October is fast approaching, and it's time for auto repair shops to gear up for fall marketing strategies. Brian Walker and guest Caroline Legrand discuss various promotional ideas, including community events like trunk-or-treats and awareness campaigns for Breast Cancer Month. They emphasize the importance of proactive marketing for winter services like snow tire changes and vehicle winterization. The episode also highlights fun, seasonal themes for promotions, such as pumpkin spice oil changes and community involvement, ensuring shops stay relevant and engaging as the year winds down.
Ready or not, October is right around the corner, and Brian Walker and Caroline Legrand are here to help auto repair shops get a jump on fall marketing before it sneaks up.
They cover fall-focused campaigns like Breaks for Breasts and Trunk-or-Treat events, along with practical reminders for promoting services like winterization and snow tire prep. The conversation also highlights creative ways to use national months and quirky holidays like Squirrel Awareness Month, National Pizza Month, and Name Your Car Day to create fun, engaging social media content that still reflects your shop’s professionalism.
Whether it’s encouraging community involvement, sharing behind-the-scenes shop moments, or reminding customers about safety during school and holiday season travel, this episode is full of ideas that help your shop stay visible, build trust, and keep the bays full as the season shifts.
Perfect for shop owners looking to market with intention and stand out in their local communities.
Introduction and Sponsor Acknowledgments (00:00:01) Brief intro to the podcast, hosts, guest, and sponsor messages.
October Marketing Planning Overview (00:00:56) Discussion about the importance of planning October marketing strategies in advance.
General Shop Topics & Breast Cancer Awareness (00:02:10) Covering general shop topics, "Brakes for Breasts" campaign, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Trunk or Treat & Community Events (00:02:36) Ideas for hosting Trunk or Treat and other community events at the shop.
Winterization, Tires, and Preventative Maintenance (00:02:58) Promoting winterization services, tire changes, and preventative maintenance for colder weather.
Educating Customers on Fall Car Care (00:04:01) Tips for educating customers about tire pressure, coolant, and battery checks as weather cools.
October National Months & Food Themes (00:05:10) Overview of October’s national months, especially food-related themes like National Pizza Month.
National Women's Small Business Month (00:05:49) Highlighting and promoting women-owned auto repair shops.
Squirrel Awareness Month & Automotive Tie-ins (00:06:08) Fun discussion on Squirrel Awareness Month and how it relates to brakes, tires, and rodent damage.
Other October National Months (00:07:27) Mention of additional food and transportation safety months, and creative ways to tie them into shop marketing.
National Go on a Field Trip Month (00:08:03) Encouraging partnerships with schools for field trips to the shop, including virtual options.
October National Weeks: Safety Themes (00:08:55) National Teen Driver Safety Week and School Bus Safety Week, with tips for educating customers.
October National Days: Green City, Name Your Car, and More (00:09:51) Ideas for celebrating National Green City Day, National Name Your Car Day, and other unique days.
Engagement Ideas: Naming Cars & Social Media (00:12:50) Encouraging customer engagement by sharing car names and stories on social...
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Auto Repair Marketing Podcast.
I'm your host, Brian Walker, and today my guest is Caroline Legrand, and we're going to be talking
about preparing for October's marketing.
But before we get too far into it, I do want to take a second to thank our sponsors.
This episode is sponsored by Shop Boss.
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All right, well, hey, Caroline.
Hey, Brian.
How's it going?
Going well.
How are you?
Doing good, too.
All right.
I'm ready for October already.
Yeah, which is crazy.
I feel like, granted, we do these a couple of months ahead of time, but the speed at which
we've already gone through almost the whole year of them is absolutely wild to me.
This year has flown by.
Well, and it feels weird, too, because October is one of my favorite times of the year.
I love the fall.
I love when it's cooling down, but it's August right now, and it's hot in Louisiana,
like still miserable.
So I'm ready for October.
