When you own a shop nowadays, it’s not enough to simply put “collision repair Salt Lake City” on the side of your garage. You really need to focus more on advertising as the competition is always there and people need to be able to find you by more ways than happening to drive by your garage. The 21st century has provided some great new opportunities by which to be able to reach people and has solidified the need to stick with some of the tested and tried approaches as well. Below are 5 places/ways you need to be advertising your collision repair shop (or any auto repair shop for that matter).
We’ll tackle some of the greatest and latest first.
- Mobile Advertising. When someone’s in an accident today, the majority of people have a cell phone on which they call the police/ambulance to come to the site of an accident. With their cell phone in their hand, it is important that your shop shows up as a trusted source of where they can have their vehicle repaired. You need to be sure that your website is mobile optimized (able to be viewed on mobile devices) and that your site is ranking for mobile searches. You can also design mobile ads to be displayed on sites and within aps.
- Online in general. You need to have a website and it needs to be optimized for local search engine searches. You want to be showing up when people are searching for collision repair and you can be in both the organic (natural) searches as well as the pay per click locations. While it sounds easy enough, it usually does involve some deeper work to make sure that you site displays highly, but the work is well worth it.
The tried and true methods.
3.Insurance agents/agencies. Do everything you can to form a relationship with agents and agencies. The person in the vehicle accident will first call for help/police/ambulance. Then family and then most often their insurance agency. If you’re already listed as a trusted provider, they can recommend the member to start right off by having you tow the auto or at least give them a quote to repair the damages. How much closer to the scene of the accident can you be than by forming relationships with insurance agents/agencies. Be sure to not forget about the independent agents as they will often have more of an ability to recommend someone than the big National agencies.
4.Dealerships. Yes, many dealerships have service departments, but very few of them actually do any collision repair work anymore as it often isn’t as cost effective as other services they can offer, according to bodyshopbusiness.com. By creating a relationship, and even better an exclusive one, you can have a great connection with customers through trusted association with the dealer. What a great introduction to be recommended by the dealer.
5.Print. Yes, print is still alive….kind of. Back in our day…. print was king and it still can get a great response. There are still some of us that use the phone book, but even more than that you want to try to be utilizing direct mail or co-op mailings where you can mail your coupon or biz information out to your targeted locations/zip codes and have your information there when they need you. Solo mailing is not as useful, unless your offering every day services like oil changes, but by utilizing co-op mailings, whether it’s a calendar or another type of mailer, you want to choose one that will give the ad more stickiness and people will more likely keep it around for they do need it.
There you have it. 5 of the best places that you need to be advertising and creating relationships in order to get in front of users eyes. Be sure to use a mix of old school methods and new technologies to reach people on all fronts. Utilize these channels and you’re sure to succeed.
