What is guerrilla marketing?
Innovative, unconventional, and low-cost marketing techniques aimed at obtaining maximum exposure for a product.
The 8 Advertising Ideas for Auto Repair Shops we have shared are all pretty main stream and should all be part of your core shop marketing plan. If you don’t have a repair shop marketing plan and budget yet, get working on that now. With a little twist or expansion on some of them you can make your marketing a little different from every other car repair shop in town.
Bumper stickers
Assuming your logo has your name and what you do on it, you have a easy way to build brand awareness. Get some small bumper stickers created with your logo on and give them out to anyone who will put one on their car. The wording is important, having your phone number on there is not. You need to build brand awareness, no one remembers a phone number that is on a sticker but they may remember the logo and the company name.
Window Clings
Not everyone wants to put a sticker on their paint job, so offer a window cling for their rear window instead.
Treasure Hunt
Give clues out on your Facebook page, on your website, in your shop and at your favorite local charity shop. Maybe even tie it in with a local event, a baseball game for instance, so the team get the benefit of more visitors. Everyone who gets all the clues or stamps on a card and brings them to the shop gets entered into a draw for $500/$1000 of credit at your shop.
Invite Local Radio
Invite the local radio for the day of the draw, you may even get the local TV along if you make the day special enough.
This project may sound expensive (how small an ad would $1k get you in the yellow pages?) or time consuming, but the ROI can be enormous if you do the work to build some buzz. The planning and work will be spread over a couple of months, but having people visit your social media, your website and your shop and seeing you help local business will build your brand awareness.
Having them visit a charity shop is good for the shop and good for your reputation as a giving business owner. Make sure that you take lots of photos of the whole process and share them on social media, especially the winner. Tag the winner on Facebook so all their friends and family see their photo and of course see your shop name and your smiling face with them.
Make the treasure hunt an annual thing and build ongoing buzz. The second year you can start building buzz earlier and maybe bring in some other local business owners to work with. Out of all the Auto Repair Shop Advertising Ideas shared here today this is the most work, but could easily be the most fun and build the most buzz.
Smaller stickers
Put your company sticker on laptop cases that you carry and anything else that people may see
Where to get stickers of all types and sizes – Sign up at Sticker Mule and look out for their special offers
Community Day
Speak to the local fire and police department, will they work with you to have a day where you check car seats for free, maybe have some exotic cars on location for the day and everyone knows kids love a police car or a fire engine. The benefit of this to you is that every car seat that is checked has a mum or dad who drive a car will see just how nice you and all your staff are. It is about raising brand awareness.
Think Different
What can you do that no one else has, what can you do to put your brand in front of every local car driver as often as you can each day? Having your company name on the side of your car is so common now that people ignore it. Unless the car is something special, what can you do to make your company vehicles eye catching?
Ask for Suggestion
Repair shop owners are generally not graduating with marketing degrees, we have shared some great ideas here for both traditional marketing and Guerilla marketing of your repair shop but no one knows everything, so ask. Ask your team for ideas, ask some of the customers who run successful local business’s. You do not have to act on every idea that you get but there is no harm in asking.