Car Count Daily
Hi shop owners and welcome to another addition of Car Count Daily. My name is Ron Ipach but you can call me Captain Car Count – because that’s all I’ve done over the past 20 years, is help auto repair shop owners just like you to get and then keep all the top quality customers that your shop can handle.
Now today I want to talk with you a little more about marketing budgets. Now if you were with me on a previous episode, I talked about marketing budgets and how I feel you should throw them out. You should not have a set amount of money that you are required to spend every month in your marketing.
Sometimes in the summer months you’re naturally busy. You don’t need to spend the money to get more people into your shop. As a matter of fact that might even be bad, you might wind up being too busy during those months and that’s not a good thing. Then like when the kids go back to school, if you’re spending the same amount of money you may not have enough marketing out there to keep your car count as high as you really need it to be.
That’s kind of my argument. Just spend it when you need it but I want to go a little bit further into this to kind of give you a little higher detail in what I’m talking about because technically the time to spend more money is not when you’re in the middle of your slow season and technically the time to spend very little money on marketing is when you’re in a high point. Let me explain what I mean.
When you’re in a high point. Well let me back up a little bit. If you go back and look at your income, your sales over the past let’s say five years and you put it on a graph, you’ll see when your high points are and where your low points are and if you put them on top of each other, you’re going to pretty much see the same thing happening year in and year out. Some months you’re naturally busy, other month’s you’re naturally slow. What we want to do is we want to make sure that we look at this thing and say okay we got to get prepared for that dip because when things start to dip, that’s when you should be spending more money. Not when you’re all the way at the bottom because when you’re at the bottom of that dip you know you don’t have the money. I mean chances are you may have spent all the money that you have just because you have lack of car count during those months.
Let’s just take again the busy summer months. When you’re busy during the summer months it’s not a time to just throw out and don’t do any marketing at all, you need to be prepared to see when that, when you’re at the top of that crest and you’re going to start heading down towards those months where the kids head back to school and everything seems to crash on you a little bit. At that point, just at the peak and you’re just over the peak, that’s where you need to start ramping it up because you don’t want to fall all the way down to the bottom and wind up with very little cars in your shop, so strike when the iron’s hot so that can you carry that momentum a little bit further into the year.
The same thing goes with the slow season. When you’re about ready to go up that, that naturally busy time, that’s the time to actually relax a little bit on the marketing budget. You have to actually go maybe about a month in advance, so if you notice, if you look at your months over the past years you’ll know it, you’ll see it happen over and over and over. You’ll know exactly when it’s time to turn on the marketing and when it’s time to cut it way back based on where you are. Again, spend the most amount of money when you’re heading towards the biggest dip but when you’re at the height. Spend the least amount of money when you’re in the bottom part of the dip and you’re naturally going to ride the wave up a little bit further.
I hope this really helps you so you don’t spend the money at the wrong time because if you spend the money too late, it’s going to be too late to get the car count in that you need and if you spend it too much when you don’t need it, that’s a problem too. This I hope helps and if not, hey ask some questions. Go down below this video. Ask some more questions and I’d be happy to clarify whatever you need down in those comment sections below.
I really enjoy reading everything and thanks for the attaboys that I’m getting and thanks for all the questions. I really enjoy answering those for you.
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