Auto Repair Marketing Isn’t What You Think (AI Is Changing Everything) [RR 1090]

This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network.

Hey everybody, Karm Capriotto in the 11th year

of Remarkable Results Radio having more fun

that I think anyone is allowed to have

is we work so hard to bring unbelievable

and some of the best content you could probably find anywhere

in the professional automotive repair realm

as far as podcasts.

And this is the place,

this is why you constantly come here.

Hey, don't forget, we're getting ready.

Actually, we had a great meeting about version two

of our app coming out and it's for your smartphone.

We call it the ultimate professional

automotive repair playlist.

Read show notes, link with our sponsor partners,

which is so cool.

Get all the show notes in our network,

Automotive Repair Podcast Network.com forward slash

app, Android and Apple and have a good time with that.

In case you're gonna watch this on YouTube,

please subscribe.

We appreciate that at Karm Capriotto YouTube channel.

I got something really interesting coming up here today.

Let me share that with you.

We're gonna talk to Dan Vance,

CEO and founder of Shop Dog Marketing.

And we're gonna talk about organizational structure

for marketing.

Oh God, please no.

Using AI for review assessments.

Now look everyone, AI, you cannot not read an article,

talk to someone.

AI in every aspect of our world and our life.

AI is, let me see, it's like my ears, it's attached to us.

It's part of something that we have to know and understand.

Dan's gonna talk about, just for discussion purposes,

if you wanna position your shop as the local alternative

to the dealer, what a review analysis from AI.

Show to support or refute this marketing claim of yours.

But before we jump in with Dan,

thank you so much to our partners.

Hey, you know the technician shortage is real,

but Napa AutoCare has a solution at no cost to members.

The Napa AutoCare Apprentice Program builds

tomorrow's technicians through a two-year,

nine-stage curriculum.

Learn more at member.napaautocare.com

or talk to your Napa representative today.

Hey, did you know that NapaTrax has on-site training

plus six days a week support?

It all starts when a local representative meets with you

to learn about your business and how you run it.

After all, it's your shop, so it's your choice.

Let us prove to you that Trax

is the single best shop management system in the business.

Find NapaTrax on the web at NAPATRACS.com.

Okay, Dan, are you ready for this?

I'm ready.

Dan has been reflecting an awful lot of late

on organizational structure for marketing.

And I'll leave it there, you go, you go.

I know it's a mouthful,

but there's definitely some thinking behind that.

And I think it's something we should be talking more about.

So first of all, most auto repair shops

are gonna go out and hire somebody to do something for them.

And most agencies are gonna tell you

they're doing marketing for you.

But in reality, they're doing a tactic,

like local SEO or build you a website

or lead generation through visitors to your website.

That's a tactic, that's not marketing.

And marketing is so much more than that.

Marketing is everything you do in the shop,

how you treat people, how you process,

how you get the repair done, lowering your comebacks,

and making sure your proficiency rates

are all where they're supposed to be.

That's all a reflection of good marketing.

What you're doing in the community is marketing,

how people are talking about you in reviews

and in other places is all marketing.

So I think the great auto repair shops

have a better sense of that

in terms of really having worked on it over time

and making investments to make sure

that they have a structure and following that structure

and then implementing tactics with partners

where it makes sense.

And there's some things that partners can't do for you.

Like it's really hard for partners to do your social media,

but that's a great place for you to build relationships

and build a marketing brand.

I definitely want to talk more about this.

I think it's really important.

And one of the core things that happened for me was

a new client, a new repair shop, young people,

and they're doing great.

They have a business coach and they're turning good numbers

and they're making money and we've got them ranking.

They want us to deliver more marketing results

without making more money investment.

It just kind of created this whole thinking about,

does money really solve this marketing thing?

Like I want to grow and how does growth

in the internet really work?

So you probably have a question or two,

but I just let me just say this last piece.

And that is that I wouldn't want somebody brand new

on the block to start outranking me

and getting more customers from search engine

when I've been there for 30 years.

