For getting a broken windshield repaired, customers have many options now. The chances of your business to keep growing depends on how well you manage the marketing of your auto glass business. The auto glass marketing ideas presented here are hand-picked ways that can enable your business to get seen and approached by more customers. These marketing strategies are:
1) Get the Perfect Start With a Conversion-Friendly Website
In order to grow your auto glass customer base, one of the most crucial steps is to build an online representation of your offline business in the form of a website. This is due to the fact that there is a significant increase in the number of consumers searching for goods and services online before making a purchase. A great advantage offered by a website is that your auto glass business can expand its geographical scope very easily due to it being available on the world wide web (WWW). Some tips and tricks to get the best possible returns from your auto glass website include:
a) Enable easy navigation across different sections on your website. Also, add a feature for your site visitors to get a free quote on the estimated service cost based on the photo/video of their auto glass problems sent to you.
b) On the header/top section of your website’s homepage, display your contact information (phone number and email) for providing quick access to your auto glass business.
c) Testimonials play a good role in building user confidence in your business, so display them on the homepage of your site.
d) Website design issues can cause your site’s resolution to distort on different device types (mobile, tablet, desktop), so test if your site is optimized to perform well on mobile devices.
e) Take a site loading test online and optimize it if the score is less than 95% because slow-loading sites lose visitors.
f) Media coverage, awards, accomplishments, etc should get displayed on your website.
2) Promote Your Auto Glass Business with a Press Release
Publishing a press release can bring more exposure to a company or business online. It doesn’t take long for a press release about your business to start showing up on hundreds of websites after distribution. The mass distribution of a press release leads to a quick traffic spike along with generating many quality links for your website. Since press releases tend to rank well for search terms with low competition levels, they can also be systematically used to grow traffic to your auto glass business by consistently targeting low-competition keywords related to your business. Finally, the end results that you get from the press release will be largely dependent on your choice of the distribution network that you select for distributing your press release.
3) Get More Customers With More Content
Growing the content on your auto glass website will cause your website to be shown in search engines more frequently. This is because, with more content, search engines can display your website for a much bigger range of keywords than they are showing currently. This process is guaranteed to cause a hike in the number of visitors to your website which is an essential determining factor in increasing sales for your auto glass business. Therefore, the significance of content marketing to the expansion of your business becomes readily apparent. You can begin searching and writing blog posts on a wide range of subjects that your potential customers might type on Google for availing local auto glass repair services. If this process of content marketing is followed for a few months, organic traffic (and hence sales) from search engines is sureshot to take positive growth.
4) Optimize Google My Business (GMB) for More Leads
To better serve users looking for city- or town-specific searches, Google displays a set of three local businesses in the “local pack” at the top of the first page results. Getting into this pack means more leads and more sales for your auto glass repair business. To get into this pack, you will have to make a Google My Business (GMB) page first succeeded by good optimization of your GMB profile. As some complexity is involved in optimizing GMB, a much better choice would be to utilize the services of any qualified online marketing firm.
5) Get Displayed for Local Auto Glass Search Terms on Google
SEO or search engine optimization is a definite way to ensure that your auto glass website enjoys top rankings in Google and in turn, brings more visitors and sales. Since most people, while searching for products and services on Google rarely go to page 2 and beyond, utilizing proper SEO techniques becomes very vital for the visibility of your business on search engines. Learning about and putting into practice the finest SEO practices has never been simpler because there is an abundance of freely available information online on this topic. Hiring an SEO agency could better help with SEO because they have much more experience and they are more aware of the latest changes in SEO.
6) Social Media Can Socialize Your Business Even More
If your business doesn’t ride on the social media wave at a time when billions of people are on social media, your business will miss a great opportunity to promote itself. It takes more than just having a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account in order to see positive outcomes from social media marketing of your auto glass business. To get at least a few thousand people to follow your business profiles on social media, you will have to put in some preliminary effort. These efforts will be in form of consistently sharing good content, making connections with others, interacting on different topics, making contacts with influencers, participating in local groups, etc. The services of social media marketing agencies can also be availed if you don’t have enough time to manage this process yourself.
7) Grow With Auto Glass Ads Online
Making use of paid promotion on Google and Facebook can lead to the quick growth of your customers. However, just running ads without proper optimization and management is sure to provide poor results or even a negative return on your ad spend. So learn the ad basics for these two platforms before starting paid advertising. To skip the daily tracking and management of paid ads, you can use the services of any good ad agency.
8) Connect With and Utilize Local Influencers
Increasing expenditure on influencer marketing by businesses gives a clear indication of its effectiveness. By doing a basic search, you will easily discover many local influencers (people commanding a large following on social media) who are interested in business collaborations. So select a few good influencer profiles from your region and approach them with your offer. As the recommendations given by these influencers are seen with a greater level of trust by their followers, your business can definitely benefit from promotions done by these influencers.
9) Make More People Refer Your Business
Referred customers are more likely to become repeat customers and this is why you must not ignore referral marketing. The simplest approach to accomplish referral marketing is to reward your existing customers who introduce your auto glass business to their friends, relatives, and family. You can hand out rewards to the referring people in the form of coupons, referral codes, gifts, vouchers, etc. Within a span of a few months of starting referral marketing, you will notice a significant rise in the number of new customers.
