Hero Group AI Labs - Ep 7 - Collision Marketing Planning Machine

Wow. It's almost the end of 2025 and a lot of you are pulling up your numbers and you're thinking, man, we worked our tails off. Why didn't we hit our goals? If that's you, don't beat yourself up. This year has been pretty brutal for a lot of body shops. So today I'm giving you something that will help you win 2026 before it even starts. An AI Labs collision market Research Machine runs a full market analysis in minutes. Who's in your area, what they drive, how old the vehicles are. But income brackets, you're really pulling from who your real competitors are and exactly where to focus your marketing. Normally, a report like this will cost thousands. Today, we're going to generate it in about five minutes for free. So let's get into it. Hey again, it's Tom here and welcome back to the Hero Group AI Labs. Now, even though I sold my marketing agency this summer, I still handle all the marketing here at the Hero Group and I still run the Collision Hub Marketing 20 Group. And this week I had a really good conversation with a 20 group member who recently purchased the shop. And she's doing what a lot of smart owners do. At the end of the year, she's building her 2026 marketing plan. But the part that really stood out to me is that she's been digging into the demographics of her area, their age, their income, what people drive, so that she can stop guessing and start marketing to the right customer. What a great idea. So I expanded on that and I built another AI machine, the Collision Market Research Machine. It's a 12 page master prompt that forces the right thinking for 2026, does a thorough market analysis. It'll help you map your positioning, it'll recommend where your ad spend should go, generate some taglines and ad angles for each channel, and even builds a 90 day content and marketing plan to get you moving fast. This is the kind of work that I used to do for my agency clients and it would take several days. Now you'll just answer a few questions and in about five minutes or so let the prompt run and it'll generate a report you can actually use, something you'd normally pay thousands for. So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to run it and how to interpret the results so that you can go into 2026 with a real plan and not just a guess. Okay, so just like everything, we're going to start by grabbing my prompt and this will be on the website and it'll be in the show notes down here. Depending on where you're consuming this, if it's on YouTube, you know it'll. I've got links on the website. If you're looking at it on our website and straight from YouTube I'll have links there too. But here's the prompt and like I said it's. It's 1700 words, 1751 words. It's 12 pages. But don't let that scare you. A lot of it is prompting you to answer some information and so that's what we're doing here. So all right then obviously we're going to grab ChatGPT so I'll start a new chat here. And I'm just going to say run this prompt. Now. It's important to know I'm using chat GPT 5.2 thinking and I may switch it to Pro after the first couple of questions here because it does things just a little bit differently. This one's. It takes a little bit longer but Pro might be a better research one because I'm going to do some market research in here. So just know that. So I'm starting with ChatGPT 5.2 thinking that's what I've been using lately. It's their newest one and it works the best for all the stuff I'm doing which I'm in AI pretty much all day every day. So let's run this prompt here and I built this in a way where it's going to ask you guys questions and then stop until you answer them. And so I'm going to pick a shop, a friend of mine's shop that I just know kind of, you know pretty well what his zip codes and everything are because I think it's important to have a real shop and not just some made up stuff here to use this. And I'm sure he wouldn't mind me doing this. So anyway, so it's going to ask for shop name. So we're going to choose Body Works plus and Charlotte and I know I use it a lot in my examples but Brian usually is pretty open about giving me access to the things that I that I need to do these. So thanks Brian, if you're watching this one. Alright, so it's Bodyworks plus and the shop address is. No real formatting needed. You can just kind of comment, just answer the questions, website URL, Bodyworksplus.com and the Google Business Profile link. So let me show you how to do that one. That's a little bit tricky. So I'm going to do Body Shop, Charlotte. And Bodyworks plus is right here. So I'm going to grab it, click it, and then I'm going to hit the share button right here. See this share? So I'm going to share. That's going to give me the link. Link copied. I'm going to come back to my prompt here. I'm going to drop that in and we're going to hit send and it'll move me to step number two. I think there's like five steps in here. All right, now it wants to know my market boundary. So it wants to know the zip codes, radius and miles from the shop or drive time. I figured that you're probably going to want to either if you're using this tool, you're either going to want certain zip codes that you want to target. You want to maybe do a radius from the shop, or maybe some drive time. If you're kind of in a really dense area, maybe you just want to keep it down to drive time, which might actually be small in mile radius. So you can kind of pick any of those things. Like I said, I've got Brian's zip codes here. So I'm going to say it's a. And then I'm going to put his zip codes in and then we'll move on to step three. All right, positioning goals and offers. So work mix certifications, Differentiator content, Average delivered repairs per month. Current average delivered per month. So what I've built in here for you guys is some benchmarking and things like that. So let me answer these questions because I know the answers. He's 99% non DRP, But it does have Chubb as a DRP and certification specialties. They are OEM certified for most brands, Including Tesla and soon possibly Rivian. They have ADAs. Let's see. Differentiator, one of the most. Certified. Shops in Charlotte, recently won Best of Charlotte. Current average delivery repairs a month. They do about 50. And I know that he always wants to try to get to 65 as the target. And monthly budget. I don't know this real number, but I'm gonna say because I know what he was spending with us and he does TV. So I'm gonna take a guess that it's $7,500 a month. That may be shocking for some shops. It is a non DRP shop, so that's not a crazy budget. But I built in to this budget. Suggestions, but it may be a lot less than that. Maybe only 5,000 or 3,500. I really don't know, but I'm putting in 7,500 just to see where we go with it from there. So I say 7,500, but that does include TV ads. Let's see, what else am I missing? Marketing budget for month, top three money services they want to push. So OEM certified repairs, Ev. Including Tesla, Rivian and Rivian Polestar. They do a lot of Polestars too. Probably there's a lot of polestars in Charlotte. And then let's see the third one. Let's just say that they want to do Volvo. And gmc trucks. Okay, So step four, five. So we're almost done here. So I capture step three now. Now please provide best guess values. Roughest find lead to booked estimate rate. So what's their close ratio? I'm going to go 75% close ratio. I actually don't know the answer to that. But my podcast coming up is going to be with a shop that Shane Orlando from Orlando Collision center out in Arizona who is very vigilant about tracking his close ratio. So we're going to learn how he does that. So stay tuned for that one. Estimate repair close ratio of the completed estimates, what percent become a repair? I guess that's repair versus total loss. So let's say 70% repaired, 30% total loss. I don't know the actual number of that either. That's a guess. Average RO value or average gross profit per repair one is required. RO value. I'm going to say average RO, $7,500. This is not his real numbers, but I'm just going to put that in there because it kind of matches what I think the real industry averages minus the calibers and. RO value. Gross profit per repair. I don't know. Let's see. Let's just say 80% GP. I actually don't know this number either. 80% GP for his shop rather. So I kind of answered 4 already. Are totals a profit problem? No, they make money on totals. Capacity constraints, pick any. Insurance, friction. Growth preference, More cars less than five years old. And let's just go with that. See what we get here. So I. This is a good place to put this. In here there's one piece of data that you can get. I didn't buy it for here because I just. Number one, I didn't have time. I wanted to get this shot today. But your paint reps can get you your car park. And what car park is? That's the registered vehicles in your market. I don't have it. Here's a place that you can get it you can go to experian.com automotive autocount and you're going to click Vehicles in Operation. The reason I didn't go ahead and do it is because you can't just click and buy it online. It's, you know, you have to contact us. This will tell you about it. But you gotta, you gotta call them to buy this. So I didn't have time today to call and try to buy one. I would have for the sake of the video, but I did not have time to get that done today. So. But a free way to do that is to call your paint rep and ask if they can pull this. I've seen, I've seen these reports and most of your paint reps have this access to this. It's either the Experian one or it might be this. S and P. There's another one too, and I can't think of the name of it. Monthly repairs delivered. So, so number one, don't have skip two. Monthly repairs delivered the last 12 to 24 months. I. I'm gonna say average 50amonth. This is. I built in some seasonality actually. Why don't I do that? I want you to see what this, this thing can really do. So, So here I'll just do this really fast. Number two, I'm just going to randomly do this at 40. This will be an easy thing for you guys to pull you out be able to just pull this right out of your sales data right out of ccc. Just your closed jobs per month. So you see what I'm doing here, I'm doing year, month and then car count in this format and it tells you how it wants the format. So. And then number three, local crash data. Skip. Don't have Skip. I'm going to say Skip the competitors list. I do have it, but it would take me a while to find it. So I'm just going to hit Skip. I. There's actually tools that you can use to pull this maps extractor. This tool right here, you can use this tool, a tool like this or a web lead extractor. And this will, this will go through and you can pick your shop, pick a radius around it and it'll pull in all your competitor names. But you guys probably already know all your names. So you can just skip that. I'll just put Caliber. Gerber, Skip. I. We'll just skip this one here for the sake of this video. But you guys know who your competitors are, so you can just put that in there. Okay. Boom. Sorry if that one took a little while. But I want to kind of really show you how this will work for you and how thorough this report is. I also built weather patterns into this too so that it can understand your seasonality. So not sure how long this will take, but probably just a few minutes. Guys, if you're watching this, I hope you're gonna get a lot of value of this thing. Really, I mean this, this is something that would have taken me everything AI is doing here in a matter of minutes would have taken me days to do this. It's now it's working on the 90 day plan. Here we go. So that was what, a couple minutes, maybe two minutes, two, three minutes, something like that. Alright, so here we go. Let's go through the results. Body Works plus here's the market boundaries, here's the starting point. 50 deliveries a month we want to get to 65 one of the most OEM certified shops in Charlotte Tesla soon Rivian on site ADAS award winning high trust fastest path to 15 delivered repairs per month Bias targeting to new vehicle households so higher income ZIPs which it identified those to reduce total loss exposure and increase repairable claims Mix using income as a practical proxy. Win the trust plus proof battle against large MSOs with the simple message factory procedures Certified documentation calibration certifications documentation calibration turn insurance friction into a customer benefit Clear process safety first language documentation promise rather than behind the scenes headache Search for demand capture people already looking then meta YouTube for demand creation people who don't know they need OEM certified Tesla 8s yet build a single newer vehicle EV8s landing stack 3 to 5 service pages plus strong internal linking between them and the homepage explain in section L. I ran a quick test of this prompt to see how it would do and I thought it got too marketing speaky so I built in an explainer for these things so that you know like if you don't use words like stack and things like that I, I have it explaining all that to you but a stack is just literally stacking like tactics like you know, website tactics and Facebook ads and so on and so on. Make a Google business page production system post photos Q and A report review velocity cheapest lead lever inclusion Agreed. We used to charge for this to monitor and manage your Google My business profile Google business profile measure TV like performance marketing unique call tracking numbers so I had it suggest some things like that in here. Capacity alignment what to do this week Install call tracking and assign unique numbers for Google Rewrite the Google business page description add 15 to 25 photos certifications walls calibration setup EV bay before and after publish two proof posts Tesla repairs aren't normal repairs and ADAS calibration after a hit matters launch Google and Plus brand search Plus Tesla collision repair so run some Google Ads to those keywords what to do this month build and refresh 4 core pages OEM certified pages Tesla Rivian ADAS calibration with frequently asked questions and proof of end process Start a campaign a review campaign with electric vehicle and OEM language Scripts provided in section K Added documentation Promise to every every estimate conversion and follow up text here's what to do over the next 90 days run the 13 week content plan optimize the zip code level performance prioritize these three zips if they produce more repairable claims Rebalance the budget seasonally Section E with a heavier capture in spring and more authority building in a summer slump okay, so here's the marketing data. I won't read through all this stuff. You can read it on the screen, pause it if you want. But here's the zip code list. Here's the demographics. So it's looking at median age. It's looking at here's the population in each zip, here's the median age. Interesting that most of these people are in the 30s. If you've ever been to the Charlotte area it actually I would have thought it was more in the twenties actually especially where Brian is. It's almost everybody there. I feel like the grandpa when I'm there at 51 but but it is kind of a young demographic as you can see 45 is the oldest median age in the population there. Here's the income A lot of college graduates migrate to Charlotte area so that's not surprising that it's a highly educated population. Your area might be totally