Online marketing for the auto industry is still in the very early stages. These days most dealers and auto shops have some sort of online strategy but have not thought about how to use the web for auto repair referrals and customer retention.
Day after day they battle to attract new visitors to their website using Google AdWords, SEO, online review sites, social media, blog posts, banner ads and many other strategies. This is time-consuming work that hinges on narrow margins to be successful (if they can track it at all). As more competitors enter the market the cost of these activities continues to become greater and greater.
There is a new strategy for attracting more traffic born every day. Don’t be fooled, many of these are just smoke and mirrors. They sound good but once you put them into practice they do nothing.
Where the real advantage lies is getting the most revenue out of each person that you get in front of. By maximizing the “Total Customer Value” you can reap significant returns on your investment and you can then reinvest a portion of these returns into completely dominating your market.
A while ago I went to a friend’s house for a BBQ. I was running late and didn’t have time to get to the store, so I stopped off and picked up a bucket of fried chicken.
I hadn’t seen this friend in a few months so we were eager to catch up. His toddler was hungry and the burgers weren’t quite ready so we handed the youngster the bucket of fried chicken.
About twenty minutes past as we were catching up and the kid came back saying he was still hungry. We asked about the chicken and he said he had finished it.
WHAT!?!? A six year old finishing an entire bucket of KFC’s finest? We went in to check it out…
We found that this little guy had simply taken a bite out of each piece of chicken and then discarded it. Every piece had a baby sized bit in it with 95% of the meat still on the bone.
In the auto repair industry most marketers are leaving a ton of “Meat On The Bone”. They fight, scratch and claw to get in front of new customers each day and then forget about them the next day and move on.
They may have someone follow up and they go into a database but this info is very often there is no real strategy for handling this data. Worse yet, clumsy sales offer emails are sent that further alienate prospective buyers.
If we spend 20% of the time dedicated to getting in front of new customers on getting the most out of the people that have already expressed an interest in our services we can see some DRAMATIC differences in our return on investment.
These custom strategies get all the meat off the bone by systematically creating more purchases, referrals and repeat business. Furthermore this is done in a way that actually positions your business as a local community leader. We build good karma around your business so that your customers actually LOOK FORWARD to hearing from you. Click Here To Listen To A Radio Interview I Did On That Subject. (HINT: This is not done by simply sending out sales / offer messages.)
Click Here To Find Out What Sneaky Tricks Your Local Competitors Using To Steal Your Customers And How To Fight This.
