If you’re an auto services company that goes through “busy” and “slow” seasons throughout the year, there are a number of things that you have to think about that others with a more consistent income might not.
The first is cash flow management. Obviously, you need to set a budget for low-season months that will hold you over until the busy season arrives. You’ll also probably need to think about staffing flexibility and hiring seasonal workers.
But when that busy season is finally coming up, you need to be prepared to make the most of it. That means your targeted marketing strategies need to kick into high gear as soon as possible.
From a high level point of view, think about preparing your online presence for the busy season the same way you would inventory and parts management for the same period. Obviously, you plan ahead for seasonal spikes by ordering parts and supplies early. You want to make sure you’re not scrambling to keep up during those peak periods. You prepare yourself to prevent overbuying and you do whatever it takes to get the maximum amount of value out of every dollar you’re spending.
Why should your online presence be any different? You can’t wait for the busy season to get here to start telling people more about it. By then, they’re focused on other things.
You need to create anticipation. You need to not just communicate with people – you need to keep in touch with your customer base consistently so that they know what is coming and why they should be paying attention to it. You also need to evaluate your customer needs to make sure that the “busy season” means the same thing to you as it does to them.
Again, all of this is time-consuming when you’re also responsible for running a successful auto services business, but that’s okay. Preparing your online presence for the busy season certainly isn’t impossible, but it will require you to keep a number of important things in mind along the way.
Putting the Busy Season to Work For You
One of the most important things to understand about marketing in general is that you should never put a “plan” in place without having a firm set of goals in mind.
Case in point: just because you’re entering the “busy season” where people are buying houses more often and requiring moving services doesn’t mean your goals will be identical to those of your closest competitors.
Some young businesses that are trying to grow may be trying to build up as many new customers as possible during the busy season. Others may be using it as an opportunity to launch a new service that will (in theory) continue to be popular throughout the year. Others still may just need to adequately communicate helpful educational-based content to their existing, loyal customer base.
Regardless – don’t start with the marketing campaign and work your way back to the goals. Start with the goals and look at what techniques and tactics you’ll need to accomplish them.
Having said that, there are a number of key best practices to keep in mind that can help you develop the strategy you need.
Research Seasonal Keywords
Depending on the area of the country where your auto services business operates, the “busy season” could mean a few different things. Regardless, you should do seasonal keyword research well in advance of when work picks up so you’ve already laid a solid foundation upon which to build from moving forward.
For example, say your auto services business operates in a town where “back to school” season is a big priority each year. Well in advance of August, you would want to research seasonal keywords pertaining to things like car maintenance and preparing college drivers.
Or say you operate in a part of the country that experiences all four seasons and this year is expected to bring with it a particularly devastating winter. You would want to research keywords pertaining to all the winter work that needs to be done to keep cars running safely and smoothly all season long.
The point is that you don’t want to wait for the busy season to arrive and then kick your marketing efforts into high gear – at that point, it’s far too late. You need to lay the groundwork now. Search engine optimization (SEO) in particular doesn’t just turn on a dime – it requires planning. For most businesses, that planning needs to begin with seasonal keyword research.
Create Busy Season-Centric Content
In terms of your larger SEO and marketing strategies, creating timely, relevant content is critically important. If you write a helpful blog post or shoot a video about maintaining your car during the colder winter months and publish it on a warmer day, even still during winter, fewer people are going to notice. You’ll have essentially wasted an opportunity to strike a chord with people. They might find it eventually, but it certainly won’t have helped your larger SEO strategy.
To help with this, you’ll want to analyze Google Trends and similar resources to pay attention to the real conversations that people are already having. What topics are they most concerned about leading up to the busy season? Do you see the same types of questions being asked over and over again? Is there a unique take you can offer, or can you contribute in some way? The answers to questions like these are where your content creation efforts need to begin.
Maybe there’s an auto industry trend that is picking up steam that you can help shed some light on. That’s the type of timely, relevant content that people are actually searching for – and that will help your auto services business’ site rise through the ranks on engines like Google.
A lot of the effort you should be making during this period will also be dictated by the seasonal keyword research you did above. Make a list of five to ten “busy season” keywords and phrases and see if you have a way to incorporate them into something like a blog post or video. You might not be able to contribute to all of them, but the ones that you can will certainly capture the attention of a lot of interested parties in your area.
Note that this does NOT mean you should stop doing local keyword searches during this period. In fact, that needs to really ramp up, too. You should still be incorporating keyword structures like “auto services in [CITY]” into as much of your content as possible, as that is going to attract many of the “auto services near me” searchers that are out there.
But if you can organically work in A) seasonal keywords, and B) local keywords into the same piece of content, you’ve got a recipe for success on your hands. Just don’t try to “stuff” those keywords into what you’re creating or you run the risk of getting penalized on Google. Plus, you’d hate to ultimately have a valuable piece of content buried just because you used a few keywords too many times.
Lean on the Channels That Pivot Quickly
Finally, understand that before and especially during the busy season, your auto services’ business will need to depend on those marketing channels that can pivot quickly. Many people don’t realize that SEO efforts can actually take between three and six months to start seeing a consistent improvement. If you wait to start your busy season marketing a week before the season actually arrives, you may get lucky and be ready for next year, but you certainly won’t do anything to help this one.
You could share teaser posts or videos leading up to the busy season, for example, offering sneak peeks of upcoming promotions or limited-time services like oil change discounts, tire rotations, or holiday tune-up packages.
This can help not only keep your customers informed about what is going on and what they should be thinking about, but it can build a legitimate amount of excitement as well.
You could also use social media to post seasonal tips and education-focused content quickly so that it catches the attention of your audience while they’re in the right mindset. For example, create videos or infographics showing how to properly maintain a car during extreme weather conditions like summer heat or winter cold. Even if you already created this content last year, you could update it slightly and repost it to social media sites like Facebook or Twitter/X. You can’t necessarily re-post it to your website, however.
You could also share reminders for preventative maintenance services like brake checks before road trips, battery checks for winter, and more. Be sure to do this with a focus on why these services are important before the busy season hits.
Plus, anything that you do on social media will also feed into your larger SEO strategy in the long run. Social media attention and activity will take people to your auto services’ business website, which will help with conversions, which will help take care of some of the factors Google accounts for when determining search rankings.
If you’d like to find out more information about preparing your online presence for the busy season, or if you have any additional questions that you’d like to go over with someone in a bit more detail, please don’t hesitate to contact the Surefire Local team today. You can also click here to attend a Surefire Local demo so you can see what an innovative all-in-one marketing platform can do to make the positive impression your auto services business needs during the busy season and beyond.