After developing a user-friendly, functional and feature-packed auto repair software, we’re introducing Torque Digital, an all-in-one marketing solution for auto repair businesses.
Read on to find out how Torque Digital helps your business skyrocket!
When you start an auto repair shop, you have to juggle many balls simultaneously. We can say there are many balls in the air to catch, and one of them is auto repair digital marketing. In order to attract new customers, your auto repair business must emphasize this. Based on my observation, small shops overlook digital marketing, and that’s where the trouble begins. 🤔
If you want to expand the footprints in your auto repair shop and give a boost to the car count, you need the right digital marketing direction for your shop. It will save your business in the long run and build a strong marketing reputation for your business.
Furthermore, to compete with your local competitors, you need to have a plan that stands out from the competition. Here is the good news: Digital marketing is the level playing field to attract new customers and create hype for your brand.
Cast your eyes over this blog post, and learn with us a hands-on effective marketing plan of an auto repair shop that will create a buzz for your business and increase your ticket size.
Why Do You Need Digital Marketing For Your Auto Repair Business?
I often hear entrepreneurs ask me the question, why do I need professional digital marketing for my auto repair?
So here’s an answer to the question, to get a better understanding let’s recall ways of traditional marketing. Ready? Up until the early 2000s, marketing was done through TV, radio stations, print ads, and banners. Gee! (thanks to the internet) at least we can measure ROI.
Now considering the budget and results: traditional marketing was untrackable, costly, and required more manpower. Whereas, Digital marketing is trackable, cost-effective, and gives high ROI.
Let’s Sort Through The Rubble
If you are one of the auto repair garage owners, who feel digital marketing is daunting. Don’t think hard, this blog post will clear up all the fog in your head and you will make better decisions to strategize your business.
Customers nowadays demand modern solutions, quick fixes, and transparency from auto repair shops. A vast number of shops have transitioned from traditional methods to modern methods. Like using auto repair software and that has been proven beneficial for them.
Similarly, customers trust those shops more who have a strong online presence and more reviews online. For that, digital marketing for auto repair shops is vital.
With an online presence, you can give a better description of your business. Your business attracts the right customers and gives you more opportunities to sell services than walk-ins do.
Your business needs to stay updated with automotive marketing trends because technology is evolving in every business.
Here’s a Scenario
Let’s say your car stops working in the middle of the road and you don’t have a family member or friend near you, who can open the hood and give it a look.
You asked the locals in the area and got to know about two repair shops on the same road… Of the two, one has no business logo— just an open garage with some techs working.
And then there’s another auto repair shop that has a BIG official-looking business logo.
As auto repairs are costly and so is your car, Which shop do you think is more credible?
Of course, the one with the logo. Prior to entering, you search them online and look for their reviews online.
Without any second thought, you will go for a shop that has a strong online presence, since it will appear more trustworthy and appealing to you because you want to avoid any scams.
Get the Right Marketing Strategy To Grow Your Business
The journey to scaling your business doesn’t have to take ages and you don’t have to wait around for your time to come when you see your business flourishing.
You can easily transform your business by following automotive marketing trends, but patience is still the key here. Nothing happens overnight.
Through automotive digital marketing, you can connect with your customers in a more personalized way, and you can target the right audience. You can say that it will let you target only interested consumers in your services.
Here are the top benefits that you will get from digital marketing:
- Increased Visibility
- More traffic on your website
- Target right audience
- Cost-effective
- More engagement with customers
- Measure ROI
- Track customers interest
- Visitor tracking
- More visible to consumers
- Boost in sales
- High conversion rate
This is just the beginning of the benefits, I will explain more benefits along with describing what strategic automotive digital marketing entails. Don’t miss out!
Area of Focus #1 – Website Branding
If you’re wondering why I say #1, it’s because this is the most important thing to focus on when you are making your online presence. It is your website. As I mentioned above, your website shows what type of shop you are and what services you provide.
In other words, your website is your business’s virtual face. For instance, if you are looking to start a car detailing business, the first thing you should focus on is getting started with auto repair shop marketing. You need to develop a secure website and its logo.
Having a website lets you connect with your customers even before they appear at your repair shop. If you don’t focus on having a website, there is a high chance a person who is looking for the best auto repair shop in the area, might find your competitor on top searches.
As they say:
“Without competitors, there would be no need for strategy.”
| Remember: There is always someone out there looking to swipe your customers away from you, don’t give this chance to your competitor. |
Don’t have a website for your business?
Things to consider when you are developing a website:
- Mobile-Friendly
Often heard, your website should be mobile-friendly. Why? Because customers can easily access your site using a smartphone and quickly find what they are looking for. If your website is not mobile-friendly, then it will be difficult for your website visitors to access your site and it will negatively impact your search engine ranking (SEO).
