Marketing your collision repair business can be a job unto itself. The shop is busy and your top priority. Sometimes marketing can seem like it will take away from what’s important, but getting ahead of your marketing efforts can pay dividends down the line. It’s easier than you might think. Here are some useful yet simple, basic strategies to get the most out of your time and do the most for your business.
1. Customer Reviews
Reviews and testimonials play an important role for any service business, as many customers look for online reviews before making a decision on choosing a service and the auto repair industry is no exception. Look for opportunities to post reviews and testimonials through registering your business on different review platforms sites, social media, and your website.
2. Integrated Software
Automation is your friend and can save not only hours but precious minutes in managing your shop as well as customer base. Investing in a software that integrates aspects like invoicing, reporting, ordering, promotions and technician management is another great way of marketing.
Marketing all comes to what a service business is doing for achieving customer satisfaction, so integrating all the processes is a great way to streamline activities and manage resources effectively.
3. Strategic Marketing
There are lots of tools you can use to this end—Internet, websites, billboards, TV, radio, direct mail, etc. Every business must have multiple marketing strategies so it doesn’t put all its eggs in one basket. Basic strategies include:
• Customer referral strategy: Build repeat and customer referral business.
• Agent referral strategy: Develop and maintain relationships with insurance agents.
• Brand awareness strategy: Build a brand following and repeat customers.
4. Search Engine Optimization
Your website needs to be crawled and indexed by search engines via Google, just like your car needs lights so other drivers know where you are. Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is a series of best practices for making your content more easily searchable on Google and other search engines. Your dedicated website needs to have content that is well written, as well as photos and headlines that are properly formatted in order to drive organic (that is to say, non paid page rankings) traffic to your site. There are some excellent SEO services to help you along with your SEO efforts such as Google, Semrush and Mos to name just a few.
5. Content Marketing
Creating content to send out to your customers over your social media platforms or email lists is an extremely cost-effective customer retention strategy. Any time your customers open their inboxes or scroll through Facebook, LinkedIn Instagram etc., they can see your newsletter or blog, tag it and share it to their communities. Content can be self-created or shared—the important part of this is that your content is something your target audience can relate to and use. Remember the customer experience of your brand is vital to your business.
That’s all for today, but we’ll be back again for more helpful tips of how to best market your collision repair business.
