When you’ve just opened a shop and you’re starting from nothing, you need that phone to ring! Nobody understands this more than Samantha Andrews, co-owner of Wright Auto Works.
“I tried to figure it out,” Andrews says about attracting customers through Google Ad Words. “I would set a target and use words that I thought were good and I would set a budget–two or three times what it should be.”
At one point, Andrews went in and changed a few settings for Wright Auto Works’ website and got so excited when the phone rang “almost immediately.”
The first call was from someone in Texas. Her shops are located in Georgia and South Carolina. The next call was from Seattle and the next was also far away.
“I set it for the whole United States,” Andrews says of her Google Ads.
Rather than continuing to try and figure it out herself, Andrews decided to get help from professionals and immediately saw results while cutting her marketing costs in half. She learned a valuable lesson–pass the baton to others who know what they’re doing and spend more time doing what you are good at.
Backstory:
Andrews co-owns two locations of Wright Auto Works in Loganville, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina with two business partners. Andrews has been in the industry for seven years and held many positions throughout that time and has been nicknamed the “car count queen,” as she’s quite good at driving traffic to shops. That wasn’t always the case, however.
Early on in her career, she says she was terrible at getting people in the door. Her boss would pay for rings, and she was under the impression that if you had a nice personality on the phone, that’s all that you needed. She got training on how to convert calls into customers and now she has a conversion rate close to 100%.
Problem:
When they first opened the shop, they hired someone to do their website and paid that person a lot of money. The problem was that they didn’t fully understand the full picture of Ad Words and because of that, they got a basic website with pretty pictures.
“There were no SEO words and it wasn’t built very well,” Andrews says.
The website looked alright, but pretty quickly Andrews knew that it wasn’t up to par and got frustrated with the person who created it. They would send new photography and the site wouldn’t get updated, or he would use stock images instead of the ones that were provided. The font and size weren’t consistent throughout the website and there were even bigger problems, such as the claim that the shop did tires before Wright Auto Works had a tire machine. “It was misleading,” Andrews says. “Not a great impression.”
Andrews tried to solve the problem by herself because she had a slight understanding of Ad Words and so she started making her own ads in Google. She set targets and used words that she thought would be good and set a budget that, in retrospect, was two to three times what it should be.
Solution:
Wright Auto Works tried to make their website work. They had invested so much money into the website but eventually just realized that it was never going to work how they expected, and they reached a breaking point with the person who created their site. He was trying to get them to pay for Ad Words and either wouldn’t make the requested changes to the site or do it poorly. Finally, the team decided to reach out to Leads Near Me. From the time that they signed with Leads Near Me it was three to four weeks until the website went live in February of 2024.
“It was half the cost and we got almost immediate results with Leads Near Me,” Andrews says. “I got so used to spending so much on Google Ads that I almost didn’t trust it.”
Aftermath:
Once the shop got up and running, Andrews says they had between 120 and 160 cars per month with the old website and that jumped to roughly 300 cars per month with Leads Near Me. “We should have done it sooner,” Andrews says.
Takeaway:
The biggest lesson that Andrews learned is that it's better to pass things off that you’re not good at. “It’s nice to pass the baton to somebody and trust that they know what they’re doing,” Andrews says of the experience.
The cost up front might scare you, she says, but the ROI is so high and you can spend your time on something that you are good at.
