How to use PPC to connect with potential garage customers
Take a look at how building a PPC campaign can help you to connect with potential customers
Published: 27 January, 2021
Over recent years, we've seen a shift in the aftermarket, where newer, more sophisticated cars are becoming increasingly complex for professionals carrying out repairs. This has meant that garages looking to adapt to these new conditions have been required to invest in the latest equipment to ensure they can keep up with the demand for more intricate jobs.
For many businesses, we've also seen a move away from the traditional static local customer base, with savvy car owners willing to travel further for high quality repair work. So, it's understandable that many garage operators might be looking to capture this growing market, attracting a wider client base that could lead to increased ROI and an opportunity to expand operations.
With this in mind, it may well be the case that you're looking for the best ways to attract a wider audience to your garage. Pay-per-click (PPC) adverts are very well suited for targeting users who are searching for a particular product or service, and they could be the key to a successful marketing campaign. Here, I'm going to share a few tips on using PPC adverts to connect your auto-repair business with new customers.
Read up on PPC before you get started
Before you dive into the world of PPC, it's important to do some research. In a nutshell, pay-per-click ads are those sponsored results that appear on search engine results pages and sometimes in other locations. Text ads are likely to be most suitable for a garage business, which allow you to focus on specific phrases relevant to your business. You place a bid to appear for certain user searches, but don't pay the platform for the ad unless the user clicks through. By choosing the right keywords, they allow you to target the exact audience you're looking for, while allowing you precise control over your budget for bidding. I highly recommend you find a good introductory guide, such as this one from HubSpot, to get up to speed: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ppc
Choose where to advertise
There are a few options when it comes to PPC advertising, including Google, Bing, and Facebook ads, though Google Ads is by far the dominant market and where most businesses start their campaigns. The sheer volume of traffic available through Google means that you can find an audience for almost any niche you wish to advertise in and there is the potential for lots of conversions to be won via keywords with high commercial intent. However, it is possible to have success on other platforms, so it may be a case of trying out different options until you find one that proves fruitful.
Brainstorm and refine your keywords
To target the right audience with the right services in your PPC ads, you'll need to carry out in-depth research to identify the keywords you'll be bidding on. It can really help to define what you want out of the campaign from the start, so think about what aftermarket services you want to push and what services are your most popular or provide the greatest ROI. Then, think about what your customers will be likely to search to find those services to create your seed keyword list.
Once you have a list of seed keywords, you can begin to refine them using a tool like Google Ads Keyword Planner or SEMrush, which will give you accurate data on their search volumes, keyword difficulty, and their cost per click. You can also use the 'related keywords' search function these tools offer to see if there are any phrases you've overlooked.
In addition, you can check whether there are any phrases that are considered related but are likely to be a mismatch if your ad shows up for them. These can be a money sink, because if a user clicks through but finds your page is not what they're looking for, they will bounce, and your budget will be wasted. If you identify these phrases, you can add them to your campaign as negative keywords, and your adverts will not appear.
Look at what your competitors are doing
Do you know of any other garages that are having success thanks to their online marketing? Then they might have set up a good PPC campaign that's worth looking closely at to see if there's room to replicate their success or find a gap that they've missed.
There are specialist tools that can help you analyse PPC performance of other webpages — Neil Patel has a good round-up here — https://neilpatel.com/blog/25-sneaky-online-tools/ — but you can also use the keyword planners I mentioned previously to get an insight into what paid search terms your competitors are ranking for.
Set your budget
One of the advantages of PPC advertising is that you can exercise a great deal of control over your budget, allowing you to decide how much you want to bid for each keyword and set a cap on the total amount you want to spend in a week or month. This means that you can set yourself a budget and be sure that you won’t find you've overspent later.
When it comes to setting your limits, it's worth taking a look at Search Engine Journal's PPC budget and bidding guide — www.searchenginejournal.com/ppc-guide/budgets-bidding — to find out exactly how much you should be willing to spend per click.
