Almost all businesses are seasonal to some degree, but running a window tint sales and installation business has its unique seasonal challenges. In the hot months you deal with an outright glut of customers wanting their vehicle, business, or home tinted ASAP because of heat, glare, and UV damage. But then the winter comes and things slow down as people forget.
To keep drumming up leads and sales even in the cooler, grayer months, you need to put a shine in your window tint marketing. Ah, but you ask: “How do I market my window tint business?”
You make a plan and you implement it and you succeed.
Class Time: Marketing for Window Tinters 101
Online window tint marketing is always the best place to start because it is easy to make your marketing work targeted, it’s easy scale your efforts up or down, and it’s rather affordable. Online tint marketing means you can reach a wide audience with little expenditure of cash and, as or more notable, with relatively little time and effort. (This is versus “offline” marketing, or real world, traditional marketing with ad buys, billboards, mobile media, and so on.
Don’t worry if you have limited online marketing experience and not much budget to throw at online marketing for a window tint business, there are a lot of highly effective marketing tools online that are free and simple to use, with Google My Business as a great example. You will quickly learn all about online marketing and will be able to make your approach more customized and focused to fit your needs, but at first the best strategy is just to get started.
These are the seven best easy and free (or very low cost) window tint marketing strategies you can use at any stage of your business development:
1. Claim your Google Business listing
2. Create a website that converts visits to leads
3. Launch a Facebook page for your company
4. Seek and collect online reviews
5. Generate or pay for informative window tint content
6. Catch more leads using the Lead Capture feature of Tint Wiz on your site and social media
7. Leverage excellent customer service as an arm of your marketing plan
A Few Window Tinting Marketing Fundamentals
No one opens a window tint business because they want to spend all their time thinking about marketing a window tint business. That’s a job for a marketing agency, but a marketing agency is not needed — nor is it necessary for you to hire an agency or spend all your time worrying how to market a tint business to have a very successful tint company marketing strategy.
And in fact, you probably know more about how to market your tint business than you think: finding a good name for your tint business and designing or choosing a logo, spreading the word about your services to friends and family, and having existing customers give out referrals are all classic marketing practices.
To make the most out of these and other marketing efforts, you need to start at the very beginning of the process by coming to clearly understand your own brand, for then you can successfully promote your brand.
Your brand, meaning what people think of when they see your logo, hear your name, or think of your business generally, is the akin to the promise you make your customers. It’s what sets you apart you different from your competitors, it’s what earns customer trust, and it’s the reason new and repeat customers will go with you over all the other window tint businesses that pop up when they search online for the terms “best window tint near me.”
Window Tint Marketing Strategies
Now that you have the fundamentals of marketing a tint business down, let’s move on to building your out online marketing strategies so you can start getting more customers.
Whether someone just got a new car or is finally fed up with roasting in the home or office, your potential window tint customer is almost always going to be looking for the nearest window tinter with a trusted reputation and who seems likely to get the job done fast and well. Customers are influenced by the ranking of internet search results, by positive reviews and ratings, and offline, so to speak, by being able to get a human on the phone fast.
The two most important things you need to do to successfully market a window tint business online go hand-in-hand: make your tint business easy to find and make it easy to contact.
1. Claim your Google Business listing
Google is where most customers turn when searching for a nearby window tint shop. If you want customers to find you, then you need to set up a Google my Business listing, it’s a must.
Setting up your local Google business listing is quite easy — all that’s needed is your company’s name, an address, and your contact info. And it’s OK if you don’t operate from a fixed location., as long as you serve a given area — if you operate a mobile tint business and do not have a brick-and-mortar address, you can use a mailing address (like your home) to verify the listing and you can then choose to hide that address, instead showing online a service area.
2. Build your window tint website
Step two for being found online and chosen by customers is to establish and grow your online presence, and a crisp, professional-looking website will increase your visibility and credibility and will lead to more customers and more revenue.
Keep your window tint company site simple, crisp, and clean so potential customers can find the info they need without clutter. Here are a few of the essential elements of a window tint website that bring in leads and converts to sales:
— A professional name and solid logo
— A few notes on your competitive edge over competitors (AKA any unique selling points)
— Your phone number and email
— The locations to which you cater your business
— A list of the services provided
— An easy way to request work such the as Lead Capture tool
— List of any awards and accreditations
— Reviews, ratings, and testimonials that vouch for your work
Even if you have made created a website before, fear not. There are great inexpensive web building tools you can consider such as Wix or WordPress, and as for developing your logo, look to PicMonkey or Canva for professional logo design tools.
3. Set up your window tint business’s Facebook page
A Facebook business page helps a service business stay in touch with customers, helps it appear in Google search results, and will lead to you booking more jobs. A business Facebook page is another solid way to be found fast online both because of the reach you can garner with Facebook ads and because of the shares.
