The Chevrolet Trax is a small SUV made by Chevrolet. It’s meant for regular driving and everyday errands, with a higher seating position than a typical car. People talk about it because it’s a practical size for those who want some SUV features without something too big.
Topic
Marketing vs tactics for auto repair shops
They’re talking about the difference between marketing and smaller tricks. The idea is that marketing is bigger than just SEO or a website—it’s how the whole shop runs.
Local SEO is how a business tries to show up in Google searches for its city or neighborhood. It’s meant to attract customers who are looking for services nearby.
Lead generation means getting people interested in your business and encouraging them to reach out. For a shop, that might be filling out a form or calling after visiting a website.
“Karm's auto” is the name of the auto shop they’re talking about. They’re discussing how the shop can market itself by sharing what its team is doing.
Term
reviews
“Reviews” are what past customers say online about a shop. Good reviews can help more people find the shop and trust it.
Term
ranking performance
“Ranking performance” is how high a business shows up when people search online. If a shop ranks higher, more local customers are likely to find it.
Term
digital lift
“Digital lift” means your online results get better because of what you do offline. For a shop, that can mean more visibility and more customers finding you.
They mention “Shop Dog Marketing,” which is the marketing company being discussed. The host brings up its CEO as an example of someone who understands marketing for auto repair shops.
Napa AutoCare is a program/network tied to NAPA that supports auto repair shops. Here, they’re highlighted for helping solve the problem of not enough trained mechanics.
A technician shortage means there aren’t enough trained mechanics available. That can make it harder for repair shops to keep up with customers and stay staffed.
A nine-stage curriculum means the training is divided into nine steps. The idea is to teach people in a planned sequence so they can build skills over time.
Billable hours are the hours a mechanic’s work that the shop can charge customers for. If apprentices become productive, they can help generate more of that chargeable work.
Term
stage five
“Stage five” sounds like a step in the training program. The speaker is saying that by that point, apprentices can start contributing enough to help the shop’s money.
Carlisle Tools is a tool brand that Napa teamed up with. The idea is to package tools for apprentices at a better price so starting out is less expensive.
A shop management system is software that helps a repair shop run its workflow. It can help with things like scheduling jobs, writing estimates, and billing customers.
They’re talking about how to market your repair shop as the better local option compared to a car dealership. They mention using customer reviews to judge if the plan is working.
Review analysis means looking at customer reviews and figuring out what people are saying. Here, it’s used to see whether the shop’s marketing is convincing customers.
Incentives are special deals or discounts you offer to get customers to choose you. The host is saying you need to offer comparable promotions, not just say you’re cheaper.
Concept
search engines will pick up on it
They mean Google and other search sites notice what people are saying about your business. If your reviews and posts match what customers want, you’re more likely to show up in search results.
LIVE
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.
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
the automotive industry is facing a technician shortage,
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
with in-depth classroom videos,
instructor-led Napa AutoTech classes,
web-based courses, and hands-on training with a mentor.
Apprentices move at their own pace,
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.
And here's the business benefit.
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
to increase and track profitability in real time.
Napa Trax offers the industry's best post sale support
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Yep, on site, and we offer remote refresher training
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Give us a call, visit the website,
or join our Facebook community today to learn more.
We'll prove to you that Trax is the single best
shop management system in the business.
Napa Trax is always customized and tailored for you,
whether you're a one man shop or a large multi-bay
or multi-location company.
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.
About this episode
The conversation reframes auto repair marketing as much more than ads or SEO. It ties real growth to shop operations, customer treatment, community presence, and trust signals like E-E-A-T. The speakers also dig into how search visibility, reviews, Google posts, and AI tools can help a shop position itself against dealerships, understand public perception, and even improve hiring decisions by analyzing reviews and candidate data.
Dan Vance, CEO of Shop Dog Marketing, challenges how auto repair shops think about marketing in today’s AI-driven world. The conversation goes beyond websites and SEO, exploring how real marketing lives in every customer interaction and how tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overview can become powerful strategic partners.
What You’ll Learn
Marketing Is Bigger Than Digital Tactics: Most shops mistake marketing for SEO, ads, or websites. Dan reframes marketing as theentire customer experience,from the way a repair is explained to how a customer feels in your waiting room. The shops that win combine smart digital strategy with authentic human connection.
Why “Precious Moments” Builds Powerful Brands: Small, meaningful experiences, like a child choosing a toy or a team member giving back to the community, create emotional anchors. Capturing and sharing these moments builds trust and a brand that customers remember and talk about.
How E-E-A-T Drives Visibility and Growth: Search engines prioritize Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Shops that intentionally showcase these qualities can outperform larger competitors. Long-term credibility matters more than short-term ad spend.
Using AI as Your Strategic Thinking Partner: AI isn’t just a tool; it’s a collaborator. Dan shares practical ways shops can use it: Identify dealership weaknesses through review analysis and position your shop as the better alternative. Understand your shop’s real online reputation, both strengths and blind spots. Improve hiring by comparing candidates to your top performers and analyzing interview traits.
Stop thinking of marketing as something you do and start seeing it as something you are. When you combine authentic customer experiences with the strategic power of AI, you don’t just compete, you create momentum that builds trust, visibility, and long-term growth.
Thanks to our Partners, NAPA Auto Care and NAPA TRACS
Learn more about NAPA Auto Care and the benefits of being part of the NAPA family by visiting https://www.napaonline.com/en/auto-care
NAPA TRACS will move your shop into the SMS fast lane with onsite training and six days a week of support and local representation. Find NAPA TRACS on the Web at http://napatracs.com/Connect with the Podcast: