What Does Your Website Cost You?

We use kukui. They do the Seo, website, reviews, Facebook, appointments and they mow my lawn (kidding)

 It costs me 800 a month and it seems like I break even with the new customers and the costs. I expect to retain those customers since we're awesome so I try to justify the cost that way. Sometimes I wonder if marketing is more about marketing to the business by the company than it is to potential customers. I feel like theres alot of truth about internet marketing but also alot of hype. They make it sound like a switch will flip and bang. You're overwhelmed with great clients. That doesnt happen.

I Iike kukui alot and I'm not putting them down but I still think the best advertising is old fashioned word of mouth from a job well done by people who give a poop. 

I've also noticed that some shops go full out on advertising and every time they either do that to pump their numbers to sell their business or they go under. I've never one single time in my area seen a shops name all over the place and stay in business for another 5 years. 

Another thing that's hard to quantify is that after kukui redesigned our site and made it more professional and helpful that my existing customers had an oh wow reaction and something about that reminded me of an article about perceived value by Mitch Schneider who I'm not sure I could have existed this long (30 years) without.  That perceived value seems to validate our existing customers opinion of us and allows us to charge as a premium business rather than compete with a discount chain. 

A few extra dollars will be forgotten but a crappy cheap job will always be remembered.

On 9/1/2018 at 5:15 AM, autoguy said:

@meowpox I checked out your website and it looks very clean. Your front page has no information about your business at all. Do you ever get customer asking what you do? Looks like you sell merchandise, do you fix cars also?

You can read about our shop in the About section hehe. Address and phone number is on the front page. I'm really big on design and branding, and just really hate the look of a busy front page and feel it is a little overwhelming. Majority of our customers are word of mouth so if they're at our website, they already know a little bit about who we are. But I do believe it has to do with customer base. We are not a general repair shop. Our customers love a clean beautiful shop, because they have really really nice expensive cars. So our website reflects that well. We get tons of compliments on it by our customers. 

On 9/1/2018 at 7:36 AM, xrac said:

I would add that while you have beautiful photographs I find the print too small and too light colored. This could make it hard to read for some people. There is no place on the opening page to click to find your services or to book an appointment. I think it is hard to get a customer beyond your front page and they need something fast and easy to move forward. If we take them to too many pages to do anything we will lose them. I think a customer should be able to book an appointment or call us from the front page. Just my two cents that is worth one cent. 

If you hover over About, theres a link called Services. Thats just one click. For appt, people click on Quote. I think this is good advice but also depends on your customer base. Again, we're not a general repair shop and we're in a very niche market so most people that need to contact us AND are actually in our target customer base will find it not a problem to click one extra link to contact us.