A recent study found that 68.1% of customers visit websites using their mobile devices. Therefore, your website should be fully optimized for both mobile devices and desktops. Make your website responsive for all devices (mobile, tablets, desktops).
- Appealing Design
You should design your website according to your niche, and what your customers want to see on your website. As you are an auto repair garage owner your website should have more real-time images of technicians, vehicles and tools. This will make your website more relatable to your customers.
Make sure your web design has not so much clutter or extra space. It will not give a professional look to your website. Your website should have a clean and airy feeling layout.
There are three important pages that should give an appealing view to your customers.
1- Homepage: Show off your garage and happy customers.
2 – About Us Page: This explains the skills, experience, and values of your team.
3 – Contact Page: The page where customers can contact and connect with you.
4- Services Page: This should clearly explain each service you provide at your shop.
Bonus Tip: Try Canva to create attractive and appealing visuals and logos!
- Professional Branding
Another important aspect of auto repair shop marketing is professional branding for your website. It gives it a professional image and more credibility, which can help increase your search engine results and conversions.
Professional branding also tells your customers that you are an expert and are taken seriously. Your brand’s professionalism builds trust with your online visitors.
Your website color theme, fonts, domain name – everything represents your website and explains more about your business. From the color theme to its visuals everything should be cohesive with each other.
- Relevant & Compelling Content
Your website should have a relevant piece of content, it should deliver a clear, engaging and delivers proper message about your brand to your customers.
Without relevance in content, no one will know about what kind of shop you are and what your core values are.
This is what makes you stand different in the market and customers would know why they should choose you over others.
Most importantly, ensure that any kind of content you post can be found easily by your website’s visitors, such as instructional videos, articles, blog posts, or shop photos.
Bonus Tip: Use Grammarly to check for spelling and grammar in your content!
5. Strong CTA’s
Another way to increase conversions is to strategically place CTAs (call to action) within your content. It’s an important element of your website, this compels the consumer about what next step he should be taking. If the customer knows what to do, he is more likely to convert.
Avoiding the call to action is a grave mistake that won’t turn out well for your company. In other words, CTAs make customers do what they want and that is conversion obviously.
In order to succeed in digital marketing for auto repair shops, you will need to understand how to grab your audience’s attention and keep it, rather than letting your potential customer slip away.
Automotive digital marketing services will let you successfully keep your customer on the right channel at the right time.
SEO: Game-Changing Optimization
You must have heard alot about the SEO term, and it’s important for your auto repair marketing as well. If you don’t know about SEO you might wonder what is it? Let me explain in more detail.
SEO (search engine optimization) is a boon to your business and makes your auto repair business grow rapidly. It helps your audience to connect with you easily.
Let’s say I’m new to town and want to know the best restaurants near me… what would I do?
In your opinion, should I look for pamphlets of restaurants, ask building people or simply Google? Of course, I will simply google and search for the best restaurants near me, I will definitely look for the results which appear on the first page.
If you want your business to grow in the digital era, then you need to get started with automotive digital marketing services.
Your business needs to appear on Google and all other important search engines. Otherwise, you will lose customers, and people might not know there is the best shop (yours) in town.😏
When you create a website and get it ranked on google. It makes it easier for a potential customer to locate you. They easily look for the services you offer. Research shows that 75% of customers do not look beyond the first page.
However, it’s important to improve your website SEO. When you improve, that will automatically improve your website’s organic traffic, and it will boost your auto repair shop revenue.
Make Sure your website has the right keywords related to your business with high-quality content that keeps your customers engaged.
For instance: If you run a truck repair shop, your potential customers may search for: a truck repair shop near me, a truck garage, or a truck repair shop in San Francisco.
Similarly, if you’re a technician, customers may Google: auto repair shop, auto repair, car body repair, RV maintenance, technician/mechanic near me, to name a few.
Let’s know more about SEO:
On-page – Everything Your Website Needs
On-page is very important in digital marketing because it helps you rank higher on search engines. You also need to add this to your auto repair shop marketing plan.
It is important to understand what on-page SEO is and how it works. Here’s a simple explanation. On-page SEO means everything that is included in your website.
This is the most important and primary part of SEO. On-page SEO is the set of techniques that help you improve your rankings on the search results pages.
It includes creating high-quality content, relevant and descriptive meta descriptions, adding internal links, etc. On-page SEO is crucial for improving your website rankings and bringing in more organic traffic.
| Bonus Tip: Check out this amazing on-page SEO checklist! |
Working on your on-page SEO is important because this is where your competitor can knock you off. It’s important to research your competitor and try to rank on those keywords above your competitors.
