My business partner Marissa has been saying this phrase so much in the last 2 years that it’s become an unofficial tagline of ours: The Internet isn’t going to save you.
It might seem a bit ironic for me to use it as a digital marketer, but it resonates deeply with me. So much so that it will very much be the undercurrent of all the writing I do on this blog.
When we say the Internet won’t save you, we’re not saying to not use it or the resources it provides. The message in that sentence is that the era of the Web as this faucet of new business you can just turn on is firmly over.
In fact, that era probably never was a reality. Sure, it opened the floodgates for so many shops, allowing them to do more business than ever before. However, a lot of us (myself included) misinterpreted it as this new, unending flow that we could always rely on.
We were all so impressed by this new channel that it made us forget about all of the other work we did to sustain it.
The Internet never made your business successful.
It was the way you and your staff answered the phone, it was the great work you turn out, it was about the aftercare services you provided and the brand you built day in and day out through your effort.
The Internet and any channel present on it doesn’t inherently provide more customers than another method. Sure, it has the most potential of any of them right now just by virtue of scale, but nothing online is guaranteeing you more business.
02Going once, going twice.
I’ll use Google Ads because it’s what I specialize in, but this applies to any other paid media. I’ve been buying ads on Google for the better part of fifteen years. It’s a useful tool, but I still hate that it creates a dependency that has killed so many businesses overnight.
The biggest problem with paid ads is that you don’t own any of it. You only get the customer’s information after having paid for it, and you ultimately have no influence over the method to acquire them.
Some people, like me, can see the patterns and learn how to guide the algorithm towards success. But at the end of the day, I always say that paid ads are like an auction house. Google is selling advertising spots on their searches, and whoever will pay the most per click will win.
The other issue with this auction house model is that every new interested buyer drives the price up. In the last year alone, I’ve seen the cost per click of PPF go from $9-10 to nearly $25 in some markets on competitive keywords. This has driven the average price of a quality PPF lead from $80 to nearly $200 in bigger cities.
Depending on your close rate, that means a cost per acquisition or closed lead of up to $900. Do your margins still hold up to that?
And there’s no way to control that. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how optimized your setup is, if the cost of a click goes up, the cost of a qualified lead goes up too.
This is simply the new reality for the foreseeable future. Does that mean paid ads are no longer viable? No, but it definitely means that they’re not for everyone anymore, even if you’re a large established shop.
The standard used to be to optimize the campaigns until the account operates like a formula: If I put $X in, I’ll get this much back in revenue. I’m not sure this kind of promise can still be made anymore apart from a few edge cases.
03When was the last time you spoke to your customers?
“Oh I speak to them every day Max!”, I mean the ones you’ve already closed. Do you have a real customer list, and do you utilize it regularly in a formalized way? I’m sure a lot of you could tell me the name, phone, vehicle, what service, when, what it cost.
But could you tell me why a lead was lost? Or why a customer you won declined one of the services you quoted him? Which ones do you think you could ask for a referral? What do they do for work? I’m sure the amount would drop dramatically.
Automotive restyling has a very defined customer cycle. Your clients might not actually need one of your products for months or years after seeing you, but you have to still stay top of mind.
I know, sounds like a lot of work, but I guarantee you the work you close from that won’t cost you $800. It’ll be done in a more human way. You’ll learn so much about who your customers are along the way.
You’ll be a lot more grounded within your business and community if you start thinking of your marketing that way. (Yes, this is marketing by the way)
04Why does no one do this?
Some shops most certainly do, but they are concerningly few and far between. The reason is simple and complicated at the same time. It’s easy to say “Just reach out to your past customers!”, but without the right setup, it becomes difficult to the point of being unsurmountable.
You need a good CRM, you need staff to use and maintain it correctly, the data stored in it must be accurate and regularly cleaned, and you need the skills to analyze it in order to know what to do next.
Maybe you changed software 2 years ago and some data got lost. Maybe you fell to the all too common habit of the owner who knows everyone and you keep all the information in your head. Or your front of house staff isn’t curious enough to ask questions that would give you valuable data points about your customers.
Marketing to your existing customers sounds like such a simple proposition, but it has so many pitfalls. And most agencies are only incentivized to grow the account they’re responsible for, not the business as a whole.
I don’t think it’s necessarily anyone’s fault, we all just lost track of what really matters in marketing. Everyone decided to take the easy way out with paid ads, and who could blame any of us as long as it was working?
But I’ll be the first one to blame shops who don’t want to recognize that this era is ending.
05What’s next?
So what am I really saying here? That we need to stop doing paid ads? That's not really what I'm saying, right? I'm saying that we need to stop thinking of paid ads as the main source of business.
Paid ads, whether we like it or not, have become a necessary evil. It needs to be a part of your marketing budget. It's what you use to fill the gaps in your calendar, not what you build the shop on. The days where you're going to have the entirety of your marketing strategy within a Google Ads or Meta ads account are gone.
To be honest it was kind of an irresponsible strategy to have to begin with. So many businesses have failed because they relied too much on one marketing channel. That’s been true throughout history, long before the Internet even existed.
Paid ads are perhaps just the worst example of this that's ever existed, because it's not only controlled by money but also by algorithms that are completely out of your control. It was never a good idea to fully rely on it and now it's all coming to a halt.
06The marketing mix
The one thing that everyone in this industry has to start getting comfortable with is something called the marketing mix.
It's a really common term when you go into a large business, but it has a place in smaller ones too. In fact, I think that if any small business wants to become big, they have to start acting like a big one right now.
A marketing mix is really simple: in order to not end up relying too much on one channel, you make a conscious effort to list out all of the different marketing channels that you will be using on a consistent basis.
At the end of every month you grade yourself on your usage of every channel to make sure that you're not overrelying on one or the other. It also keeps you honest with your marketing budget and it makes you realise if you've been getting a little bit too comfortable with one or another, if you've been relying too much on one of them.
What should be present in a marketing mix for an automotive restyling business?
- Organic Search: It’s where almost every buying process begins, and what people find has to be right. Nowadays that doesn’t just mean Google but also LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini.
- Paid Search: Like I said, a necessary evil. Be careful with paid search, it shouldn’t account for more than 20% of your monthly revenue. The reason why is simple: If more than 20% of your revenue depends on paid search and cost per click goes up, you're screwed.
- Paid social: I don’t believe in it for our industry. Low quality leads, low close rate, I’ve yet to see it be worth it once I dig into the numbers.
- Owned channels: Email, SMS, long and short form written content. These are called owned channels because they don’t require payment to be seen, and they are not governed by an algorithm.
- Organic Social: This isn’t really about going viral or getting a ton of views. Checking out a business’ social profiles has been an essential part of consumers picking a business. Your pages shouldn’t be only finished work, it should be you in front of the camera, sharing your passion for your craft.
- Presence: You and your team must be out in your community as much as possible. This doesn’t have to be paid, you don’t have to ball out being a sponsor. Just being present, wearing your gear, interacting with people will bring you more stable revenue than any other channel.
“Isn’t this still the Internet?” — Yes it is, but you’re not waiting for it to save you. It’s you taking control back, making repeatable decisions that you can monitor and forecast.
And this is what this blog will be about: Building a marketing mix you can depend on to fill your shop and grow it to new heights you never even dreamed of. Hop in.