Marketing When Times Are Tough Part 2

Hey guys, we're having some good feedback on this blog lately and thanks if you're one of those who pops in regularly to view my posts, it's nice to be appreciated!! Please leave a comment and if I feel it's relevant I will happily approve it, if it's spam and you are trying to just abuse my generosity then kiss my ***!!

Our last post dealt with marketing your business when times are tough, I hear lots of stories about people who have so many customers they don't know where to turn, and the biggest stress is managing the work load. But, trust me its not the same for everybody, if you're in a small town or a sleepy area you may have to work a lot harder to generate business than the big boys in the big cities

So that's we said last time in our previous article, you need to look at your overheads, reduce your cost base to a minimum, maybe look further and seek collaboration and work from somewhere with a low overhead, or even your own garage!!

I must say that working from my own garage would not suit me personally,it would be a problem as I am not in a big town with a good population and people may not willing to come to my home, but it is a brilliant business model for car window tinting, low overheads from working at home, high profits with low material cost is a a great business solution.

But, alas that's not for everybody so you may have to look at the alternatives and in this article want to talk about how you can optimise and engage with your customers in an automatic way.

How about this one, you could use an auto responder, that's an e-mail system that sends out an automatic e-mail when it receives an input from a customer. You could set up a predetermined e-mail to go to the customer when he fills out a contact form with a check box on your website, for example, please give me a price for a four door saloon car, you could have a specific e-mail that is sent to the customer depending upon what they select from the check box, an SUV window tint , a hatchback, a saloon vehicle, would all send a different e-mail with a different price. If the customer doesn't buy it from you, you could automatically after a predetermined amount of time, say three days, send them a follow up e-mail offering them a slight discount or incentive to buy from you, if they still dont buy, send another one of them even better deal, this can be done automatically with no intervention from yourself, how good is that!

Think about automation...it's a great time saver and makes you look efficient with your marketing!!


I wil update this post next few days with a link to my chosen auto responder system, it's worth checking out, plus they have a free one dollar trial so why not give it a try.

Marketing For Tint Shops

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Marketing Your Business When Times Are Tough Part 1

Yeh, its tough out there!!

Operating a small business in a recession is no fun...and if you dont keep a handle on things, before you know it your flood of customers could become a trickle and leave you in a mess!

Ok I am no expert on business mastery, but lets say I have done it for real, not like some of these business gurus who spout all the crap and pretend to help other people, and profit from their mis-fortune sometimes!

Anyway, I'm rambling, lets get back on track.

If you are finding business tough right now, get used to it!!..because I dont think things are changing anytime soon!

You must take a good hard luck at the situation and that starts with your fixed costs.

It's all well and good having a nice shiny business, but if you are getting little custom then you need to change things and thats starts with looking for a way out of this situation and try and think about how you can reduce your monthly overheads.

The answer is collaboration!

I say take your business to your customers, target the motor dealers in your area and offer an on-site service, you will be using their facilities and utilities and giving them a top notch service on their own doorstep. I think this is the best business model for tint shops when times are tough! 

You may need to brush up on your pattern making and adapting your techniques for mobile as it is really a different ball game so expect a few issues with quality when you first start doing mobile tinting.

Get Social

You MUST harness the power of social media and make this your best friend. The viral aspect and sharing of your status updates can be a real driver for new business. Make offers that can be redeemed by your customers, try and engage the customer with pics of cars, make videos showing your skills and even video testimonials from your customers...you can shoot and publish videos direct from your smartphone and have it online in a few minutes.

Offer one free window tint installation a month for people who like and share your business page and make sure to visit facebook.com/username and set the username for your business so you can use it properly in your marketing.

Gotta go now, to do some status updates to get my buzz going for this week!

Watch this video to see how you should be doing it and the time needed to make it work!

