Let’s start by getting a – somewhat – distressing truth out of the way. The elephant in the room that’s not leaving anytime soon 🤦♂️:
The fact that most repair businesses suffer from a funds failing. 😟
Something that not even the best repair management system – as we say here at RepairDesk – can magic away.
A shortage that forces repair entrepreneurs to budget their every move. Whether it’s marketing, sales, workforce numbers, or something else.
During a repair business’s nascent growth stage, the priorities of survival rule. The reason why even the most enterprising ventures in the domain lose steam.
Now, no commercial outfit, no matter its size, can function without digital marketing. This is on account of the obvious:
If the intended customers don’t know of a brand’s existence, how on earth are they supposed to convert? Make the coveted purchase. 🤷♂️
Here, there’s a new-age remedy that’s worth discussing. A panacea, if you will, that helps businesses with little currency get on the radar.
The title of this piece speaks the prescription out loud – Digital Marketing (or ‘DM’).
I’m going to detail an overview of how it helps repair businesses of all sizes scale – complete with three actionable pointers.
So let’s go.
A Basic DM Overview – for those who know not!
In a nutshell, DM entails the use of online channels that are:
- Free/Organic (SEO, Social Media)
- Paid (Multi-Platform Ad Campaigns),
using a variety of content formats, including:
- Text (Blogs, AdCopy, Whitepapers, etc.)
- Multimedia (Videos, Podcasts, GIFs, Still Graphics, etc.)
to promote a brand’s product/service wares to defined audiences.
This is the ‘executions’ bit of the trade. It further concerns the guidelines for content production. A simplistic rubric for this proceeds, thus:
👉 To produce content that is engaging, comprehensible, and business-goals fulfilling!
Then we come to the ‘operational’ part of the affair. Here, the digital marketer uses data and other insights to decide on suitable content posting schedules. The idea is to maximize content-audience engagement – the harbinger of sales.
In today’s congested (if not contested) online space, marketers have got to get all these issues right to score qualified (paying) attention. And they have to do good the first time they shoot an outreach. Because first impressions count in this business; coloring the customers’ perspective.
Now, based on this outline, low-budget repair business marketers would obviously prefer the organic route. Practice, however, informed by experience, is a killer in this assessment. It instructs the marketer to avoid such fastidiousness. Because it shows that organic campaigns take some time to bear fruit.
Resorting to paid advertisements and promotions offers the fast track to getting noticed. But the thrifty marketeer can only spend so much.
A balance, then, needs to be set. ⚖
Since repair businesses are mostly a B2C affair, their digital marketing efforts are more promotions-oriented.
At this point, I’d like to dispel a certain myth pertaining to repair shop software use:
No – it can’t execute holistic DM campaigns for your repair brand. To date, only business analytics tracking comes as part of the package!
Now, the latter, to be sure, doesn’t come without its fair share of repair shop growth benefits – so you might want to start your marketing journey with a good subscription 👇👇
1. Start with Google CPC/PPC
Being the search engine with the predominant online search market share,
your repair business needs to show up on Google properties. We’ve already discussed how organic campaigns don’t provide immediate results.
Here, the Google Ads platform is your best recourse. Simply register your business with a Gmail account, and choose your preferred digital marketing category.
Based on experience, I’d recommend going the Dynamic Search Ads route. These allow for paid ad postings on Google Search, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. The three Google platforms most visited by users (brand audiences).
Dynamic ad campaigns are also the easiest to set up since they come with a lot of default templates.
Social media ads comprise a common complement (or alternative) to paid ads.
To correctly target relevant audience groupings, these platforms come with a range of filters. These allow for user segmentation: the grouping of people/potential customers per common criteria.
Paid ad campaigns typically yield results – and effective awareness – within a day or two. So they make for the logical ‘first step’ approach.
2. Build a Solid Content Marketing Foundation
This means deciding on your repair brand’s initiated range of suitable content formats. Once done, work up a paid and/or organic postings timetable.
For starters, you might want to invest a lot in video content. Nowadays, short, 1-minute service videos are all the rage in technical circles.
In repair settings, these showcase a business’s proficiency at salvaging broken materials. Distilling full transparency on the minutiae of the trade.
From a marketing standpoint, the professional work screening doled by this content format is both:
- Customer Appeasing
- Customer Appealing
Dishing an opportunity to strike two birds with one stone (as sickening as that sounds 😬).
In a typical content marketing strategy, the full range of social media channels is at the marketer’s disposal. So, it’s good practice to make the most of these offerings.
Other marketing collateral formats, as pointed above, also have a crucial place in this framework.
3. Conduct SEO
Probably the most famous organic marketing strategy, SEO in repair entails:
Optimizing the business website through front-end programming, content, and site architecture-oriented approaches that enable first-page search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
This is followed by ‘off-site’ optimization – where practices like (inbound) link-building come into play.
The modern internet is practically teeming with one SEO tutorial after another; relating its overt and technical processes. So, the industrious repair shop owner can learn the ranking strategies themself.
Another option is to outsource the concern to skilled techs already immersed in the trade. In this case, however, constant oversight becomes necessary; otherwise, goal conversions can suffer. An objective that integrated repair orders software can help to achieve.
Aspirants should note that SEO generally takes time to yield results; and so, in the offing, it has to come supported by adspend.
In the final analysis, what works for marketing one business might not work for another. The best guide here is the discerning repair shop owner’s discretion and market/field understanding; in addition to locally-specific considerations.
Instinct, further, is a good propeller toward the best outcomes.
So, my final piece of experiential advice as I conclude the narration:
Trust its calling – though do verify it through data.