different. It might really surprise you. Okay so market level interpretation practical. Your zip is much it mixes affluent and educated overall with meaningful pockets of younger less affluent density. So there's a lot of kids there that are getting their careers started. They're not in a rough area. They're just young kids that have started their careers and so they're going to be lower on the income bracket platform implication. Using a population weighted proxy across your zips, the median age Signal is around 39 which falls falls in your rule brand of 37 to 46 to prioritize Facebook which I you know 37 year olds probably still on Facebook but maybe TikTok would be a good good one for Brian. Certainly Instagram, which it mentioned in YouTube and search again Your results are gonna be different platform weighting recommendations. Where to put the so lsa, by the way? Local search area. So Google search. Local search area. 30% of your efforts go to Google search. 25% to Facebook, 20% to YouTube, 10% to Instagram. Again, you can experiment with this stuff too, you know. But the nice thing with running ads on Meta is you get both, you cover both. So really 35% you'd have Facebook and Instagram, Google business profile 10% Nextdoor, 5% supportive and homeowner heavy zips. That's an interesting one. We never did a lot with Nextdoor, so it might be worth something to look into that vehicle and EV ADAS signals. Again, I don't have the car park vehicle information, so if I had that, we could really tighten this up. So I would encourage you to call your paint rep and ask for this and then attach it to the prompt when you run it. So I'll skip ahead of that. But you know, having been in the area, it's a lot of kids that are, you know, first job, first car. That was the first thing I did when I graduated college and got my first job was I bought a new car. So there's. That's a good thing for his market area because he really wants to try to target cars that are less than 5 years old so that they don't total out. So higher income zips lease heavy households messaging messaging implications. You know, emphasize OEM procedures, certifications, EV competence, adas calibrations, documentation, total loss exposure module, vehicle age and profitability impact. So I said that it's around 30% total losses totals. Total losses are not a profit problem. But they do not count towards delivered repairs. Goal preference, more volume. They want higher vehicles directional total loss risk score by zip. This is interesting. So which higher income newer vehicles total loss risk. So 228206 has a high total loss risk. Older cheaper vehicle mix more likely 2810210 medium, 28277 low, 2828031 low to medium and 28036 are low. So in other words low probability that these cars are going to total out targeting recommendation. You know, obviously total it. Right. We're just talking averages here. Not that Brian wouldn't total cars or anything like that, but just you know what I mean by total loss. That it's just the age. Specifically the age of the vehicle targeting recommendations. Align your goals at the KPI has delivered repairs bias spend and creative towards those zip codes first and then the other ones to round it out seasonality and weather crash opportunity module so seasonal seasonality for my delivery repairs that's why I put those numbers in there so top three months April, March and May top three slower months July, August and June so volatility proxy coefficient of variation so there's a 16.7% swing and again I just threw those numbers in there so really don't put a lot in that practical seasonal shifts what to do differently so on your peak months shift your budget towards search and local search area fast lead responses, answer calls quickly get quick scheduling, do a lot of follow up texts. So basically these are your hot months so get ready you know and and really target local search. So what I would do there is maybe some Google Ads definitely pump up your Facebook budget for those three months and then your off peak shoot shift towards authority and building content reviews remarketing stay visible so that you win when the demand returns Recommended budget allocation by season so March May it's suggesting a 15% bump in your ad spend and maybe even pull from your meta budget if needed. June through August the 10% go to search and 10% to YouTube and meta content and remarketing in the winter just stay steady capture add winter safety adas education weather crash hooks that you can you could credibly use by the way I had it built into the prompt to check weather and seasonality and see how that might impact your marketing. Depending on where you live you might have a mild climate, it doesn't really matter. Or you might be like me in the mid Atlantic area right now we still got snow on the ground. It's December 18th and you know you're going to have wintry spikes. So I wanted to have that factor into into here too so that we can kind of plan for weather seasonality. So you know North Carolina severe weather produces hail wind events, blah blah blah. You can read through all this stuff. I won't read through through that competitor and network pressure scan. So it's