Write a great PPC advert
Once you've chosen your keywords and decided how much you're bidding, it's time to write a great PPC advert. Now, your space is very limited in one of these ads, and you will only have limited room for headlines, description lines, and your URL. That's why you need to focus on making the copy as succinct but impactful as possible to attract those click throughs.
You'll need to start with the nucleus of your ad, which is the keyword you want it to appear for, but be careful to introduce it naturally in a way that doesn't sound spammy. This should not be that hard if you have chosen a good, relevant phrase to describe what's being advertised. You'll also want to include at least one USP in the advert to make your services stand out from the crowd. Whether this is a free initial estimate, guaranteed turnaround time on repairs, or something else, is up to you.
Finally, you will want to end with a good call to action, which is a phrase that pushes the user to click on your advert. To have the most impact, choose words that promote action like ‘get’ or ‘find out’, value words like ‘free’, ‘save’, or ‘best’, and those that are personal like ‘you’ and ‘your’.
Conclusion
By following my advice here, you should be able to set up a solid PPC campaign to connect your garage with a wider customer base. Remember, if you're not hugely confident in approaching tech-focused activities yourself, you can always get advice from an expert, like a digital marketing firm.
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- Communicating essentials
We all know customers are one of the key elements of any thriving garage business and if you do not keep them satisfied, they will simply go elsewhere for the services you provide. It is a simple fact, but one that is so often overlooked by businesses up and down the country and the people who work within them.
Everyone within your garage has a critical role to play in delivering excellent customer service. There are many distractions that get in the way of us providing a positive experience to customers, as I like to call it; ‘An Experience’.
I regularly witness employees not understanding customer perceptions, and people who are placed into reception roles who do not possess the necessary skills and ability to qualify and deal with a customer from start to finish. Worse than that the processes within the business are inadequate which does nothing to assist these poor folks.
We should all realise the importance of building long-term relationships with customers, understanding what many business commentators call the lifetime value of a customer, after all without them the business does not exist.
Motivation
If we are going to provide an exceptional service to our customers, we first need to understand what their motivation is in dealing with us in the first place. Some buy because they find your price to be the lowest, some because they find your services to be outstanding, while some purchase from you because of your reputation in the garage industry. By understanding our customers, we are better placed to deal with their needs in an effective manner that meets with their core requirements.
But most of all, customers buy your services because of the perception of value that it gives them. However, it’s much more difficult in our garage sector as most if not all purchases are distressed sales, they are needs rather than wants and that’s why I focused so much on giving my customers a positive unmatched experience they’ve never had before.
Journey
Aside from understanding the wants and needs of our customers, it is also useful to understand the journey they take. My skill-set allowed me to value stream the processes of the customer journey from phone call to handing back the keys examining the non-value time and processes which helped us identify the danger points and start to plan how best to serve the customer for their needs not ours.
Now to keep it simple, I focused on six parts of the customer journey:
- Pod life...
Driven by the change in the way people consume television programmes, which has seen a significant shift to on-demand services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and BBC iPlayer, the country’s listening habits are being transformed.
Until the recent stay-at-home warnings, the number of people listening to live radio had been dropping and is expected to do so again once the Coronavirus crisis has passed. Conversely, those choosing to listen to podcasts has increased significantly, with the latest RAJAR data reporting almost a quarter of 15 to 34-year-olds now listen regularly to podcasts.
A podcast is a set of digital audio files that are made available on the internet for people to listen to immediately or download for later use. Users can subscribe to specific podcasts to ensure they receive it as soon as a new one is uploaded.
The biggest brands in the world, like Jaguar Land Rover, Nike and Microsoft understand the power of branded podcasts, but regardless of the size of a business, podcasts are a great way to communicate your value proposition to an engaged and captive audience.
This on-demand format reflects the growing trend amongst the public and lets brands tell their story anywhere, anytime.
For a small garage owner with local clients, there may not be an urgent need for a high-quality global podcast in normal circumstances, however, the current coronavirus crisis has caused uncertainty for businesses of all sizes.
