy you employ so you can accurately evaluate how well that approach has worked in helping you achieve your goals.
