Before You Spend a Dime on Advertising, do this!

[Joe Marconi]

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[Transmission Repair]

On 2/14/2022 at 5:40 AM, Joe Marconi said:

Got your attention? Good!  

Every business needs a marketing and advertising plan, and to create a budget for that plan. However, the biggest bang for your buck, and the area of the greatest return on your efforts is what you and your employees do each and every day- Providing an Amazing Customer Experience!  And that cost little to nothing.

Before you spend a dime on advertising or marketing, make sure that you are providing an amazing customer experience. Build value and focus on the customer at each visit.  This will also help with customer retention.

What are your strategies to provide an Amazing Customer Experience? 

 

 

Yes, this is true.  While perhaps not so true with G/R shops, here's what worked best for us:

A self-managed Google AdWords program.  The average click cost us $11 bucks and it took about 3 clicks to land an appointment.  75% of those appointments turned into major work.  Our total customer acquisition for a major job ended up being about $44 bucks.  We were averaging about 350 calls a month.  Now remember, we're a transmission-only repair facility with only 4 lifts.  We got so overloaded sometimes that I would actually pause all campaigns to just let us catch up and catch our breath.  Like Joe said, a great customer experience is key.  It's really hard to give a good customer experience when you're 3 weeks behind.  When a transmission fails, people need their vehicle NOW!

[Transmission Repair]

To add to my previous post, I also learned that by pausing and unpausing our AdWords campaign, I was able to somewhat control the influx of business to match our production capabilities.  I was never able to do that before.  It was like they say, "feast or famine" with absolutely no control over it.  It was difficult, if not impossible, to give every customer a great experience with an uncontrollable work load.

With phone numbers becoming so cheap ($2 ea.) I was able to get enough tracking numbers to see what campaigns worked and which ones weren't.  I used a company named Convirza (https://www.convirza.com/solutions/by-industry/automotive/ ) for phone tracking to see where calls are coming from.  I also used their feature of Call Analytics which would score phone calls.  They even customized their analytics to where they had to hear the word "appointment" at least 3 times from our end of the conversation to see if we scheduled an appointment.  

I would use a different phone number on each campaign, advertising, and even business cards.  After a year, I learned specialty advertising like pens, calendars, and refrigerator magnets don't generate any phone calls so I quit all that nonsense.  I would even have different phone numbers for different keywords in AdWords.  By far, the hottest keyword was "transmission repair" followed by the same keyword with the prefix of a car make.  All phone calls were also being recorded.  I would listen to high opportunity calls where we didn't set an appointment.  It was great.  If you haven't used call tracking before, Convirza has account managers that will set you up, teach you, and walk you through the whole process.  Try it and you'll never go back to the old way again.