But for our listeners, now is the time where you need to be thinking ahead to October and
doing some planning for your fall marketing.
It is the time, I feel like, where die hard summer lovers are like, this is the last bit
of summer.
You can't let it slip away, but a lot of people are like you ready for fall.
So Starbucks, I think next week is, as we're recording this in August next week, is coming
out with their fall menu.
I've seen lots of pumpkins and Halloween decor at any store that I've gone to.
So everybody else is ready, unless you're a die hard summer lover, is ready for fall.
So if you're one of those people ready for fall, then you'll enjoy this podcast because
we've got all of the fall episodes or fall ideas.
All right.
Well, let's go on and get into it.
First up with just some general shop topics and things that are happening in the automotive
industry.
We've talked about this in past months, too.
But if you're doing something like Breaks for Breast, that is actually happening during
October, as you probably know, for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
So you've probably talked about it a little bit in September.
But if you are doing it, make sure you're still talking about it in October, as long
as you have space to keep booking those appointments out to do the break job for Breaks for Breasts.
All right.
Then we got the trunk retreat, which we have an article that Kim wrote about doing a
trunk retreat, great opportunity to do something cool for your community and have
people come to the shop and get to meet you and your team and all of that.
But mostly it's just about having a good, safe place for the kids to come and get some
candy.
There's a blog about trunk retreat specifically and one about just planning an event in your
shop and everything that you need to be doing to prepare for it marketing-wise and what
you can do following it.
So we'll give it here.
It's just an idea to be talking about in October.
If you're hosting a trunk retreat, but we'll link the blog and the show notes,
so y'all go check those blogs out if you are doing that or any other event.
It's also time, not in Louisiana at least, even in October, but everywhere else, a little
bit north of us and sometimes west is getting cooler.
So if you are an area where people are changing over to snow tires, start promoting
that now, reminding people to get those appointments scheduled ahead of time.
That way you're not waiting on it or they're not waiting two weeks out to book later
when the snow is actually on the ground, being a bit proactive with that.
And the same thing applies to winterizing vehicles.
So anything that has to be done preventative maintenance-wise, you can create a package
for your winterization to check the tire pressure, heaters, batteries, and all of the other
aspects and parts of it that get messed up with the range and temperatures.
Yeah, and it's a good time to start just educating people on the topic, because once
the weather starts cooling down a little bit, that's when people see those tire
pressure warnings come on.
It cools down and the pressure in the tire drops, and that's when the lights come on.
And to let them know that, hey, it may not be a serious issue, but it's also a good
way to get cars in the shop to be able to do a DVI on them is come by and let us set
your pressure for you and test your coolant and test your battery and all of that
kind of stuff.
My go-to that like fall is actually here in Louisiana is, granted, we'll probably get
another warm front after that, but the first time I get in my car and I see that my tires
or my tire light is flashing, I'm like, oh man, it's cool enough that the tire pressure
dropped.
It's actually cold outside.
It must have been really cold last night.
And here in Louisiana, we have fake fall number one and fake fall number two.
Yeah, that's usually about the time the hurricane season is coming to an end, which we're
always glad to see that go away.
Yeah, not there just yet, but we will be come October or end of October.
So getting into the months, there's a lot of months and weeks in October that have
just a lot to do with food.
So I know we joke all the time about the traditional pizza party, national
pizza day, October one is actually national pizza month.
So if anybody, I, pizza probably is one of my favorite foods.
If you're a die hard pizza lover, here's your chance to go all out for
that, but there are some other months that I think tie into some of the weeks
and days too.
So we're not going to repeat them every time y'all can come check list out.
But first up is national women's small business month.
We do have women's history month or women's month in March, but this is
specific to women's small businesses.
So any of you shops that are fully ran and operated by a woman or women
in the shop, give them a shout out.
I want to see it as a woman.
I want to see that.
So super cool thing to be promoting and talking about all the time, but
all month long.
