It’s Your Business
- Subject: Effective advertising and promotion
- Essential Reading: Shop Owner, Center Manager
- Author: Terry Greenhut, Transmission Digest Business Editor
Have you ever said to yourself, “I wish I had just one or two more majors a week? Boy, if I did I could really make some money in this shop.” The question is, after all these years in business why don’t you have them? As a matter of fact, some shops are finding that they don’t even have enough business to maintain the level of income they once enjoyed. They come up one or two majors short of making a living most weeks.
Thinking about that dilemma, it occurred to me that if a business doesn’t grow or isn’t able to maintain when similar businesses in the area do OK or thrive, the problem in many cases is directly related to the amount of time, effort and money the owner puts into advertising and promotion.
In speaking with several shop owners, I have come to find out that as business leveled off or declined for them their answer to the problem was to cut back on the promotion and advertising that provided them with most of the customers they did have. By doing this, thinking they would save some money that they believed it was crucial to save, they lost even more customers. Over time it became a spiral-down effect that was difficult to stop.
Everyone in business wants the magic answer, that one piece of advertising they can buy that will open the customer floodgate, something so strong they’ll have to beat customers away with sticks. Nice dream, but it doesn’t exist – or at least during my lengthy visit to this planet I’ve never seen it. The closest I’ve ever seen to a landslide of customers is during a “going out of business” sale at a furniture store when the “something for nothing” crowd shuffles in to see what they can steal. Other than that and half-crazy people lining up for three days to get a Cabbage Patch doll or the latest gaming box, I’ve never seen one ad campaign that could consistently draw a large number of customers.
There are some forms of advertising that work better than others at different times, depending upon seasons of the year and customers’ ever-changing interests. For example, I remember in the 1970s I would run an ad in the local “Penny Saver” for a discounted transmission service that would have customers lining up on a Saturday morning.
It worked well for a while and then fizzled out as situations changed, and for quite a time people weren’t thinking or caring much about maintaining or keeping their cars (the glorious 80s). I had to refocus and put more money into other types of ads and promotions that would draw more customers.
I didn’t abandon the “Penny Saver,” because lots of people still read it and some still responded to the ads. What I did was change my advertising to appeal to the “full-time four-wheel-drive” owners who, at that time, wanted better gas mileage, which we could provide by changing their vehicles over to part-time four-wheel drive.
Later on, when that business was all but used up, I changed it again. This time it was electronic diagnosis. I highlighted the $27,000 machine I had bought to help in that diagnostic effort.
I found that it was necessary then, and I believe is even more necessary now, to advertise in several forms of media because customers have more and more ways of retrieving the information they need or want in order to make purchasing decisions.
Although many of the traditional forms of advertising still work, as always they work only to a certain degree. Thinking about advertising and promotion, it occurred to me that we rely on several sources to get some number of customers to call us and possibly use our services. Although we all would like to believe that we will be able stop all but one or two forms of advertising to save some money, the truth is that we can’t. The customers we get are due to a combination of everything we do to promote our businesses.
This combination of advertising, publicity and outside sales yields only enough customers for us to maintain the rung of the ladder on which we so precariously stand. If we want to move up a rung it will take a far greater effort than most of us now put in. It would mean beefing up every effort, from advertising to promotion to outside sales, to secure those few more customers a week we need to put us over the top. The one thing we can never do is reduce the effort to try to save money. All that would do is to keep us from making any.
The trickle-down effect
Think about a funnel as a representation of the way advertising and promotion work. If we pour in all the forms of them that we employ and stir them around, customers begin to trickle out the bottom opening. Those customers don’t flow out quickly; they trickle out. So although it seems that we are putting in a lot to receive only a small relative return, sometimes things are what they seem to be. It’s true. We do generally get a smaller return from advertising than we had hoped for. The problem is that if the advertising doesn’t seem to be working to well and we remove one source after another, our funnel no longer fills and even less trickles out the bottom. Take away all the sources and, oops – no more customers, business closed, everyone gone.
Although we’ve all heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” as it refers to computers, in adverting it’s “not much in, nothing out.” If we don’t fill the funnel right to the brim and keep it full, we can’t trickle out enough customers. If, on the other hand, we take a proactive approach to advertising and outside sales, the results can be amazing. We have to start thinking of every factor as just a part of the mix; each contributes and none should be dismissed.
If in the past you had lots of promotion out there and were doing well, why aren’t you now? What has changed? Is it the area? Did it become too poor or too affluent to support your business? Did the type of services you need to offer change? Are you keeping up with the trends and technology of our business? Does your advertising appeal to the type of customers you want to work for and the type of vehicles on which you want to work? Are you on radio, TV, in the yellow pages and newspapers? Do you get involved in local events and generally get the name out every way you can? Do you have a fully developed and functional Web site that will provide useful information, allow customers to request appointments and prepay before coming in to pick up their vehicles? And do you have a real outside-sales program that operates every day as opposed to a phony-baloney one involving the boss going out to knock on two or three doors when business gets so slow he can’t stand it anymore?
Outside sales is more critical now than it has ever been. With so many shops competing for the available fleet and wholesale work, with remanufacturers sending out well-trained, aggressive salespeople to offer longer warranties to general-repair shops and service stations, each of you will need to redouble your promotion and outside-sales effort.
There has never been, and it’s not likely there ever will be, one source that will provide an overwhelming number of customers. Your eggs must be put into many baskets.
When you place an ad, be sure to let it run long enough to see whether it works. The only way you will know for sure is to question every caller or customer as to exactly how they heard about your shop and track the results.
Remember that people don’t need you ’til they need you; there is no impulse buy here, so you may not get response as quickly as you think you should. Think of most of your advertising as institutional instead of quick response, and plan it for the long haul.
Visit www.TerryGreenhut.com.