And this guy just shows up.

The reality is the internet doesn't work that way anyway.

The internet is based on a commonly known factor called EAT.

It's an acronym, it's E-E-A-T.

All right, Dan, talk to me, E-E-A-T, what is it?

So it's experience.

So just think about like how long I've been in industry,

what experience I bring to the marketplace.

My expertise and experience are not always the same.

So that's a factor that gets considered.

So it's double E and then authority and trust.

You know, a business that's been around for a long time

or a large business is gonna have a stronger factor

in each one of those elements.

And that's the measurement table.

So that's how they can help small businesses grow

because it allows you to develop those areas

and to showcase them.

And larger businesses not to be threatened

by a one or two man shop and in that internet space.

As we were recording this,

on the day that we were recording it yesterday,

I was in Cleveland at the Breaks for Breast Check presentation.

There were a bunch of shop owners there that participate.

And we were just shooting the breeze.

Hey, Karm, I'm thinking I may have a marketing issue,

blah, blah, blah.

And he says, listen, I'm not the expertise,

but I know a ton of people.

I know I could probably hook you up,

but what are you really doing?

And then I started to think

as this individual was explaining,

I'm just not doing enough of that.

And maybe I gotta do more.

And I said, are you telling the why story

about Karm's automotive?

I'm just picking a name here.

And they stopped and they thought for a moment.

And he's having a problem trying to recruit

some really good people.

This is a legacy great shop.

Two wives got different jobs in different cities

and had to leave and he lost his two best people.

And he hadn't prepared for the struggle

of finding a couple of new people.

And I said, have you been seating your marketplace,

your clients with this beautiful,

unbelievably highly cultured,

you know, this educational type of operation

that he has been in it?

And I said, why Karm's auto?

And every time you make a post,

if one of your guys is doing some great work

with the Boy Scouts and he's out for a weekend,

get a picture of it, ask him for a picture

and get it posted.

Hey, our guy Bobby spent time, you know,

in Scout Camp, they earned a badge, blah, blah, blah.

These are the kind of things that I believe are tactics.

Okay, you gotta dial them in, I get that.

But along those lines,

are shops doing enough of that community public why?

Yeah, I don't think they're doing hardly anything,

much less anything close to enough.

And if you look at most shops,

they have hired some digital or agency help for marketing,

but very few of them get involved in the community.

There is a structure for what I do digitally,

you have to have that.

But there's also a structure for relationships.

What am I doing to build relationships?

That's what you're talking about there, Karm,

and that companies or shops that go like a rocket ship

are the ones that make a larger investment in community

and a balancing effort in digital efforts.

Because the digital world can see into your community.

I don't know how they do all that completely,

but reviews is a big part of that.

So they can see what it looks like in the real world.

And it does drive your ranking performance.

So you get the benefit of digital lift

when you focus on that relationship,

building relationships with people.

They have a toy chest in the front waiting room.

And all I said is if one of the kids with moms

in the waiting room and they open it up

and they can take any toy and play with it and take it home,

what about getting permission to get that posted up

on Facebook?

Those are like precious moments.

Yeah, I think precious moments are really important.

We wanna anchor people having great experiences

when they come to you for auto repair.

And maybe it is that toy basket,

or maybe it's a cookie in the car,

or a nice clean waiting room.

And for the ladies, they love clean restrooms,

as we all should.

But I think overall this idea of creating experiences.

And then if you can highlight those

and create a picture board of like kids playing with the toys,

like that anchors it for somebody

that wasn't there to see that moment.

That's a really great place for you

to build relationships, right?

It's connection.

I love that.

That's a great point, Karn.

And you know, Shop Dog Marketing, the CEO of this,

you're a marketer.

And I know though that you've talked to me an awful lot

about the power and the value of coaches in the industry.

Yeah, I love coaches.

I think they're great.

And to their credit, they help and change businesses.

But they're focused on transactional.

