Parker Mitchell, Account Manager, from Texn Rewards, based in Texas, US, discusses how effective marketing strategies can increase your auto recycling business sales.
As a business owner, you must have an effective marketing strategy to drive your brand loyalty and get new customers visiting your business. Without an effective marketing strategy, your business will likely see a decline in new customer acquisition and returning customer loyalty.
Marketing helps you stand out amongst the competition and keep your brand top of mind for your target audience. If they ever need something you offer or know someone who does, then you want it to be your business they think of first. It can also provide customers with incentives to do business with you in the near future or value in terms of new information they did not previously know.
Loyalty to your brand and new customer acquisition through marketing increases sales. However, it comes with a cost, and that is the part many business owners have a hard time justifying. Effective marketing strategies result in a net benefit, meaning the increased sales from marketing should be greater than your marketing strategy’s cost.
In the 21st century, there are many marketing options to choose from. Some of the most common advertising mediums for auto recyclers today include TV commercials, billboards, radio commercials, yellow pages ad, social media advertising, email, and text messaging. Here is a breakdown of what you can anticipate for each of these mediums:
TV Commercials
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics1, 80% of the US population watches TV on any given day. The average time per day is around three hours per day depending on age and location. Therefore, TV commercials can be an excellent way to acquire new customers because many new people are likely to see the commercial especially if it is on a popular channel. However, you must consider the costs here to determine if this will work for your business. First, you must consider the time it is going to take to plan out a commercial. Then, you must get a crew to produce the commercial. According to Pikewood Creative2, a single day production with a crew of up to three people can cost between $500 – $5,000. A crew of up to 10 people, complete HD camera package, and lighting/grip truck can range between $10,000 – $50,000 for production. Next, you have to pay to air the commercial. According to Fit Small Business3, advertisers can expect to pay a minimum of $5 per 1,000 viewers for a 30-second commercial. The average cost of broadcasting a 30-second commercial nationally was $115,000 in 2019. For comparison, the average cost for a 30 second Super Bowl ad is $5.25 million.
Billboards
According to the Arbitron National In-Car Study on the Harley’s Dream blog4, 71% of Americans consciously look at billboard messages while driving. 58% learned about an event which they later attended. Also, 26% noted a phone number written on a billboard and 28% noted a website address written on a billboard. This is another method for getting new customers. According to Fit Small Business5, physical billboards cost is determined by the population of where the billboard is located. Physical billboards cost an average of $750 – $1,500 per month in rural area, $1,500 – $2,000 per month in small to midsize cities, and $14,000+ in larger markets. Digital billboards can cost $15,000+.
Radio Commercials
According to Radio Advertising Facts6, 92% of Americans age 12 and up listen to the radio each week which is an audience of 235 million listeners. According to Fit Small Business7, Radio advertising costs $1,000 – $2,500 to produce the commercial depending on what is included such as music, voice actors, and editing. The cost of airing radio commercials can range between $200 – $5,000 per week depending on location and size of the listening audience.
Another good way to build brand loyalty over the radio would be creating your own radio talk show like Nordstrom’s Under The Hood Show. According to Prometheus Radio Project8, many stations get on the air for under $15,000 and can stay on the air for less than $1,000 per month. The main start-up expenses for a radio station are engineering fees, studio equipment for producing radio shows, and transmitting equipment for sending your signals out to the world.
Yellow Pages Ad
Yellow Pages has recently transitioned to become a major online player, and according to Inc.com9 80 million people visit the YP.com site each month where more than 20 million businesses are listed. According to The Balance Everyday10, yellow pages ads cost anywhere from $250 – $400 for a business card sized ad.
Yellow Page ads have been steadily and significantly decreasing in popularity/cost since 2008 with the popularity of internet/cell phones.
There are currently about 223 million Facebook users in the United States and 2.2 billion users worldwide according to Statista11. According to Review 4212, the average user spends 58 minutes per day on FaceBook.
Facebook is free to create a business page and attract customers back to your business. This is a good way to establish brand loyalty. However, you can also advertise your business on FaceBook. According to Web FX13, FaceBook advertising costs $0.97 per click and $7.19 per 1,000 impressions.
Email Marketing
Email is widely used with over 90% of internet users maintaining an email account according to Statistica14. Over 40% of all email opens are on a mobile device which shows that a lot of people read emails on their phone. Campaign Monitor15 reports that the average email open rate is 17.8% across all industries and the average click-through rate is 2.6% once the email is opened. The cost of email marketing is $9 – $1,000 per month for a mid-size business if the campaign is self-managed and $300 – $500 per month if working with an agency according to Web FX16.
