How to Advertise Your Body Shop Seasonally and With the Weather

Table of Contents

• Intro
• Seasonal Collision Repair Advertising
• Weather-Based Collision Repair Advertising
• Automate Your Weather-Based Advertising
• Final Thoughts

Video

Natural phenomena and auto body repair go hand-in-hand. 

Springtime brings rain and storms, specifically hail storms, and the damage that goes with it. 

In the summer we have more road trip traffic, and more traffic means more accidents. 

Fall means the days are getting shorter, and harvest time includes tractors and large equipment on the roads, at least here in the Midwest. And there’s no shortage of suicidal deer to destroy vehicles. 

Then in winter we get snow and ice and more crashes.

What if your shop could not only advertise to match the current season, but could also be ready to run ads at a moment’s notice depending on weather conditions?

Seasonal Collision Repair Advertising

Seasonal Advertising is just what it sounds like - running ads or campaigns based on the time of year. For example, in the fall, you might run ads related to deer hits. 

Advertising is most effective when it’s relevant to a person’s current situation. 

Imagine you are driving home from work on an autumn evening, and the sun is low on the horizon, and a family of deer runs across the road in front of you, close enough that you have to brake hard.

Now when you see a billboard about deer strikes, it resonates with you. 

You get home and are perusing Facebook or Instagram, and there’s an ad from a body shop showing a car that has hit a deer. That is a relevant ad. 

There’s no reason that shouldn’t be your shop’s ad, but how do you do it? 

The simplest way to get in front of lots of people is Facebook Advertising. You or your staff can create a post and boost it, or for a more comprehensive ad campaign with tighter targeting, create the post using Meta Business Suite.

Once your ad is created, consider trying a few variations of it to see which version gets the best results. And once it’s created, you simply turn it on each year at the appropriate time. 

You can always swap out the text and graphics, but having something ready ahead of time is a time-saver, and helps prevent you from telling yourself “maybe I’ll try advertising next month”.

When winter rolls around, you’ll have your winter ad campaign ready ahead of time on Facebook or Google Ads. This time you decide to create a campaign showing winter collisions and your quick repair turnaround time.

Weather-Based Collision Repair Advertising

With seasonal advertising, you have the same four seasons every year, and can run your campaigns during the entire season if you wish. But with weather-based advertising, you only run ads for a few days after a weather event.

Why only a few days? For the same reason I covered earlier - relevance. 

If your area has a severe hailstorm on Tuesday morning, an ad about paintless dent repair for hail damage is super relevant if someone sees it that evening or over the next couple of days. 

That same ad can still be useful a week later, but having it running immediately after the storm gets your shop in prospects’ eyes right away.

The only way you can “turn on” an ad immediately after the storm is to have it created ahead of time. 

You can do this on: 

• Facebook
• Google Ads
• YouTube
• other platforms. 

Once your ad account has been created, you can create ads and leave them in draft mode where they aren’t active. Once that storm hits, you turn it on instantly and you’re filling a need for prospects who have just noticed that their car’s roof is full of tiny, expensive-looking dents.

You can repeat this process for any other weather events you can think of such as:

• ice and snow
• high winds
• dense fog
• raining frogs

Create ads for each occasion and you’ll be ready to run them at a moment’s notice.

Automate Your Weather-Based Advertising

If you really want to get fancy, you can integrate your ads with a monitoring service such as WeatherAds, which can trigger your ads to be displayed based on weather conditions, including:

• wind speed
• snow
• ice
• blizzard
• freezing rain
• storm
• hail
• fog
• hurricane
• tornado
• temperature
• rain
• sunshine
• cloud cover
• humidity 
• air pressure
• UV index
• thunder/ lightning

It doesn’t take too much creativity to think of scenarios where you might be able to use these conditions.

Final Thoughts

With seasonal advertising, you are planning your collision repair advertising to match the changing seasons, so in addition to digital advertising and social media, you can use billboards and print ads. With weather-based advertising, you’ll have to stick with online ads.

Want us to set this all up for you? Get in touch today!