And sometimes that thinking becomes linear.

Like I think that that's the way everything works.

I can put it into a spreadsheet and track it.

But the internet doesn't work that way.

The internet's more of a momentum.

What am I doing to build momentum?

And every time I do something that grows

and it gets stronger and I build more momentum

week by week, month by month, year over year,

that's hard to see in a linear thing.

So look, I may spend $1,000 and get two cars in my shop.

And after 90 days, somebody's saying,

well, maybe you ought to get a different agency

because that doesn't look like that's working out really well.

But it doesn't take an accounting that you win

from a zero ranking factor to like a 45% visibility

and digital search around keywords.

And that's a mammoth change.

That's a Mount Everest for somebody that has zero ranking.

But that doesn't show up in the linear chart.

Can you put a value on that?

Well, yeah, think about the impact for your business.

If I go from zero visibility to like 50%,

that means I've got really good presence.

I'm showing up in the three pack for important keywords.

So the likelihood of getting chosen

by the larger majority of people goes way up.

And I'm telling you, that's a really, really big factor

for shops, but that may not necessarily translate

into an ROI spreadsheet just yet.

So the person who shows up,

you're getting the credit for it,

but no one sees that soft where I hate to say that,

but that soft touch, the stuff that's churning underneath

in the algorithm and in the accumulation buckets

of people are coming here and they're clicking on us.

But there's gotta be ways to see that.

Oh yeah, those metrics are out there

and your agency can show those to you

and help you visualize what they are and understand them.

But you have to include them in your ROI.

Yes, the idea of telling my agency,

hey, if I just get you to do more for me

and not spend more, my ROI will go up.

And that's not how the internet works either.

Especially if I don't have those markers of eat, right?

If I don't have experience and expertise in the

or authority or any kind of trust,

I can give Google more money to give me better presence,

but they will run to the bank with that.

They are happier than you can imagine

because they don't have to do anything.

All you're doing is sending them extra money.

The internet is a really big sucking sound

and I don't think we know it.

Oh, it's huge, yeah.

Oh my God.

I mean, you know, there isn't anything

that you would be interested in

that you can't have a free option,

but you know, free today get you two of anything.

You know, it used to get you five of something,

now it's down to like just,

oh, you're gonna do a couple of these

and you ask yourself, what's the hook?

And then you decide to look at the pricing

and it's way more than you expected or you thought.

But recently Google sent me an email

that said I was gonna say $50 on something

during the course of the year.

And I'm saying to myself,

what shareholder approved that?

I know.

So I get it, we're spending a lot of money there.

They're making like a billion dollars a day.

They don't care about them.

They're making lots of money.

Hey, you know, it's no secret

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but Napa AutoCare is stepped up with a powerful solution,

the Napa AutoCare Apprentice Program,

and the best part, it's completely free for members.

This program was pioneered by shop owners Pete McNeil

and master technician Jake Sorensen

at McNeil's AutoCare in Sandy, Utah.

They recognized that waiting for skilled technicians

to appear wasn't an option.

So they built a program to grow their own.

By recruiting motivated individuals

with the right passion and attitude

and providing them with structured training,

they proved that apprentices could become

the next generation of skilled certified technicians.

The program features a comprehensive nine-stage curriculum

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instructor-led Napa AutoTech classes,

web-based courses, and hands-on training with a mentor.

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typically completing the program within two years.

Graduates earn four ASE certifications,

the G1, A4, A5, and air conditioning,

and are officially registered with the Department of Labor

as Journey Workers Automotive Technicians.

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As apprentices gain skills, they generate billable hours,

often boosting shop profits as early as stage five.

Plus Napa now offers a new apprentice toolkit

developed with Carlisle Tools at an exclusive price,

helping break down one of the biggest barriers

for new technicians the cost of tools.

Together, Napa AutoCare and your shop

can tackle the technician shortage head on.

Start now, grow your own talent,

and build your bench for the future.

