Questions body shop owners ask about marketing

Enough to beat the three shops you appear next to. Across 70,441 collision listings the median is 54 reviews and 32.9% sit under 25. The shops holding the map pack in a real metro are usually past 150, and the 90th percentile is 367. Collision has an advantage most trades do not: every repair ends with a delivery, and a delivery is the single best moment in local business to ask. The scripts are in the reviews guide.

In most states, yes. The vehicle owner picks the repairer; the insurer pays under the policy. Insurers may recommend a program shop and many drivers assume that is a requirement. Rules on steering language and on who must approve what vary by state, so check your own department of insurance before you print anything. Say it plainly on your site and on the phone: you choose the shop, we handle the claim, we work with every carrier.

DRP volume comes from carrier scorecards, not from ads. Cycle time, CSI, touch time and severity move your allocation; a Meta campaign does not. Marketing earns you the other half of the business: customer-pay collision, deductible-only jobs, PDR, bumper and cosmetic repair, restoration and fleet. The healthy target most owners land on is a mix where no single program can take more than about a third of your revenue with one email.

In most US metros expect $15 to $45 a click on collision and body shop terms and $60 to $200 per phone call. That sounds brutal until you weigh it against a $3,100 average repair order. What kills shops on Google Ads is broad match paying for "insurance quote", "how much to fix a bumper", parts shoppers and job seekers. Exact and phrase match, a hard negative list, and call recording. Details in the Google Ads guide.

Not for wrecks. Nobody scrolls Instagram after an accident, they call. Meta works for the cash jobs a driver has been putting off: paintless dent repair on a door ding, a scraped bumper cover, a faded clear coat, a curbed wheel, a hail follow-up. Those are decided on price and a before-and-after photo, which is exactly what Meta is good at. Offers and budgets are in the Meta ads guide.

Yes, and the data is blunt about it. 35.4% of collision listings show no website. Shops with a site carry a median of 91 reviews; shops without carry 21. Correlation, not proof, but the site is also where a driver confirms you handle their carrier, where your certifications live, and where an online estimate request captures photos at 9pm. See website essentials.

Not on price and not on ad budget. A consolidator location runs on process and volume; it cannot credibly promise the owner will look at the car. Compete on the three things a corporate location struggles to sell: a named person who owns the repair, certifications on the specific vehicles in your market, and a straight answer on when the car will be ready. Say those in the first line of your website and in the first line of your voicemail greeting.

They are the strongest trust signal this trade has and most shops bury them in a footer. Gold Class shops are a minority of the field, and OEM certification programs for aluminum-body trucks, EVs and specific brands are narrower still. Name the certification, name the vehicles it covers, and put it above the fold: "aluminum-body F-150 certified" beats a row of logos nobody can read.

Because cycle time is what the customer experiences and nobody told them what to expect. Almost every one-star review in collision is a communication failure, not a repair failure. A Tuesday and Friday text with a photo and a revised completion date kills most of them. Coordinate the rental return date with the actual delivery date, and tell the driver before the rental company does. More in the cycle time and follow-up guide.

It is public data collected at scale, so treat it as accurate within a point or two, not to the decimal. Listings are deduplicated by Google place ID and rebuilt monthly. It also mixes in shops that describe themselves as body shops while doing mostly mechanical work, which pulls some numbers around. Google does not publish this itself, which is why we do. Method is on the about page.

Public Google Business Profile listings found through Google Maps searches for auto body and collision shops in every state. We keep only public business fields: review count, rating, website link, hours, categories, city and state. No reviewer names, no personal information, nothing from behind a login.

Any one of the services we run, or several at once: Google Ads management, Meta ads, AI search optimization, local SEO and Google Business Profile work, website design, social media management, review generation, missed-call text-back and follow-up, email and SMS campaigns, bookkeeping, and cold-call appointment setting for fleet and dealer accounts. Setup, management and reporting are included. Ad spend paid to Google or Meta, if you run ads, is yours.

You decide. Keep the service at the monthly price quoted before the trial starts, switch to a different one, or stop. Nothing renews on its own and nothing is charged during the trial. Whatever we build lives in your accounts, so if you stop, you keep the campaigns, the pages and the review process.

No. There is no card on file at any point in the trial. We ask for access to the accounts involved and about 20 minutes for a setup call. Text or call (385) 832-6175 to start, or use the free trial page.