In the automotive repair industry, one of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs face is figuring out the marketing. Due to high rates of competition, it can be difficult to know what, if any, of your marketing efforts are having an impact and helping to drive customers to your shop. To help you determine what marketing strategies are worth your investment and your time, we’ve compiled the top 3 techniques and strategies to keep in mind when putting together your auto body shop marketing mix.

3 Ways to Increase Sales with Auto Body Shop Marketing

One: Start tracking how your efforts perform

Let’s start at the beginning. One mistake that many novice marketers make is thinking that they can accurately predict and describe how various marketing and advertising efforts will perform. Marketing is almost never this straight forward. If you aren’t already doing so, now is the time to put together a strategy for tracking every element of your shop’s marketing campaign.

While some traditional mediums like print, radio, and television can be difficult to track, your digital and online efforts are incredibly easy to track with systems like Google Analytics. Once you have a system in place for tracking the performance of your campaign, make sure to keep a detailed spreadsheet and refer to it often. Marketing is all about optimization, so use the information you gather to continually build stronger and better performing campaigns.

Two: Know your brand

Most auto body shop owners don’t have branding guidelines in place, which can make it difficult for you to know what makes your shop unique and special. While there are a plethora of resources online about improving your shop’s website and search rankings, the digital marketing process is anything but uniform. To know your brand, and its place in the community that your shop serves, you need to appeal to your customer base.

Your brand grows out of an understanding of your consumer, your work mix, and your financial goals. Once you know this information, you can draw on it and use it to create a visual and verbal brand that subconsciously appeals to your ideal customer.

As you start to think about your shop’s brand in a critical way, ask yourself these questions:

1. Who is your typical customer?
2. What areas in your community do you serve?
3. What types of vehicles do you see most often?
4. Who is your competition?
5. What sets your auto body shop apart from that competition?

Three: Provide personalized service

One of the most effective, low-cost methods of marketing your auto body shop has little to do with your marketing mix or your ad spend: it starts with how you treat your customers. If you are operating on a local scale, personalized service can be invaluable for increasing word-of-mouth referrals and making your business stand out in your community. You can provide this kind of stellar service in a few ways:

1. Provide service reminders for existing customers to remind them when their vehicle is due for a service
2. Create a customer follow-up program to collect feedback from customers and form personal relationships
3. Implement a referral program to reward existing customers and encourage them to make recommendations to their network

BAYiQ is an automotive marketing platform designed to help you implement and manage your repair shop’s marketing strategy, regardless of your size. To learn how we can help accelerate your auto body shop marketing to the next level, schedule a demo today.