Visit member.napaautocare.com or contact

your Napa representative today

and get started with your apprentice program.

Let's face it, your shop management system

is the single most important tool in your shop, period.

Napa Trax was built from the ground up

to make your business more profitable and efficient.

We provide an extensive set of tools

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Yep, on site, and we offer remote refresher training

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Give us a call, visit the website,

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Napa Trax is always customized and tailored for you,

whether you're a one man shop or a large multi-bay

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After all, it's your shop, so it's your choice.

Visit us on the web at NapaTrax, that's N-A-P-A-T-R-A-C-S.com.

Let's talk about the second major topic.

Dan, if I wanted to position my shop

as the local alternative to the dealer,

what would a review analysis show to support

or refute this marketing plan?

That's such a great way to do that,

and look, I see shops do this, and I ask them,

well, what kind of reviews do you see

on the dealerships website or on their Google profile?

What kind of reviews do you see,

and are you solving those kind of problems?

Because you can't just say we're cheaper than the dealership,

but we offer all the same incentives,

clean shop, best parts, great service, we're just cheaper.

That's not gonna win dealership, people, over to you.

So there's things they love,

and there's things they hate about the dealership.

They go to the dealership

because they think they're gonna get better technicians

or specialists working on their vehicles, right?

That's what they think.

But if you see that in the reviews,

you can work on addressing that with your own reviews,

and then the search engines will pick up on it,

and they will offer you up as an alternative.

They'll carry the water for you,

but you fundamentally have to understand

what your differences are

and what your unique marketing position is.

You just said something so big and so powerful

about solving those problems.

Let's go back to social media, let's go back to your posts.

If you discover that there's a little trend going on

at a local dealership where consumers

aren't happy with something,

and I would never on purpose pick anyone out,

but I'd say, have you ever come across this?

Well, here's how we do it,

here's how we solve that problem,

or you'd never feel or equate that issue here at Carm's shop.

I think it's a brilliant move.

It's bullets for the gun.

It absolutely is, and what's magical about it

is that I don't have to try to be the communicator

to the world of people that are on the internet.

The search engine will do that for me.

I just have to position myself

so that I show as an alternative,

because the way the search engine works right now,

so it's comparative.

So it's definitely looking at why are you different

and can I offer you up as a comparative option

to somebody that searches for a dealership for auto service?

And that's the way the search engine works.

So if I position myself properly,

the search engine will do all that work for me.

It'll give me the visibility.

I don't have to do that.

I just have to train the search engine.

You have to train the search engine.

Is this search engine hovering over your website

or your social media?

Where is it pulling this from?

It's gonna look at your reviews.

It always looks at your reviews.

And anything you put on your Google Maps,

like a Google post, which is like a blog,

it sees that right away,

because it's on their website, they index that.

And you wanna mirror that on your website as well.

Those three places will give you visibility.

Oh my God, you know what I thought of?

Do shops have a Y page?

They have a Y page.

They don't even know it

because the search engines now have an AI tool

called AI Overview.

And it knows all kinds of things about your website,

positive and negative.

And you can find out a lot about

what the search engines think about your business

by just using the AI Overview in Google search.

AI Overview.

And it's when I put in a question, a long form question,

like, this is my business, you can do it that way.

You can say we are AutoShop Jojojo

and what's really positive about us

in the search engine environment

or what's a negative perception about our business

in the search engine, it will tell you.

Do you say that in Google?

Do you use Gemini?

Can you use chat?

I like chat, but you can do it in Google search

and you can do it in other places as well

because they're going to the same sources

for that information, your website.

You just said a mouthful.

You explained exactly, hey, I own this place.

I'm looking for an objective overview

of the positives and the negatives of my business.

Yeah, you can do that with the dealer too.

If you ask the same questions,

all of great marketing is just a lot of questions

and understanding and why am I different

and how can I really shine by being different

and to just say we're better or we're an alternative

to the dealership is weak.