And one of my favorites set of sale on this list is squirrel awareness month.
I knew you were going to like that one.
Well, yeah, because I mean, it's perfect.
You talk about breaks and tires because you know, I don't, I'm assuming
that squirrels are the same everywhere.
We call them suicide squirrels down here because they run out in front of your
car and then they can't decide which direction they want to go and
they're going back and forth in front of you.
And you either have to swerve last second or jam on the brakes.
And you know, it just seems like a perfect fit.
You got to save the squirrels and that requires having good breaks and good tires.
This is true.
I've totally lost Caroline.
She's looking at me like you're out of your mind.
I've never called a squirrel a suicide squirrel, but what?
I thought that was the thing.
No, the only nickname I've given to squirrels was the squirrels on
LSU's campus and the quad, the quad squirrels will like come up to you
to get an acorn like to eat your food.
They're like a cat, very friendly.
That's the only squirrel, but it is a good time to be paying attention
to the rodents or anything else that's getting stuck in your vehicle.
I didn't even think about that.
So you're, you're coming at it from the angle of like the nest that's
been built under the hood and the wires that have been chewed up
by a rat that the shop is going to call a squirrel so that they don't
offend the client.
Gotcha.
Okay.
Exactly.
Whatever it may be, chewing your wires.
There's tons of food months, like we said.
So take a gander at the list.
There's pretzel month, pasta, pizza, popcorn, all of the P foods.
Then there's also lots about transportation and transportation safety.
We've got national roller skating month, national walk to school
month and Halloween safety month.
So maybe you can tie something fun into that, but Halloween,
writing on your roller blades to work or to school in your Halloween costume.
I don't know what it could be, but if you do something fun with any of those
posts that we still haven't seen, anybody tag us in the Facebook post and
the Facebook group with the super fun posts from these, but we'll keep
an eye out for them still.
I love the national go on a field trip month too.
We know a few shop owners that have like they work with their local
schools and have field trips at the shop, you know, brings awareness
to a great career, especially, you know, now with AI and, you know,
how that's impacting white collar work.
It's a good opportunity to get, you know, kids thinking about maybe
an alternative when it comes to what they want to do when they're older.
And there's even one case that we know of that, like, you know, right
after COVID, I hate even using that word anymore, but, you know, right
after COVID, there was a shop owner who was doing virtual field trips
where they were like on zoom and he was going around the shop,
you know, showing the kids everything and interviewing, you know,
technicians and everything else.
That's pretty cool.
That is pretty cool.
All right.
Getting into weeks, we keep with a lot of those safety themes.
So we have national team driver safety week and school bus safety week.
We talk a lot.
I feel like in August and September gave a lot of tips for that back
to school safety and back to school specials and all of that
conversation.
Now that school is really in full swing.
You've got teen drivers on the road.
People are going to bonfires, football games in the fall, all sorts
of things happening in the community, state fairs, anything going on.
So anything you can do, like we said, talking about winterization,
educating your customers and just being a source of like a good guiding
light for your customers and your audience and your community is
going to help set you apart and might not be super specific to
what you're doing in the shop necessarily, but you're educating
followers how they can educate their teens on safe driving practices
or how kids should act or not act on a school bus.
Yeah.
And then so we get into our days.
You know, we have things like national green city day for those
of y'all who were lucky enough to live in those cities, you know,
that have like the awesome greenways and, you know, stuff like that
to just, you know, maybe showcase it and show how your team enjoys
it and uses it, you know, and all the other things that that
make your city green and even, you know, say opportunity to show
how you contribute that to that by running a green shop or to totally
take us off on a witch broomstick.
If you're a Wicked fan and your shop colors are green, you could
turn your whole shop into the Emerald City and just celebrate
it all month long.
And then if you do a trunk retreat, everybody can dress up
like Alphaba and Glenda.
The options are truly limitless there.
So just a thought.
That's kind of a wild one.
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