Off-page SEO – Rank Better
The Off-page SEO is the second most important part of SEO that involves other strategies outside the website. Off-page SEO includes getting links from other websites, building backlinks, submitting relevant content to search engines, and so on.
All these off-page strategies help you rank better on the SERPs. They help you get more targeted visitors and leads. This enhances the traffic to the website.
- Off-page SEO includes:
- Influencer Marketing
- Guest Blogging
- Social Media
- Ratings & Reviews Management
- Link Building
Local SEO
From the word local, you can infer that this digital marketing type targets a local audience.
Local SEO is a process of optimizing your online presence by leveraging the power of the web to make your business seen and noticed by the right people, in the right locations.
This might sound overwhelming to you right now. Relax, let me explain a bit to make your understanding clear.
Your auto repair shop needs to target the right people and for that local SEO helps you meet customers that are specifically in your area or near you. So this type of auto repair shop marketing allows you to target your local audience.
For instance, if you are located in San Francisco, customers who will be searching auto repair shops near San Francisco will find you through your website or other business listings.
It’s important to submit your business information to other business listings like Yelp, Yellow pages and other top-rated business listings. To beat your local competitors, you need high-quality local SEO to show up on page one of search engine results.
Important Tools To Improve Your Digital Marketing Game
As an auto repair shop, you need to monitor your online game progress regularly. If you want to level up your auto repair game then start getting automotive digital marketing services and watch the results roll in.
Below are some tools that will help you monitor your SEO performance and determine what works and what doesn’t.
Let’s have a quick look at my favorite auto repair marketing tools.
As a leading SEO management suite, Semrush is often considered a must-have digital marketing tool. Personally, I love this tool, kind of a blessing for me.
Following its varied website optimization prescriptions can give your online presence the necessary visibility boost. The tool is useful for keyword research, on-page optimization, or off-site (link profile) analysis.
Ahref is another digital marketing tool but relatively cheaper than the tool I mentioned above; many digital marketers are seen using and loving this for their businesses.
In addition to the common interface, Semrush and Ahref also share a similar approach toward bot deployment.
So when you start your digital marketing for an auto repair shop, you can buy this tool to boost your SEO game. It helps you track the relevant keywords that your auto repair shop may need to target.
Often referred to as ‘spiders,’ these trackers facilitate the essential functionality of these tools. In order to perform their publicized analyses, they explore targeted websites to gather the necessary information.
Hootsuite is an amazing tool for handling your social media. This lets you run and monitor your social media campaigns successfully. We can say that it’s one simple and easy dashboard for your social media platforms to be managed.
Moreover, it saves you from another big hassle. You can manage all your active social media platforms from this tool. You can schedule posts on different modules at once.
The first thing you should do as a new player in the marketing world is to start monitoring who is visiting your website. Google Analytics lets you do so, yeah right. You need end-to-end analytics tracking for your website.
It has made a lot easier to track the information about your visitors and your website traffic. It is an analysis tool that shows you how many people visited your website, how long they stayed on your site, what demographics they fall into, and so on.
Social Media
If you are someone young reading or even old who loves to be connected with today’s world, you will agree with me that most of our lives are controlled by social media.
Today’s world relies heavily on it, and it cannot be neglected. If you are not digitally marketing your business on social media, you may not attract new customers.
You need to understand that the automotive business can’t totally rely on walk-in customers or word of mouth. You have to keep your regular and new customers attracted to your shop. A luring offer from your competitor could easily take your existing customers away.
Yeah, that’s frightening, right. Let’s talk statistically.
On average, people spend 2 hours and 33 minutes on social media per day. This small gadget got everything inside that, so if you want your customers engaged with your shop and one of doing that is social media marketing. 😉
For instance, you can post a video of your most skillful technician where he is repairing a car, or educate customers with car DIYs, or driver safety tips.
You can also post photos of local events, share customer testimonials or create short videos about how you create your estimates quickly using estimating software.
It can be anything. Go crazy with your content!
Bonus Tip: make sure the content you post should be eye-catching and attention-grabbing so that it leaves customers with no choice than subscribing or follow your page.
Content Marketing
Let’s say you are thinking of getting started with your auto repair marketing, and you have created content for your social media, without the right content marketing strategy your content won’t reach the right targeted audience.
Creating content consumes a lot of energy, effort and time, but if your hard work is not going in the right direction it becomes all useless.
Content strategy helps in promoting brand awareness for your business, and keeps your garage top of mind when customers need auto repair services.
If you stay consistent with your content marketing it helps develop and nurture a stronger relationship with your existing customers and attract newbies to your shop.