Text Marketing
Text marketing is a great way to establish brand loyalty and increase sales. According to Texn Rewards17, 96% of Americans own a smartphone. The US has an estimated population of 331 million in 2020, so about 318 million Americans have a cell phone. Also, 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes. So, a higher percentage of texts are read than email and within 3 minutes means your message gets read quickly via text message.
In general, you can expect to pay $.01 – $.06 per message for text message marketing depending on if you do the texting yourself or have a marketing company do the marketing under your guidance.
Another important factor when deciding which text marketing company to choose is how they get customers to join the program. If the customer must text in a keyword to a short code (TEXT2JOIN), then you will see less participation then if there is a kiosk in your business where they join. Also, if the kiosk is a mandatory sign-in because they need to sign a liability waiver as well, then you will see much more participation. Customers always have the option to opt-out of the text marketing program on these kiosks.
It is a good idea to use multiple of these mediums in your overall marketing strategy so you do not become dependent on one way to build your brand and increase sales.
One important point in all of these is that you need to be able to track the results. It is easy to track the results of Facebook, email, and text marketing. TV commercials, billboards, radio commercials, and yellow page ads are more difficult to track. However, if you have systems in place which track total attendance and total sales, then you can get an idea of whether or not these campaigns are delivering the results you expect. To do this, you want to establish a baseline attendance number and sales number for a particular month, then, you run one of these campaigns and compare the difference in attendance/sales. You want to make sure to compare the same month for different years where the economy is performing about the same in order to account for seasonal fluctuations and secular trends.
For US-based Auto Recyclers, we at Texn Rewards are seeing excellent participation throughout the country due to the proprietary check-in kiosk we created specifically for self-service salvage yards. Our ‘Just In’ notifications integrate directly with Crush and now also with Pinnacle/Powerlink through the URG data transfer service. We have improved our Check-In Manager system where yard managers can login to look up previous check-ins, check for coupons, and download liability waivers. Our check-in process is quick as long as yards do not ask for too many extra fields of data which we highly recommend they do not during the initiation process.
We just eclipsed 1.1 million subscribers nationwide and our opt-out percentage is excellent at most yards who use our kiosk with the liability waiver integration. If you are a full-service Auto Recycler in the United States and do a lot of online sales, then Podium18 is an excellent option for text marketing. They do payment processing through text messaging.
About
Texn Rewards is a mobile marketing which provides mobile/digital advertising & marketing services to small and medium-sized businesses that help add new customers and bring existing customers back.
To find out more, email Parker at info@texnrewards.com or visit www.texnrewards.com
1U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-7/television-capturing-americas-attention.htm
2Pikewood Creative http://pikewoodcreative.com/how-much-does-it-cost/
3Fit Small Business https://fitsmallbusiness.com/tv-advertising/#:~:text=For%20local%20television%20stations%2C%20advertisers,for%20upward%20of%20%245.25%20million
4Harley’s Dream https://harleysdream.org/2019/02/07/billboard-advertising-statistics/#:~:text=In%202018%20we%20put%20up,car%20traveling%20over%20200%20miles
5Fit Small Business https://fitsmallbusiness.com/how-much-does-billboard-advertising-cost/#:~:text=Physical%20billboard%20costs%20average%20%24750,%2415%2C000%2C%20depending%20on%20the%20location.
6Radio Advertising Facts http://radioadvertisingfacts.com/the-facts/radio-advertising-facts-figures/
7Fit Small Business https://fitsmallbusiness.com/radio-advertising-costs/
8Prometheus Radio Project https://www.prometheusradio.org/startup_costs#:~:text=Many%20stations%20get%20on%20the,signals%20out%20to%20the%20world
9Inc.com https://www.inc.com/gene-marks/do-people-still-use-the-yellow-pages-the-answer-may-surprise-you.html
10The Balance Everyday https://www.thebalanceeveryday.com/print-advertising-explained-38453#:~:text=This%20type%20of%20print%20advertising,decreasing%20since%202008%20or%20so
11Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-facebook-users/
14Statistica https://www.statista.com/topics/4295/e-mail-usage-in-the-united-states/
15Campaign Monitor https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-benchmarks/
16Web FX https://www.webfx.com/email-marketing-pricing.html
17Texn Rewards https://www.texnrewards.com/