looking at your competitors. So I told it caliber Caliber and Gerber. If I had put everything in there it would look through here too. So additional visible competitors Tesla collision repair centers in Charlotte other shops claiming ADAS calibration Mark Ficken Collision Center I'm not familiar with them. Rivian set of certified network positioning exists. What competitors claim Lifetime warranty national guarantee trusted by insurers fast turnaround Tesla authorized what they can't easily prove which is your advantage Breadth of OEM certifications local award credibility repeatable documentation system calibration as a policy customer advocacy so what it's saying here basically is here's how your competitors market themselves and here's some angles for you to try in your marketing. I did build that into here that I wanted that your defensible wedge proof driven, you know, so kind of beat the drum here on these things. So here's what the core promise of some of the competitors and by subject matter and what your kind of counter angle to what they're saying is, you know, so channel strategy, demand capture and demand creation. So and I had it explained tactics in plain English because I wanted you to be able to kind of follow along what it's saying. So Google Search demand capture purpose show up when people are actively searching for collision repair or Tesla collision repair or OEM certified. Here's the best segments for that. Starting with these first and then move on to that one minimum viable structure. Campaign 1 is just a brand for body works plus Campaign 2 collision repair Campaign 3 EV Tesla Rivian terms Campaign 4 ADAS calibration terms. So this is Google search, Google AdWords. So these are four campaigns types that you can run. I'm going to do a follow up to this one where I'm going to build a marketing lead gen analysis machine where once you have this data and you set up these campaigns, I'm going to build a machine that can then follow the results. It would be a natural part B to this I've started working on it. I'm trying to figure out a way to make it easy for non marketers to gather the data pipelines that you're going to need to build it. So I don't have that one done yet. When I do finish that video I will add, go back in here and add a link to the show notes and as well as update our website with that. So but least let's get you started down the right path with where to put the money and how to set up the campaign. So even if you don't work, even if you don't do this in house and you work with a marketing agency and you have any kind of marketing campaign reviews, bring these notes with you and just say here's what I would like to try. I want to run four campaigns on Google during these months into these zip codes and I want to want you to come up with some ad ideas focused on these themes. That's how I would, I would run that conversation by your marketing agency. If you don't like what you get from them or they're scratching your head, brother, you've got the wrong marketing agency. So you may want to take a look at who you're using because this is some pretty basic stuff. And then KPI targets starting points, cost and lead booked estimate. These are what you want them accountable for. It's what everyone kept me accountable for and kept me up at night trying to figure out ways to make sure that I could prove that our ads generated names on a page which is really a difficult thing to do. But we built some tools to help us get there in my marketing agency and you're certainly welcome to reach out to my agency, my former agency, Stratosphere Studio. Capture the Keys was our brand. You know there's still working with the collision repair industry. I'm still somewhat involved but not really heavily involved but happy to if you're watching this video and you want me to make an introduction over there, happy to do that. So Google Local service and this is by the way not a plug for my marketing agency. It's just letting you know if you're looking for somebody I can put you in touch. Google Local Service ads LSA Demand Capture purpose calls from Google Guaranteed style local pack were available for your category. So that that's the you know, minimal viable. You want the the local search area profile plus budget plus hours plus fast call answering. So this is kind of like on you to make sure that you're tracking this stuff. Maybe if I need to I can build some kind of maybe after my podcast that I'm going to film tomorrow with Orlando with Shane Orlando and we talk about how he does his close ratio tracking. Maybe I'll build a tool for that and that'll be a future episode. So if I do that one, I'll stick it in here too where I leave off Google Business Profile Free Demand capture so when the map pack for the near me intent okay that's a whole conversation. Honestly the map pack near Me I think it really it all boils down to just one thing. How close you are to how who's the closest shop to where you're searching for. I don't think there's any way to beat the map pack. You know it's like you know a lot of people argue that you can I kind of take the come at me bro stance with that because I have yet to ever see and I