It’s Your Business
- Subject: Evaluating the effectiveness of advertising and promotion
- Essential Reading: Shop Owner, Center Manager
- Author: Terry Greenhut, Transmission Digest Business Editor
If you have been in business for a while you very likely know which marketing and sales efforts are the most productive for attracting and selling to new customers. You also should know what brings repeaters and referrals. You may believe that there are many avenues available, but consider these questions:
- What really works best?
- What is most cost effective?
- On what are you wasting money?
- What is worth more of an investment?
- Which marketing and selling techniques need to be improved upon?
Although you may want to keep doing every bit of promotion, you really need to question the generation of profit vs. the cost. If you are investing in forms of advertising just because you always did, you need to know whether they are still viable. Every ad you run needs to bring a good return on investment. If the results of any initiative can’t be measured, should you continue it?
It is more critical than ever that we find out how each customer comes to us. That should be a major factor in determining where future funds will be invested. Many of us don’t ask our customers how they heard of us. Others ask only if a customer actually shows up at the shop for diagnosis or service. Since advertising is something you do to begin the process of dealing with a customer, you need to know whether it is making the phone ring or making them stop in for the first time.
To know whether advertising and promotion are really working we need to ask every customer, at first contact, how they heard about us. When they call on the phone (usually the first contact) we need to know exactly what made them call. Was it a referral? If so, from whom? Was it advertising? If so, from where exactly? Although some customers may not be able to answer the question to the infinite degree you would like, many will, and it’s always vital to get as much information as possible and record it for later analysis. When a caller says he got you out of the yellow pages you need to be much more specific. If you advertise in more than one book ask which yellow pages they used. Then ask, “What brought you to the yellow pages?” Many times it will be a referral. They were told whom to go see. They just needed a phone number or an address.
Most of us, at one time, thought the yellow pages actually generated the majority of our leads. Through careful questioning of customers we’ve now found that the book is used more as a reference guide by people who already know where they want to go and just need to know how to get there.
If other sources bring customers to the yellow pages, we need to find out what those sources are and cultivate them. Having a huge ad in the yellow pages that costs thousands a month makes no sense if a small one that gives adequate information will suffice. If your ego says you have to have the biggest ad in the book, get over it. The ad just needs to be big enough to get results. Let your competitors waste their money trying to be the biggest.
Many shops are abandoning their big yellow page ads, taking smaller ones and investing a larger share of their budget in the Internet, believing that more and more people use it to shop. They’re right; more folks think of the Internet first whenever they want information about anything, but you can’t throw all your marbles into that jar yet. Although computer literacy is growing rapidly there are still some diehards who either refuse to or can’t understand it. Then there are those who can’t get online for one reason or another. They will continue to shop traditionally until that situation changes.
A common misconception about Internet advertising is that it’s free or very low in cost; it’s not. It’s like anything else – it costs as much as you are willing to invest. First you pay for some type of software to create your own Web site or have someone design a good-looking and workable one for you, but that’s just the beginning. Just because you built it doesn’t mean that they will come. You now have to promote it. You have to invest with search engines and write or have articles written for you that contain key words and phrases the search engines will pick up. You’ll then either have to find software or pay a consultant to place this information properly. It’s almost like hiring a public-relations person or a press agent to plant good stories about your business.
The bottom line is that if you can’t get your business on the first page of a search, somewhere near the top, the odds of anyone clicking to go to your Web site are dramatically reduced. Think about the way you search. Once you find what you want, you stop. Everyone does. Why go any further? You might look for one or two comparisons or more-convenient choices, but in general people stop once they’ve found what they think they are looking for.
All your other advertising needs to direct people to your Web site. Every print advertisement that appears anywhere must prominently display your site’s address. If you do TV it has to flash or be on constantly during the commercial. Every radio ad needs it as a tagline, and it will help if the name of the site is mentioned a couple of times in the body of the commercial. Every promotional gimmick you give out, from the coffee mugs to the ballpoint pens and business cards, should have the Web address on it. The return address on your envelopes and stationary should include it. Shirts, jackets and caps should have it embroidered. Anywhere you print your company logo the Web address should appear with it.