I can help you with your car window tinting seo

  

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Tint Shop SEO - A Quick And Dirty Guide

How To Rank Your Car Window Tinting Website For Local Customers

The internet just isn't going away and without it your marketing efforts will be seriously compromised.
So what do you need to do to try and get your website listed in Google and other search engines so local customers can find you when searching for "car window tinting in your town".

The first thing you need to consider is your domain name, use a service like namecheap.com to purchase your domain name, think about the name selection carefully, your business may be called "TJ's Car Window Tints" but a domain name like www.windowtintingohio.com will be better suited for your website, by including the keywords that your customer searches within your domain name you wil automatically have an advantage over your competitors who are not doing this.Once you have decided on a name, you then need to get some web hosting, a company like hostgator.com are a good choice here as they have a big scaleble network.

Finding a good web designer for your car window tinting website is next, along with branding and logo design, this really depends on your budget, but if money is tight go to fiverr.com and look for service suppliers here, make sure you filter your results based on "rating" so you find the best people,  and while you are at it, find somebody who can install Wordpress using the C Panel feature provided by Host Gator.

Visit Themeforest.net and search for wordpress themes, these are like skins for your website and you can pick up some really nice designs for $20-$40.

Next up once you get all this rolling is optimising your site to catch local searches, here you need to be very careful, a good place to start is with getting your site listed in some directories and if you google "Directory Submissions" you will find some good companies, get some social bookmarking services from Fiverr.com but avoid anything that blasts a lot of backlinks to your website.

Set up a youtube channel for free and upload videos of your car window tinting jobs and tag them with the keywords your customer would search for you, get somebody from fiverr.com to do a submission to the various video content networks to give your video a boost in the rankings.
Finally, make sure you keep posting content onto your car window tinting website every week, 2 or 3 times a week even, this can be pics of cars and a description of the work you have done and include your keywords in the blog posts you make.

Follow this avice and you will soon be ranking high for your local area when somebody searches for car window tinting. If you leave your site sat there doing nothing, dont expect google to show you any love!

Next time - how to conquer facebook and engage with your customers who are looking for your car window tinting services.

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Facebook Marketing For Your Car Window Tinting Business

Market Your Car Window Tinting Business With Facebook

Getting feedback from customers whose car you have tinted is very valuable in your marketing efforts and is something you should encourage.
Take the time to set up your Facebook page properly and you will reap the rewards of engaging with your customers and exposing them to your skills. You can use new tools like the 22 Social FAn Page Tool - They have a free trial.

Make sure you set your page up as a business and not a personal profile, a lot of the newer Facebook enhancements are aimed at business pages rather than individual personal profiles.

Get a graphic designer to make you a cool timeline image for your profile, if you are struggling their are plenty of suppliers on fiverr.com who will make you a suitable graphic for 5 or 10 bucks.
I would also strongly consider the use of online video in your marketing efforts, be it for customer testimonials or just a general showcase of your work. Lots of people are scared of online video, they are scared of the technology and the costs involved but with the new cell phones on the market shooting full 1080p video you can kick out some really good quality professional looking video content quickly.
Set up a youtube channel named after your main target keyword of "car window tinting your town" and upload your videos there and share the link on your Facebook profile page, again, fiverr.com is your friend here and you will find lots of suppliers who can help wuth cool intros for your videos and stuff like that.

I dont advice you build your business around Facebook as they are a law unto themselves when it comes to making changes, the introduction of the timeline feature killed off so many fan pages that were using the fan gate or reveal tab technology that they lost a hell of a lot of friends that day!

The option of Tabs still exists within Facebook and you can almost frame your car window tinting website within a Facebook tab and capture enquiries directly from within Facebook.You can consider using Facebook Advertising System to promote your car window tinting business and they have the option to really drill down on the demographics of your area, you can target customers by location, interest, age, sex, etc all within say a 10 mile radius of your location.

All in all Facebook is a good tool for your business and regular status updates will keep your fan base and customers upto date with your car window tinting company and all it has to offer.