This uncertainty has led to a slowdown in business, with many workplaces temporarily closing their doors to adhere to the government’s social distancing measures.
During this period, it’s crucial that garage owners maintain their existing relationships and communicate frequently with customers, offering advice or guidance to those who need it most. For this reason, podcasts could be an effective way of keeping in touch with clients, allowing them to take information from podcast episodes and feedback on posts with further mechanical questions.
Once you get started, you may find that the podcasts are offering value as a separate forum to promote your business and it could be an idea you want to maintain when business eventually returns to normal.
Businesses now use podcasts for a variety of purposes, including sharing information about new products, company news or general information related to the sector in which they operate and even information aimed only for the ears of their employees.
Incorporating podcasts into your marketing strategy offers numerous benefits for your business and there’s never been a better time to get started.
Your podcast is the opportunity for you to demonstrate, then share your experience and expertise to listeners. Traditionally, you may have relied on the written word, but podcasts are a better way to show your true personality and enthusiasm for what you do.
Regular podcasts offering information, opinion and new ideas for discussion help establish you and your business as a leading authority, to be trusted by customers and new prospects alike. Inviting similar respected individuals from within your business or from across your sector to help create the podcasts, will only add to your credibility and generate further trust from the audience, whilst expanding the number of likely listeners.
Building a stronger connection
Hearing people present sector news or discussing topics creates a stronger connection with the audience than them simply reading the information on a web page. When your podcasts are regular, listeners recognise your voice and presentation style, hopefully finding it a pleasant experience.
Listening to you explain in person helps the audience better understand your values and the way you run the business. You become a companion voice, a source for interesting news to be listened to whilst they undertake other tasks; unlike video or reading, which requires their undivided attention. If you’re good, there is the added benefit of your podcast being recommend to others who may be interested in what you have to say and sell.
In a survey conducted with 300,000 podcast listeners in the US, around 63% of respondents indicated they had bought what the host had been promoting, which demonstrates the power of podcasts to positively influence the buying decisions of the audience.
A podcast may be relatively easy to produce, but the content is critical to the success and longevity of your activity. The mechanics are easy enough, requiring just a good microphone connected to your computer to make the recording and a way of editing the finished sound files. However, while it is often lauded as a DIY project, it is easy to make a podcast that only you want to listen to and professional producers will enhance the quality of the output considerably.
The producer is also helpful for handling the transition between speakers, asking the questions, requesting clarification of unclear points or jargon and ultimately editing the hours of chat into a professional and efficient 25-minute sector-specific podcast that thousands will enjoy. The content can cover current events, changes in the sector, news specific to your business, a discussion around sector-specific topics, trends, legislation etc., but it must be interesting to the target audience and delivered in short sections.
Thirty minutes on a single topic might bore the average listener, it’s easy to break the topic up into pieces and deliver several podcasts that revisit the subject. It’s also good to point listeners to your website if you have more detail on a topic, like a guide or catalogue they can download.
You don’t have to be funny or try hard to entertain. You just need to use your experience and imagination to deliver short bursts of interesting chat or discussion, in a professional manner, with the content tailored to your audience. The more you do, the easier it will become. Once finished, you can start promoting your podcast to increase its exposure to a larger audience. You would need to make the podcasts available on a variety of distribution channels, or enlist the help of a podcast producer, who will know the best channels to choose.
If you want to talk in detail about sensitive information only for your employees, perhaps explaining strategic decisions, or current lockdown policy, a private podcast can be created and a link emailed to specific recipients - it can be password protected if necessary.
And finally
Podcasts can be a uniquely spontaneous, informal and intimate medium, perfect for delivering important insight with emotion, warmth and passion for a topic.
It’s not all about well-edited scripts or carefully crafted questions, but about researching the topics carefully, agreeing what’s to be covered and then talking with friends as you would in the pub, not the boardroom – it’s where the authenticity comes from.
Everyone involved can be in a separate location, which at the time of writing makes podcasts the perfect tool for bringing people together to create memorable content that an engaged audience will find truly valuable.
