When someone gets into any situation that causes their car window or windshield to get cracked, they know they must contact a service provider to repair or replace it, the only question is, how can you make them call your auto glass business and not Safelite or any 10s of other business that offer similar services.
Let’s take a second here to analyze the set-by-set process potential customers go through before they make a call and book a service. Usually, the first step would be to take out their smartphone and search for “auto glass repair”. On which search engine? Most of them would search on Google (Google is dominating the market with nearly 78% of the market share, the other 22% goes to Bing, Facebook, and other small search engines). After they type in the keywords, the search engine will get them to a search results page that contains multiple auto glass service websites, business directory listings, landing pages or business pages. The next step for them is to choose the specialist they like the most and call for help.
So, what have we learned here? 1. The auto glass industry is an emergency “need now” industry. Customers who search for auto glass services, most probably need an auto glass professional urgently. 2. Most customers search for auto glass professionals online before deciding and calling. Therefore, it is safe to say that no successful auto glass business can neglect the digital scene and their online presence. Thus, you need to make sure you are always available where / when customers are looking. In this article, we will cover the marketing steps you need to take to refine and perfect your online presence and make your phone ring, every single time!
Claim Your Business on Citation Sites
Local citations are online listings of business information. Local business listings typically contain the name of your business, your address, and your phone number. These listings are designed to help local potential customers find relevant details about a business in their area. As we already saw the way to generating auto glass leads is through the first result page of the various search engines. But how do we do it? One of the easiest ways to get there is through business directories. First, it’s completely free. All you need to do is go to local business directories, like Yelp, Google My Business, or Friendly.biz, claim your listing, update your business information, add some pictures, and boom you are done. In 2021 almost 40% of the auto glass jobs are booked on citations like these. As a bonus, once you claim your listing on these directories, Google is notified, and gives you extra points and puts your own website higher in organic search results. In Friendly.biz, you get a free priority listing just by claiming your business.
Paid Marketing – The Best Platforms to Advertise Auto Glass Businesses
When it comes to auto glass it’s important to understand that many of the jobs have a sense of urgency. A person stuck in the middle of the road with an entirely broken windshield, or another who needs to take their kids to school on a cold day, but their car windows are broken. These types of customers will need to get the service on the same day, or at least the next. From our experience on Friendly, most of the emergency jobs come from Google and Bing searches, and this is what makes these two platforms our best choices of advertising for auto glass companies.
Here is what you should expect in terms of paid advertising for auto glass industry:
- Every 2-3 clicks will bring you a valid call.
- Every 2 calls are equal to a booked job.
How much will it cost you? It depends, but anything under $20 for a quality lead would be a good value for your marketing budget.
Hire The Right Marketing Help
If you’ve been managing your auto glass business for a long time, you’d have probably already tried to work with different marketing agencies or even tried your hand at advertising your business yourself. If this is the case, then you know how hard, time consuming, and frustrating this can be. When every day a new marketing tool or platform is hitting the market, it’s hard to keep up without any professional help. So why not just get a marketer to do it. This will save you time and money. Not just that but also help you make more money!
But how to choose the right kind marketer?
Here are some tips to keep in mind:
- Make sure your marketer is familiar with the industry.
- Ask them what their marketing strategy is and see if it matches your goals.
- Ask them if they already managing auto glass advertising campaigns for other clients.
- Share with them your expectation and see how they can deliver.
- Take your time before you choose, it’s one of the most important business decisions you will have to make.
How much should you pay your marketer?
Although there are several paying models in the industry, the two that stands out, are flat fee and percentage of marketing budget.
Flat fee – the agency tells you upfront what fee they will charge each month (usually there is a ratio between the marketing budget and the asking fee).
Percentage of the spending budget – the agency charges a certain percentage from your marketing budget. The prices in the auto glass industry are somewhere between 15-30% of the budget.
As part of our service for our auto glass clients on Friendly.biz, we provide a dedicated marketing team, who will first perform the research necessary and build a tailor-made marketing plan based on the specific services, promotions, and geolocation of the business.
Marketing Budget
The main absolute rule is that every auto glass business must allocate some funds for marketing. But of course, not everyone can afford to spend thousands of dollars each month on advertising. We suggest to all our clients to start with a relatively small budget, that they feel comfortable with, anywhere from several hundred up to 2 thousand dollars. After a certain period, when you will have the chance to evaluate the results of your marketing, you can raise the budget step by step. Please remember these dollars you spend on marketing are what make your phone ring.
Track Your Marketing Results
After all this hard work, refining your online presence, finding the right marketing agency, building your marketing strategy, and allocating the budget, it’s finally time to track the results. To do this, you should ask your marketer to send you a detailed report at the end of each month, that will include the exact number of phone calls and form submissions that they generated for you. Once you have the report, you can make the calculation and understand what the revenue is for your business from this marketing activity and decide if it makes sense for you to proceed with investing more money into it. With Friendly, we provide our clients with a call tracking software and full report system on all their activities. Where they can measure their marketing performance at any time. On top of that, they’re able to access all call recordings to improve on dispatch quality.
Bonus Tip: Build a Converting Website
Remember your website is the face of your business for potential customers, and first impressions are always important. These potential customers don’t know who you are, they’ve probably never heard the name of your brand, so the only way for them to evaluate if you are the person for the job is through your website. Imagine the situation, you claimed your business on citation sites, you paid top dollar for a good marketing campaign, brought the lead to your website, and…nothing. You see them just clicking the back arrow and choosing another service provider. This is just one of many scenarios of losing potential customers because you don’t have the right website.
So, keep this in mind!
- Keep your website modern, clean, and simple.
- Mobile responsivity – 70% of the searches are made from cell phones. Make sure the mobile version of your website is user-friendly and looks as good as the desktop one if not better.
- Speed, speed, speed – every additional second of loading time will drop the conversion rates of your website by 10%.
To recap, the most important thing is to claim your listings and to ensure potential customers can easily find accurate information about your business. Generating leads is easy, it’s the steps you take before that counts!
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Use subject: Auto Glass