Video Transcription (Edited):  What worked for automotive repair shop marketing in 2016?  The things I think that worked in 2016 are going to carry forward in 2017 with even more momentum.

A lot of the things we are applying for our clients, we look to outside of the automotive industry, we look at what is working for digital marketing as a whole, for sales and also for connecting traditional marketing to digital marketing.

One of the things we have seen that have worked very well for our clients in 2016 is moving budget from Google AdWords to Facebook Ads. By Facebook Ads, I do not mean boosting a post; I mean creating an audience. An audience can be previous website visitors, your existing customers or big data sets. They are being pulled into Facebook where it is essentially the same thing that we use for a direct mail campaign. Also, we are targeting vehicle owners; if they bought the car new or used, and then continuing from there. These are things that we would not even talk about with direct mail campaigns, where we have in the market for auto services. We can also do things like household income geographic area. I mean, you name it, the sky's the limit. In digital marketing as a whole, there are people that are targeting 30-year-olds with mustaches that live in a geographic area that buys shaving products. I mean, it’s kind of ridiculous when you think about it but then you have companies like Dollar Shave that are building nationwide brand entities off of this kind of marketing. Facebook marketing is extremely important that you look it if you are not doing it. Also look at it from a much more holistic approach than just boosting a post. We can dive in further to everything else that can be accomplished by loading your existing customer list into facebook and building a “like” audience to them. We talk about things like taking your top 20% of your customer base, building a “like” audience to them and looking at that for customer acquisition, which is so very effective.

Some things with SEO that we have been doing are in response to some changes that have happened with Google over the past by looking at local SEO and focusing on reviews. I dive into that a little bit more in another video. But really focusing on reviewing generation, cross promoting those reviews, and creating content for your Google My Business page. Facebook is becoming a more important entity and there are a lot of local searches that occur on Facebook.

Also, stopping focusing on syndication which I said has been going away a long time ago. If you are not going to generate real content about your business, do not hire people to write blog content for you, do not use stock video, and do not use stock content because you are just syndicating a whole library of content on your website. I think that some of those things we have seen are kind of on the downcline. We have seen video marketing to be a very, very important thing as we move forward, specifically, generating video content. We have some examples of client videos that with a very low budget and a very low barrier of entry to record that content is starting to develop a real voice for your business and show the company brand and company culture. I think what is going to be effective in 2017, is getting away from the things that make our industry not interesting, that people do not want to engage with us and focusing more on the people and the culture and the community involvement. These are a lot of the things we have been talking about for quite some time but we are now leveraging some of the new tools that are available for digital marketing to accomplish that.

These are just a couple things that I thought have been really effective in marketing in 2016. Obviously, some of the basic mechanics of search engine optimization are with just with a fast, responsive website. We still have a lot of shops out there with outdated websites, they are not mobile responsive, they do not show your company branding on them, and have a lot of stock photography. Those are the things that as we have watched clients move to, kind of rebrand themselves, and really breathing new life into their brand by you know though just a simple website refresh, which is a very cost effective thing to accomplish.

Then the last thing that worked in 2016 is the birth of the Auto Shop Growth Mastermind with our first meeting in early 2017. This is a new type of concept of problem-solving and focusing on each individual business in the group and developing that peer group. The group is not focused on marketing but rather it is focused on the business as a whole. We are solving the problems that we are all facing at times and that other people in our peer group have solved and leveraging them as that collective brain. This is one more thing that really worked in 2016, getting that off the ground. Our members, the people that have attended, I think really saw the benefit of that and in 2017 it’s going to be really big.