Marketing for automotive aftermarket and servicing groups
Bays are the constraint, so the work is judged on booked hours and on the customers who come back at the next interval.
Where the money moves.
A workshop sells hours, not impressions. Bay count multiplied by technician hours multiplied by utilisation is the revenue ceiling, and no campaign lifts it. So the question a group marketing manager has to answer is narrower than lead volume: did the spend fill the diary on the days it sat empty, with the jobs that carry margin. Tyres and batteries occupy a bay and return very little. Brakes, diagnostics and logbook work pay for the site. Demand arriving as price-shopping calls chasing a headline special makes the numbers worse, not better.
Timing is set by the registration calendar rather than by a media plan. A NSW customer needs an inspection before renewal, Victorians need a roadworthy at sale, Queensland runs safety certificates, and every one of those dates is scattered across the year by plate. That is why site-level search and a properly maintained Google Business Profile per workshop carry more of the load than brand advertising, and why the phone is still the conversion point. If the booking system and the call handling sit outside the reporting, half the result is invisible.
Retention is where a group either compounds or leaks. The motor vehicle information sharing scheme means independent workshops can buy the manufacturer service and repair data they need, and Australian Consumer Law means a new-car warranty survives a logbook service done elsewhere. Plenty of owners still do not know either of those things. Saying it plainly, in the reminder that lands three weeks before the next interval, is worth more than another prospecting campaign, because a recaptured customer costs nothing to acquire twice.
Reporting runs off the dealer management system, not the ad platform. Bookings, average repair order value, first-time-right and the return rate at twelve and twenty-four months are numbers your operations manager already trusts, so those are the numbers the marketing report is written against. Offline conversion import closes the loop between a search click, a phone call and a completed job, which also lets bidding chase the work that pays rather than the cheapest enquiry. Everything else is activity, and activity does not fill a hoist on a Tuesday.
What we run.
Workshop-level search and profiles
Each site gets its own profile, its own review flow, its own service and suburb pages and its own budget line. A single group page ranking across every suburb sends a Penrith customer toward a Blacktown bay and loses the booking on the drive time.
Reminder programmes off the DMS
Service due dates, tyre wear, brake life and registration months already sit in your system. Email and SMS sequences fire against those triggers, so the reminder lands before the customer starts searching rather than after they have booked somewhere closer to home.
Warranty and capped price content
Short video and search pages answering what owners actually type: whether servicing here affects a new-car warranty, what a logbook service covers, what a quoted price includes. Filmed in the workshop by the technicians doing the job, then cut for search and social.
Fleet, novated and overflow work
A different buyer on a different cycle. Fleet managers and novated lease brokers are reached through LinkedIn, direct email and a capability page that survives a procurement read, not through a suburb search campaign built for retail intent.
Reporting against the diary
A standing view of booked hours by site and by day, average repair order value, and the source behind each booking. Where the diary is soft, spend shifts toward it. Where a site is at capacity, spend comes off it.
Questions we get asked.
Geo-fenced campaigns per site, one profile per workshop with its own review flow, and location pages carrying the real address, technicians and services rather than a suburb list. Where catchments genuinely overlap, we split by postcode, watch which site converts the shared ones, then hand that budget to whichever workshop has capacity that month.
Yes, with tracked numbers per campaign and per site, recorded and matched back to the booking in your management system. The report then shows booked hours and average repair order value by source rather than call volume. Price-shopping calls get separated from calls that became jobs, which changes where the next dollar goes.
Dayparted bidding and day-specific offers do most of it, and reminder sends are timed so the booking lands midweek. Search budget lifts on the days before the soft ones. It works considerably better when the booking system exposes real availability, because pushing demand at a full Friday wastes the click and annoys the service adviser.
They are an acquisition cost rather than a profit line, so they earn their place only when the next service is captured. The customer leaves with a follow-up booked, or lands in the reminder programme with a vehicle record attached. Run as a standalone discount, they buy traffic your bays cannot afford to give away.
Also in automotive
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9 services under one team, run against the numbers your business already reports on.
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