But if you can help the search engines carry the water

for you to demonstrate that you have better specialists

than the dealership, then you will win.

We have to make some kind of shift

in a lot of our tactical stuff

or at least make it better,

but we have to think more strategically.

Yeah, and AI is your helper.

It's like helper, hamburger, helper.

It's ready to go.

All you got to do is mix it in

and so you can pull all of your own reviews

and drop it into chat, GBT.

Don't worry, it's already on public profile.

It's already in the public domain.

Just put it into chat and ask some questions,

questions that you're thinking about

and then it's okay to say,

hey, dear chat, I'm really interested in some angles

that I'm not asking you about.

What am I missing?

And it will interject.

It will help you review and analyze that.

AI driven leaders, a book I read,

Chris Cloutier recommended and I read it real quick.

And I have to tell you,

you talk about having your eyes opened

as to what you can use AI for.

And the examples in the book were so powerful.

And it wasn't because I was stupid or dumb,

these executives, who's coaching executives

on how to use it,

and they were saving all kinds of time

because it was doing some heavy analysis

that the executive would get to,

but probably three or four days later,

once they devoured or if you will,

digested all the information that they had,

they put it all in

and they started to see some crystallization

in strategic ideas.

I'm telling you, AI is a place where you can become brilliant

by just leveraging it as a brainstorming place

or as a place for insights.

You can describe challenges that you're facing

and ask it to help you see different routes

to a better outcome.

And you can ask AI, AI, what's my visibility?

How does the internet perceive me

as far as for competition and for strength,

for relevance, for authority, for experience,

and all of those things, it'll tell you.

And you can put that in there.

Dan, are you finding your clients

hesitating to wanna do that?

I think there's some hesitation,

but I'm hearing about auto repair shop guys

that are doing things that I get excited about.

Like, I just like, that's brilliant.

Like, I know of one shop,

he's taken all of his really, really great people

and he's combined them into like a personnel file.

And he's put that into chat.

And then when they're interviewing,

they'll take that interview ease resume

and they'll add it to that profile structure

and say, is this person a good fit for our organization?

Damn.

Yes, that's what I said.

You just gave me another wild idea

and this could be illegal, but listen.

I'm doing an interview with a candidate

and I say, can I record it?

Can I record our voice?

He's got to sign a piece of paper somehow.

And then you take that transcription

and you put it in here and you say,

can you evaluate the character, the knowledge,

all this stuff and based on the,

you know the culture of our business

and all those resumes over there,

can you give me a two paragraph overview

on the risk that I have in hiring this person?

What's this guy's personality or Gal's personality?

That they're trying to hide because they're in the interview

but it'll give you insights to what their core personality is

like introvert, extrovert, intelligence,

being able to kind of think through things before responding.

It'll give you all that feedback.

You don't have to be the HR expert.

You are leveraging your new business partner.

That's a beautiful thing.

All right.

So I think I recently wrote a blog

and somewhere in that blog's title,

the word Brainiac was there.

Okay.

I can't remember what it was about

but it was about brains are bandwidth.

And I probably mentioned AI

and I think you're so right.

Let's not be afraid that AI may tell us something

we don't want to hear

because if you know you don't want to hear it,

you're hiding behind something.

So let it become your friend

and let it do the Brainiac work

or the clarifying confirmation work

that you feel in your gut.

Your intuition says this

and you just need someone like a Dan or a coach or an AI.

And I'm not replacing coaches and Dan's with AI

but I think it's a great resource

to listen to words and tone of voice

and dig down deep inside with all of its knowledge.

Yes.

That's marketing in one way or the other

you can talk about.

That's how I'm representing my business

and those are the drivers that are underneath it.

Those are the tactics.

So if you said, look, I want to be a dealer alternative

you run the reviews, you figure out what people think

what their sentiment is,

what are strong factors, what are weak factors

and you compare your own reviews with that

and you can start building a strategy with AI

and you can use an agency like us

to go out there and deploy a tactic

like writing blogs or content

that's going to help the search end and understand

that you really all are an alternative.