Facebook’s share-ability is a huge asset when getting the word out to would-be customers in your area. Of all the many social media platforms, Facebook still has far and away the most users and the most conversion-friendly features that help you get leads. Plus, a Facebook page is free and relatively easy to set up. You can optimize your window tint business’s Facebook page to ensure it helps you get more leads.
But in order to enjoy those sort of enhanced results, you need to make sure the page is well-optimized for your business’ goals. The difference between a regular old Facebook page and an optimized Facebook page is like the difference between a hand-me-down car that runs fine but will never catch eyes and a sports car that people can’t help to notice.
4. Gather and manage online reviews
Positive feedback online left by existing customers gives potential new customers confidence in your products and your tinting services. Also, online reviews that feature your shop’s name can help your Google local page appear atop other businesses without as many reviews. Having lots of online reviews has a positive effect on your website’s rankings.
Here are a few tips to start netting high quality-reviews:
1. Send all customers follow-up email after their job is complete. In this email, you can let them know the work is done and, while you you’re at it, ask for feedback.
2. If the feedback left by a customer is positive, send them a polite foll-up request for a review with a link to your Google Business or Facebook page. Many people will give you a review if you just ask for one.
3. Finally, you can automate the review request process by using tools available from Tint Wiz. Your customers can be asked to leave a review on whichever sites you want them directed to when they interact with your site.
5. Create expert window tint content
Window tint is a unique product in a specialized industry, and to be candid most people don’t know much — if anything — about tinting and its many benefits. Help your customers feel better educated and informed (and willing to spend), at no obligation to them with free content, and you’ll win their trust and quite likely win their business.
This type of marketing is called content marketing, and its goal is to create organic, interesting, informative, and ideally also shareable content, such as blogs, images, Instagram posts, or YouTube videos, that position your team as approachable experts and that keeps your brand top-of-mind for would-be customers.
A solid strategy is creating content based around recently completely window tint installation jobs. Use pictures of your projects in the posts (before and after images always do well) and write descriptions about what you did done and why. Write these articles with the customer in mind and leave the industry jargon out of it.
And if writing isn’t your comfort area, consider creating videos and post those: videos are a solid way to engage with customers, and when kept short or edited down, videos can be posted all across the web, from your website to social media to YouTube and even in paid ads. (Or you can always hire a writer for your content, of course.)
6. Get more leads using Lead Capture
The Lead Form feature created by and available on Tint Wiz lets you capture customers’ information entered on your website, on social, as a QR code, and more. When a potential customer submits info, you are notified by Tint Wiz, and all of that customer’s information that is in Tint Wiz is made ready for you without any data entry or copying and pasting from email or messenger.
Once a lead is captured, you can get in touch with that customer or even directly send them a quote via SMS text message or email with just a couple of clicks or taps. The Tint Wiz portal allows you to see when the customer has read the proposal and also sends automatic follow ups to them. For example, Tint Wiz automatically follows up with your lead via email a day after the lead is landed if the customer has not viewed the proposal, and it does so again 48 hours later if said proposal has still not yet been approved (or rejected).
Using Tint Wiz’s automations like this keeps workflow efficient without anyone being missed or forgotten even as your business and roster grows.
7. Excellent customer service as a marketing tool
Advertising and social media and content marketing are all pieces of the larger marketing puzzle. But great customer service is by far the best — the most cost-efficient and reliable — long-term growth strategy for any window tinting business.
Solid customer service grows your business in two ways:
1. You will earn repeat business from your current customers, and repeat business is cheaper and of more value in the big picture, because you have already done the hard work and spent the time and money to get their attention and gain their trust.
2. Happy, satisfied, and above all long-term customers spread the word and give out personal referrals, no spend needed.
Using a window tinting software such as Tint Wiz can allow you to quickly access customers information anytime (and from anywhere) which means greater customer satisfaction because they all feel closely supported, and it means more efficiency for the business. It’s, in other words, a win-win situation for both the shop and the customer.
Make Marketing Your Tint Company Part of Your Daily Routine
Simple tasks like adding new pictures to Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, and your website can make a huge difference for your online presence, as can regularly updating a blog — these steps keep customers and search engines alike engaged.
There are also many simple tasks you can do throughout the day even off your computer that are, in their way, marketing. These include things like educating customers about the products and services over the phone, engaging in social media chats and posting on relevant accounts, and of course asking clients for feedback, ratings, and reviews.
Also, take note of the frequently asked questions from your customers and use these in your potential marketing content — what they ask, others are surely wondering. So in short, make window tint Marketing Strategy a deliberate, reasoned part of your daily activities until it no longer needs so much intention because it becomes second nature.
When these many efforts become routine each and every day, then week-by-week, month-by-month, and year-to-year, they add up to a major boost in your leads and revenues.
About Tint Wiz
Tint Wiz is a business management platform for window tint businesses that keeps track of everything in one place and automates day-to-day operations, so window tint businesses can provide exceptional service and run at maximum efficiency.
