1. To reach out widely enough
2. To reach out frequently enough, and
3. To reach out cleverly enough
    
The first of these is simple enough. A shop may have to expand its advertising and promotion into the next town, community or neighborhood to reach enough prospective customers to grow. In contacting prior customers, a shop may also have to reach more widely back into the past, reconnecting with customers who came to the shop three, four or even five years earlier. Many people only have an accident or damage their vehicle once every three, four or five years.

The second is equally simple, but not often carried out effectively. How often should a shop contact prior customers? How often should a shop promote to prior referral sources? How often should a shop promote to prospective referral sources?

The answer is enough. How much is enough? Enough to provide a continual flow of business into the shop. How often do you get the same junk mail from credit card companies, insurance companies, mortgage companies, etc., etc.? If it weren’t effective to keep sending that junk mail, they would stop doing it. It may seem like a silly rule, but it is a fact that the same message repeated over and over to enough different people will motivate a certain percentage of those people to respond to the message. The larger the number of people contacted – if the percentage remains the same – the total number of people responding will increase accordingly.

The Cleverness Element
The third of this promotional threesome is not as simple as the first two, and many fail to get it right. These days we’re bombarded with TV commercials that make very little sense and hardly seem to relate to the product being sold. We see billboards with great graphic designs and photos, but the name of the product in type so small that near-sighted people like me can’t even tell what they’re selling. There is one simple rule to create an ad or promotion that will catch someone’s attention: Many ads tell you how great their product (or shop) is, but all the buyer cares about is “What’s in it for me?”

These days cost is an important factor for most people. If you’re selling your services directly to the end user – self-pay customers or commercial accounts – you need to emphasize cost savings when dealing with your shop. Even if a customer’s insurance is paying the bill, many people think their insurance fees will go up after an accident. By emphasizing your DRP or special relationship with their insurance company, you may be able to reassure the customer that you provide a cost-savings to his or her insurance company that may be passed on to the customer in the form of reduced premiums.

Another major concern may be trustworthiness and honesty. Some TV newscasters push sensationalist stories about auto shops that rip off customers and fraudulently inflate repair bills. A clever ad may mention this attack and counter it by emphasizing your shop’s relationship with the Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, Autobody Association, and other affiliations with ethical codes. This might be thought of as a “reversal technique” since you wouldn’t be expected to refer to a story that attacks the collision industry.

While these messages are fairly obvious, creative thinkers have come up with some guidelines to help the rest of us create clever promotional messages.