Google Ads
This is the most popular method to drive qualified leads to your business, yeah right. Google ads can easily help you reach the goals that you have set for your business.
It’s not just good SEO that gets a company’s landing page or product ranked as the first, second, or third search result on Google; it’s usually Google Ads.
With Google Ads, a business is able to display advertisements to customers who search for its products and services on Google Search or Maps.
You can use Google Ads to generate more revenue, increase brand awareness, and build a stronger presence on Google Search.
With Google Ads, you can reach more customers in the areas of your choice. Likewise, suppose you want to target a specific demographic, such as people who have recently purchased a car.
In that case, you can choose to target a specific geographical area, such as people living nearby. Additionally, you can choose to target potential customers according to the specific keywords that they used in their online searches.
Another great way to meet your new customers! 👋
Facebook/Instagram Ads
Facebook and Instagram ads are another great way to keep your bays busy all the time, or in other words, get more clients.
You can use these two platforms to reach potential customers in your area and build a stronger relationship with them. As you can micro-target your right audience on these platforms, that makes your campaigns successful.
Facebook ads are as critical as email marketing, great web design, SEO, and organic social media. Facebook has billions of users every day, and placing a targeted advertisement on the platform would greatly increase your chances of reaching them.
Don’t let this opportunity pass you by, start advertising on your Facebook/ Instagram and see the difference it makes for your auto repair business.
Make sure when you start with your automotive digital marketing services choose a team of experts that runs successful facebook ads for auto repair shops to maximize business profit.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is arguably the most effective and affordable way to connect with your customers.
By using email marketing for your business, you can connect with your customers more personally. It helps you build a relationship with your customers and invest more time in providing them the service they want.
Therefore, you can also use email marketing to announce new services and promotions and build your list over time. You can use this medium to build your brand and increase your reach, ultimately increasing your income.
You can do email marketing in several ways:
- Create a newsletter and send it to your list periodically.
- Generate a coupon code and send it to your list when a new offer is available.
- Design a survey and send it to your list when you want to understand more about them. Check out SurveyMonkey!
- Create a link and send it to your list when you want to share a piece of content that you know they’ll find useful.
- Make a video and send it to your list when you want to share a new piece of content.
- You can write a press release and send it to your list when you want to share something with them in the news. Here are some tips!
- Publish an ebook and send it to your list when you want to share a new guide or tutorial.
Bonus Tip: Try Mailchimp to take your email marketing game to the next level!
Why Torque Digital?
Why do I feel you are becoming overwhelmed because your automotive shop doesn’t have a strong online presence?
If you are a small garage owner who wants to start auto repair marketing and doesn’t know where to get started. Torque Digital is here to help your business. We provide automotive digital marketing services for all business types.
There are many digital marketing agencies present in the market today, but we are aligned with a vision to make our customers’ business a real success.
With our digital marketing services and advertising experts in the field, we can provide your shop with a strategy to make your online presence stronger and help you meet your customers through the latest marketing plan for auto repair shops.
We help you provide:
- Google Ads (PPC)
- Local SEO
- Facebook/Instagram Ads
- Website Development
- Logo Design
- Content Marketing
- Content writing
- UI/UX Design
- Digital Branding
So let’s say if you are starting your auto repair business you should also look for marketing services so that your and auto detailing software to stay focused on your business growth and spend less time doing mundane tasks that we can help you with.
All-in-one Auto Repair Solution
Torque360 is a complete auto repair solution for your business. We also provide software for auto repair garage owners that helps them manage their shop pesky tasks like scheduling appointments, creating invoices, estimates or managing their inventory.
This software eliminates your manual hassle and lets you manage your auto repair business digitally, without getting stuck in the front desk office. We let you focus more on what you LOVE: fixing cars.
Wrapping It Up
If you are a small shop owner who is doing everything to make their business successful but missing out on digitally building your brand. Your success will be slow and it will take a lot of time for your business to create hype in the market.
However, if you focus on digitally marketing your business and work on developing a website and its optimization there is a high chance that you will beat your competitors and make them twiddle their thumbs why?
Because customers will be trusting your strong business profile. When you show customers what you do and how you stand out from the existing competition they will be willing to give your shop a trying shot.
If you want to thrive in your business in 2022, it’s important to stay updated on the internet and its trends. Honestly, your auto repair business can’t totally rely on walk-in customers. You need to invest in your auto repair shop marketing so that your business gets what it deserves.
Digital marketing for auto repair shops helps to reach its potential customers, increase your website traffic and build brand awareness
Here’s what Digital Marketing includes?
- Website Branding
- SEO
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Google Ads
- Email Marketing
- Facebook/Instagram Ads
- Content Marketing