10) Start Giving Away Inexpensive Items
Do you want to leave your clients with a lasting impression of your business? If so, gift them some custom-printed inexpensive goods! This low-cost merchandise (such as balloons, pencils, pocket diaries, etc) with your company’s name printed on them are very easy to procure due to the presence of several sites online that provide bulk custom printing service. Since there is a utility value attached to these products, people will use these products for some time as a result of which they will be exposed to your business name being printed on these items.
11) Use Email Marketing for More Sales
If a visitor lands on your website and you fail to capture his/her email address, then you will just have one chance to convert that visitor into a customer. However, if you become successful in gaining the email address of your site visitors, you can have multiple chances to convert the visitor into customers because now you can contact and persuade such visitors through email communication. In order to ensure that more people visiting your site would leave their email addresses on opt-in forms placed on your website, provide some good incentives like coupons, add-on services, etc. Having a good targeted email list can enable you to increase the frequency of sales/orders per customer.
12) List Your Auto Glass Business on Directories
There was a time when directories used to rank very high on Google. Even though the power of directories has largely been eroded in the past few years, there are some directories still left that enjoy high ranking and traffic from search engines. A few great examples that you might be familiar with are Homeadvisor, Yelp, etc. All it takes is a few minutes of your time to create a free business listing on these directories in order to get extra traffic and leads from search portals.
13) Video Marketing is Good for Business Growth
Videos have a very strong influence on enhancing the decisions of people. Further videos that get posted to Youtube gain a significant benefit in the form of faster ranking on the search engine Google. To have more of your videos rank powerfully on Youtube and Google, focus on creating videos for underserved keywords and questions related to your auto glass business. The more videos you upload to YouTube for such underserved keywords, the more easily you will gain quick rankings and consequently views and leads through your videos. So consistency is the key here, hence continue to create quality videos and you will definitely reap the immense benefits through video marketing.
14) Market Offline
Online marketing has eased out many things, yet offline marketing still holds its place. For local-level marketing, offline marketing methods can drive more or less similar results to online marketing. Despite the fact that you have to shell out more money for offline advertising, they are used to provide more reach and enable consistent branding across both offline and online modes. The most commonly used offline marketing methods are billboard advertisements, flyers, banners, and ads in newspapers.
15) Fully Utilize Reviews for Business Growth
Work on increasing positive reviews of your business online and you will soon find that more people are choosing your auto glass business over your competitors. This is the power of reviews. They are the new hallmark for social proof and any business that becomes successful in establishing its trustworthiness through positive reviews online gets rewarded in the form of more customers and more revenue. Keep the link to your “Google Business Profile” page ready and start sending it over email or text to all your customers for getting reviews. This will help you to gain reviews much faster than it would have been otherwise.
16) Hold Photo Contests and Get More Recognition
While getting a crack in the glass window of a vehicle is a bad experience for any vehicle owner. You can get creative with this and can hold a contest on Instagram where users will submit their cracked vehicle glass photos in order to be able to get some or the other rewards. This way you can attract many leads from your region along with making your business popular.
17) Send Letters of Appreciation and Text Greetings to Old Customers
Create a record of the services provided to your customers and on the same date next year, send a text message or letter of appreciation to your customers for availing of your service. This will help to maintain a good relationship with your customers and can cause more referrals from these customers.
18) Make Use of Safety Events and Seminars
Attend or even host all road and vehicle-related safety events/seminars and explain the importance of fixing broken windshields soon. If you would like to host such seminars, you can tie up with other related but non-competitive businesses to lower the cost of hosting and promoting such events.
19) Participate in Community and Events
Make your active presence at all big local events and hand out your business cards or reserve a booth at such events to promote your auto glass repair service. You can also distribute some free merchandise at such events to get your business noticed and remembered by more people.
20) Partner with Relevant Businesses
Reach out to all those businesses that have many vehicles and may require auto glass-related services from time to time. These businesses can be car rental services, used car dealers, auto body workshops, auto customization workshops, etc. You can also ask car mechanics, and car wash services to refer your auto glass business to those people whose vehicle glasses are damaged.
21) Publish Articles in Local Newspapers and Get More Recognition
Come up with articles on vehicle and road safety and approach editors of local newspapers to get them published. By contributing articles for local newspapers, your business will get more authority and recognition from people and this will surely have a positive impact on your auto glass business too.
22) Utilize Vehicle Wraps Creatively
Get creative and eye-catching pictures of cracked or broken windshields/autoglass and wrap them on your vehicles along with mentioning your business details on them. You can also get such advertising done on other vehicles by paying them some monthly commissions. These vehicles will carry your advertising on road and will help to get more eyeballs to your business.
23) Get More with Add on Services
A good way to earn more revenue from your customers is by increasing the scope of your business through add-on services. You can tie up with a car wash business, car repair business, etc, and can refer your customers to them for getting extra commissions from these customers referred by you to other businesses. If you have some extra space left in your premises, you can utilize it to offer some closely related services related to your business to get more sales.
24) Use Free or Heavily Discounted Services for More Growth
You can provide minor services related to vehicles free of cost or at very nominal prices to set your auto business apart from your competitors. These services can be minor paint touch up for scratches, free filling of tires, etc.
25) Offer Free Pick Up and Drop off Vehicles
You can offer free pick up and drop off vehicles to provide more convenience to your customers and also to boost positive word of mouth about your auto glass business. All a customer needs to do is to contact you on the phone to get his/her auto glass repaired and your business will handle the rest.
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