If you can get semi-interested parties to your site the next question is, “What will keep them there and make them contact you?” If you count the number of hits on your site compared with the number of sales or contacts that go further than just a quick visit, there is often a vast difference. If there is, people are coming to the site but not staying. That’s important information. If you are getting lots of hits you know that whatever you are doing to attract them to the site is working. If you aren’t getting many to stay and take the next step, the problem is with the site’s content and needs to be fixed quickly.
Just as with any other form of selling you will get some percentage of visitors to actually buy. The goal is twofold: to increase the number or visits so that even a fairly low percentage of those who stay and go further will create more sales, and to increase the percentage of visitors who buy by making them better offers than the competition does.
You should offer an Internet special of some sort. A coupon for a free or reduced-price “something or other” that they can print out and present usually works well. The trick is to place it where they can’t help but see it. If there are multiple pages on the site you may want it on every page or at least have a tab or click box they can use to give them instant access to it from anywhere:
“Click here for our free monthly car-care newsletter.” Even if you don’t get a phone call or an appointment for some type of repair or service work from the first visit to the site, you want to use that contact to build a database and keep in touch for the possibility of future business or referrals. A periodic newsletter sent automatically to their e-mail address gives you multiple chances. The newsletter must contain useful information, not just advertisements; otherwise they will opt out of it after the first or second month.
Are you a good story teller? Most shop managers and owners are. They tell customers stories all day long. They just don’t always realize that they are doing it. Since customers like reassurance that they are choosing the right repair shop and are making sound decisions about repairing their vehicles, use your newsletter to tell stories about other customers and what happened with them as a result of allowing your shop to handle their repair and maintenance requirements. Of course, you don’t want to use their names unless you get permission, but the names aren’t that important; the situations are. If the reader can relate to one you’ve written about, if they can think, “That’s just like my problem, and look, they found the solution for someone else,” then you’re in. Most won’t want to look any further.
Customers traditionally don’t want to reinvent the wheel. They are happy to see that their problem isn’t unique and that you’ve already solved it for others. That builds trust and puts them in a comfort zone. They would sooner come to you as the “expert in handling that type of problem” than to someone who makes no claim or mention of their capability in that area at all.
We’ve all done forms of institutional advertising over the years. We call it “getting the name out there.” Although that’s good for building brand-name awareness, it isn’t all that helpful in creating immediate customers. With money being tight we need results. So maybe we should put the institutional ads on the back burner for a while and go directly for what sells.
A coupon for a free half hour of diagnostic time or a free oil change or diagnosis of a check-engine light can be a great loss leader. Whatever will get them through the front door and onto a lift is what you want.
Super critical: When they come you must give them a reason to stay. Too many customers are lost because of crucial mistakes during the intake process. Don’t be guilty of chasing customers by saying the wrong things and scaring them off.
- Right thing to say on the road test: “Yup, I feel it too.”
- Wrong thing to say on the road test: “Yeah, I feel it slipping. That’s the forward clutch. It’s gonna run ya about $3,200.”
- Right thing to say in the driveway: “It doesn’t seem to be all that bad. Leave it with me for a while and I’ll see what I can do.”
- Wrong thing to say in the driveway: “This thing’s blown to smithereens. We’ll be lucky to salvage any of it.”
Quoting a price or giving worst-case scenarios on the road test or in the driveway will have them waving goodbye and driving off. To retain them you need to go through your entire diagnostic process, minimizing the problem until there is proof that it is major. Don’t ever present the customer with a price until you are ready, and you aren’t ready ’til the computer or a fully filled-out hand-written repair order with substantiated prices for parts and labor says you are.
If you rush the process you lose. Take your time. Explain everything. Make the customer comfortable with you and the repair you want to make. Don’t be aggressive, but fight for your price with good objection-handling techniques.
You can’t afford to lose any good leads in times like these, and a good lead is any customer who has gone out of his or her way to come to your shop. Sound promotion and retention are the keys to making it through our current economic challenges.
Terry Greenhut, Transmission Digest Business Editor. Visit www.TerryGreenhut.com.
