Marketing Your Automotive Shop

Marketing Your Automotive Shop

Building your automotive shop business through marketing is all about raising awareness and interest among the right prospects to drive traffic into your shop, where you can then demonstrate the quality of your services. It’s about having a large funnel and getting as many customers through that funnel opening as possible.

This brief marketing plan will show you how to build awareness and trust by combining Ad Pages digital and print advertising to become a household name in your local area. We’ll also talk about what works best in terms of offers to generate leads, so you’re not wasting money on trial and error.

• Make Your Website a Lead Generating Referral Source
  

  Check out your competitors’ websites in your area. Most likely, they are little more than an online brochure, with a few stock images, a short paragraph about what the business offers, a listing of services, and perhaps a page for offers. These are just the bare essentials.

  Winning websites in this industry are designed with search engine optimization (SEO) and mobile optimization in mind. When a potential customer types in the name of your city and service (let’s say car battery), your website should be designed to generate first page listings. If you’re not on the first page, you’re simply not in the game. When a mobile phone user comes across your website – and this is how most users will discover you – it should be optimized for easy browsing on a phone. Ad Pages can build and optimize your website for SEO and mobile. Without investing in these services, much of the money you put into other print and online advertising will be squandered. Automotive shops need to drive online traffic to a website built to convert browsers into customers.

• Target High Income Households

  Preaching the value of conscientious car maintenance to everyone is a losing game. Households with middle-to-high income have been shown to proactively invest in vehicle maintenance and repairs, while lower income households take chances with their vehicles’ longevity. In addition, if you don’t target higher income households… you’ll be competing on price, even after the initial offer, and working for the narrowest of profit margins. Ad Pages is a leader in print and online advertising for auto maintenance and repair shops; it’s where higher income households look for reputable shops and offers that they can use to learn more about the selling proposition of your business.

• Direct Mail and Print Coupons

  Ad Pages is a time-tested winner in the automotive maintenance and repair business. What makes Ad Pages superior to other print offerings is that families keep it on hand for weeks as a reference, so when they need a service, they simply pull out our magazine and find your ad. So which services should you advertise? Advertise the services everyone needs using coupons, which provide a low-cost, high exposure way of generating new leads. Set your offers at a price that beats your competition’s coupons. Start with the #1 most effective service to promote – oil changes, and offer a significant low price, such as $24.95, a dollar off or percentage off. You will want to test these three options in Ad Pages over a few months to see which pulls best in your area.

  Low cost (unprofitable) oil changes, tire rotations, and diagnostics or brake pad changes are called loss leaders. It’s the price of gaining new customers, and new customer acquisition is cost-effective when you focus on loss leader offers in the services everyone needs.

  You’ll want to test these offers in the Ad Pages catalog as well as inserts and with our online coupons. Different offers may produce different results in each format, depending on your area. We’ll go into greater detail, and you can rely on our years of experience in auto shop advertising to guide you. For example, one of our largest automotive clients is a national and household brand. With several locations for them, we have generated 80,106 coupon impressions just from January through September of 2020, along with 1,384 digital coupon retrievals from the AdPages.com website. 

  Your next step: talk to us. You could spend a year learning what you can potentially learn in just a short phone conversation or meeting with our auto shop marketing experts.