Every business in every industry faces the same challenge: finding enough customers willing to pay for a product or service to sustain their business. In most cases, the tactics, while difficult, are pretty straight forward; most companies and industries can clearly define a customer and know where to find that customer.
Trucking is a little different.
From Local and Over-the-Road drivers to Carriers and Owner-Operators, finding customers isn’t as simple as searching for “drivers.” This problem is made even more complicated by the shifting physical location of drivers and their equipment.
However, all trucks break down eventually, so how do diesel repair shops make sure that they’re top of mind when that happens?
Today we’re looking at the top three ways you can be ready and first in line to serve your customers when they need it most.
Google Local Listings
Most drivers still find repair shops and other services by searching the web via their tablet or smartphone.
Thankfully, Google is great at serving relevant search results at a hyper-local level. For that reason, any repair shop hoping to get in front of new customers when they’re ready to buy should invest in building a robust Local Listing with Google.
To do this, you can follow these instructions to create and fill out the listing for your business. However, just creating the listing won’t go far enough. Instead, you need to have some activity to “show” Google that your business is trusted and relevant.
Reach out to your loyal customers and see if they would be willing to leave you a review, make sure you remind customers at the time of service to leave reviews, and be sure to check for new reviews regularly and respond to your reviewers often.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is hard. Let’s get that out of the way first.
Sure, you can pay for impressions, but typically those impressions will be lower quality than organic impressions generated when someone searches for you and your business specifically. For that reason, success in paid advertising is all about two things:
- A/B Testing to find the most compelling messaging and visuals.
- Monitoring the cost per acquisition carefully to ensure that customers generated don’t cost more than the revenue (and profit) they provide.
However, paid advertising can be a great way to inexpensively stay top of mind for your local customers. Sometimes the benefits of advertising are less tangible than cost per acquisition. In many cases, there’s inherent value to simply being seen often so that your name and brand are top of mind when the need for a repair shop arises.
TruckerBux
We’re biased, but we believe that using TruckerBux is one of the best ways for you to drive new business directly to your shop.
With TruckerBux, you can set up your profile, list your services and service area, and get notified when a driver is stranded inside of your service area. You can then submit a quote, get directions for on-site repairs, and even invite and assign your service technicians to jobs within the app.
Sound expensive? It’s not. TruckerBux only makes money when you do. Our system charges a service fee which covers your account, the leads you get, and the world class fraud prevention we include with every transaction courtesy of Stripe. Don’t worry about losing your hard earned money due to credit card fraud. TruckerBux, and it’s partnership with Stripe, have you covered.
You only pay when you win new business and we’re expanding our network of drivers and carriers all the time. Rest assured that we’re creating a new way to repair and get paid that is revolutionizing the trucking and service industries.
Get started driving new leads to your repair shop by clicking here. Signing up is completely free and you can get help from a real person if you have any questions.