You'll rank better and you'll all of a sudden

you'll be like we're getting a lot of dealer calls.

That's how you'll label them.

So that's just a digital tactic

but you could apply that to relationships too.

What are my reviews telling me

about how I'm perceived in the community?

Everything you can find in the local chamber,

newspaper, radio, whatever you can find

that's published because most of it

always goes into the internet about my business.

I want to know everything about my business

is being said or mentioned and AI will do that for you.

We're not far off from it doing that for social media

which is going to be even more powerful.

I'm kind of excited for that day.

Are you telling me that AI is going to go in

and find its in way to Facebook as an example?

Yeah, I've tried to do like social media scraping

for sentiment and it hasn't worked out great for me

but it's going to be hard as AI becomes

more and more powerful to not get that data.

So yesterday as I mentioned earlier in the episode

we were in Cleveland for the Breaks for Breasts

check presentation at the Cleveland Clinic

which has one of the first ever IBM quantum computers.

And it happens to be on display

in one of their beautiful area of the hospital.

It's not like you walk in the door and you check in

but it's in a private back area that we were at yesterday.

And I saw this quantum computer two years ago

and every time I see it I think of AI

and I say deep down inside there

and I think of the data centers that are being built

to help 472 minus degrees Celsius

is the temperature of their core.

So the computations are liquidy split nanosecond stuff

and I find, and so we can't be afraid of this stuff

because the hardware I believe is being built

to manage all this stuff.

I had to toss that in.

I'm a little bit of an introvert

and I just tell people that so they know like for me

it's uncomfortable for me to ask other people questions

about like am I doing this right or how does this work

or give me some input.

For me as an introvert,

I see AI as a kind of a way to collaborate with somebody

without exposing myself in a place that I think I'm weak

because I don't wanna be perceived as not knowing something.

And I bet there's a lot of people like me

that are gonna turn to AI and feel empowered.

It's not something to be afraid of

and it's really good stuff.

It's gonna help.

Yeah, yeah.

Dan, I always saw you as a quiet giant.

I never really thought of you as an introvert.

We've done a lot of great episodes together.

Brilliant stuff.

You're so eloquent and you're not afraid to just jump in.

That's a revelation.

But I say that because I think that's probably

a lot of auto shop owners when I look at them

and I'm thinking processing about them

and I just think they're gonna love AI.

They just will kind of let go of the ropes

and just enjoy it.

And it's gonna help them be better partners, right?

We want better partners than our marketing agency

with auto shops that wanna be rockets

and understand that there's some things

that they can do to really drive that

and not put all the pressure on an agency

that's got one narrow tactic that we've been assigned,

per se.

Great final words.

Thank you so much, Dan.

I learned a ton.

I think this was a great episode.

You must come back as usual.

Dan Vance, CEO and founder of Shop Dog Marketing.

I had a blast.

Thanks for your info.

Thank you.

Thanks for being on board to listen and learn

from the Premier Automotive Repair Business Podcast,

Remarkable Results Radio.

Get your episodic education on the ARPN listening app

at automotiverepairpodcastnetwork.com.

Also enjoy the podcast

on our Carm Capriato YouTube channel.

Carm is all for advancing

the professional automotive service industry.

Until next time.

Auto Repair Marketing Isn’t What You Think (AI Is Changing Everything) [RR 1090]

About this episode

Chevrolet Trax

Marketing vs tactics for auto repair shops

local SEO

lead generation

Karm's auto

reviews

ranking performance

digital lift

Shop Dog Marketing

Napa AutoCare

technician shortage

McNeil's AutoCare

nine-stage curriculum

Napa AutoTech

ASE certifications

G1

A4

A5

billable hours

stage five

Carlisle Tools

shop management system

Napa Trax

position my shop as the local alternative to the dealer

review analysis

Google profile

incentives

search engines will pick up on it

Request an Explanation

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