Next Time - More Car Window Tinting Tips, This Time On Dealing WIth Obstacles When Tinting Rear Windows

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Removing Door Panels When Window Tinting

A quick guide to door trim removal when car window tinting.

Once your are fresh off your car window tinting training course and are ready to rock the world with your car window tinting skills you will most likely come across your first brick wall. That will be leaning to remove door panels to get your window film applied.

Some guys have the experience from work they have done in the past, maybe they used to do mechanical work or vehicle glazing and door trim removal is easy...but if you have never done any door trim removal, then you will have a learning curve ahead of you for sure in your quest to become a car window tinting ninja.

Many newbies who start out fresh will come up against many problems and door trim removal will probably be the toughest  to get their head around.
Here I recommend you start to use some of the car window tinting forums or seek the help of a mentor, the latter is easier said than done, as people who have worked hard to get the knowledge dont want to share it with the new kid on the block.
My advice is start off being friendly with other forum members, dont try and make out you are "The Bomb" when quite clearly you are not as you will get shot down in flames pretty quickly.

Ok, lets get back on topic, door panel removal, in most cases it will not be required to remove the full door panel, on lots of cars you can just pop the top of the door panel back and using a special hook tool, catch hold of the rubber moulding or rub rail at the top of the door, when this rubber trim is removed, you can install the film a little lower down in the door and stop any chance of the film peeling from the bottom upwards. This technique is good for lots of cars, I use it on some BMW's, Audis, Fords, Renaults and a host of others.

You need to equip yourself with some essential door trim removal tools like trim pullers and special clip tools but i think the most useful set of tools will be a set of Bojo trim tools, these are a set of plastic wedges which can be used without damaging any trim and are perfect for sliding between two plastic surfaces that need to be seperated or for exposing trim clips that run down the side of the door.

Next Time - How To Market Your New Car Window Tinting Business






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Mobile Car Tinting For Customer Convenience

I know this might be a strange topic for this blog but over the last 10 years of tinting cars I have had my fair share of female customers and I used to make a point of asking them why they chose to come to my business over going to one of my competitors. Always engage the customer at every opportunity without coming across as a smart ass, they don't like that. Try and build some confidence that you are the best person for the job and use your sales spiel to get the sale.

Be respectful: yeh, I think if my wife read this blog she would disagree and say I don't respect women enough…especially her!!, but if you want to close the deal and get the car window tinting job on their car then you have to respect them. They may not have the knowledge of some of the male customers, they may not have done any research into the subject or let you know they want an nano-ceramic non reflective film at 15% transparency but they do want window tinting from you all the same.

Talk a good job: One of the things I hear about from female customers is that some of my competitors will not give them the time of day, just like all other sales enquiries, take the 5 minutes or whatever it takes to ask the right questions, one of the best ways to close the sale is to focus on the benefits that car window film will bring to the rear seat passengers, and that's most likely going to be Kids. So sell on the heat rejection benefits of the film and how much protection it can offer. For more info on the benefits of car window film see this blog post from last week.

Marketing for Girls: Your sales message you deliver via your marketing materials can attract a varied audience and you will find that pitching your products to women is a good thing, a lot of the time they will control the purse strings and will make the buying decisions in the household. Poor old hubby is out at work all day and she may be doing lunch with the girls and keep her happy and she will happily gab to her lunch companions that you are the go-to guy for window tinting in your area.

You may need specific marketing pieces that target both male and female audience, do a little bit of market research with your female customers and just ask the question - "what made you choose us today"? - I am sure you will be surprised by some of the answers you will receive, store these in the mental marking bank - your brain, or write them down so you can be better equipped for your next marketing piece - its always nice to score with the girls and if you can make some nice money at the same time - double bonus!

My friend Richard over at Car Tinting Melbourne offers a mobile car tinting service to customers, and lots of ladies like this service, as they sometimes feel intimidated in a male workshop environment and his service offers the personal touch combined with convenience.

You can see his website at http://cartintingmelbourne.com.au/

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