and I've run experiments and maybe I'll do that as a video one day but it's to me the proof in that is just to ask ask Google what's the geographic center to where you live and it'll tell you an Exact latitude and longitude point and even two cross streets. Then just ask like in this case ask what's the geographical center for Charlotte, North Carolina? This is best if you don't live in Charlotte, North Carolina. If you live in Charlotte, pick something else like Tucson, Arizona. Say what's the geographical center point for Blanktown? Then ask best body shop in Blanktown and tell me if those three results aren't the exact ones that are right around that latitude longitude point cross street. It happens every single time. But this is suggesting that you can somehow win the map pack and the near me intent. If you're wondering what the hell map pack means, it's this right here. This is the map pack. The three right here. So Body Works plus Charlotte, Collision and Hendrik. And it's showing me Body Works plus. I did do body shop Charlotte but it knows I keep looking for Body Works plus. So this is a skewed result here because they are not, they are not the closest shop to just Charlotte. But anyway I'm digressing here back to my results. So that's the, that's the Google map pack purpose. When a map pack minimum viable operations. So weekly posts put short updates prove promos proof frequently asked questions. We did do this for our clients. We did always post into the Google Map Pack. What that is is down here inside your own Google results. You can put content here. See this right here? Body Works plus you can put content in here. So these are blogs and posts and stuff like that that we created for them. So that's what that is. And you can do this directly in your Google business profile. If you can't figure out how to access that, reach out to me. I'll walk you through how to do it. Okay. Photo cadence Upload weekly photos. This is a hard thing to stay on. But if you make it a reminder on your phone, constantly add photos it just shows Google that you care a lot about your Google listing Q and A seating. You post common questions as a customer would and answer them. Review Velocity. Ask for reviews consistently every week. I got some scripts built into here. Alright, moving on to YouTube paid and organic demand creation. Build trust before people crash and then they remember you. One long video every week or every other put plus countdowns into shorts. Before I would have said this is a hard thing. I mean who's gonna be able to post a video every week? But AI video making is getting so easy that you could just kind of like pick a customer FAQ even and turn that into a video. I'm gonna do one on Some of the, like the, the free video generators, like is it Sona or Sora or whatever. I myself want to learn it. So I'm going to do a video on that and I bought a course on it. So I'm going to take the course and then turn it into a post. But you could create some AI video content for your channel and for your YouTube. So that would be a great way to do that. Facebook and Instagram demand creation and retargeting. So stay visible to high income households. Retarget website visitors. Retargeting is a smart move any anyway even, even if you put a low budget to it because a lot of people come to your website, don't take action the first time and may forget who was that website I was at. So what retargeting is is anybody that comes to your site, you'll see, they will see ads that you can create to retarget them to come back to your site. So they'll just start seeing in this case body works plus ads for a specific length of time that you can retarget. You can set the retargeting range. So local awareness, video ads, retargeting proof posts, certifications, calibrations before and after next door optional. Again, I never did this in my agency, just didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. But this is a pretty good suggestion. So homeowner heavy, neighborhood trust works well in these zip codes. Minimum viable. So create a profile and do some posts in there a week and do a small paid test. So again, never ran ads there. I don't know how good they are and how effective they are. But if you've got the budget and you're looking to get creative in 2026, that's not a bad suggestion. And then TV and radio only if measured. I did not handle Brian's tv. We just didn't do TV at our agency. We just did not have the skill set for it. So but this is suggesting that they, you know, use a unique call center number or a call round number and some scripting to try to track any of the leads that may have come via tv. Just you know, keep track of that alright channel taglines and ad copy. So to help you get started I had this thing build you out some ideas for ads and taglines. So here's here are those. So Google search, local search area, Google business profile. That's what these little things mean here. 10 taglines, 5 hooks. So I won't read through all these but you know, five to nine words these Basically are ad what to put in the keyword targeted ad. So those are Google Ads. These are the hooks. So this would be after the. You know, when you build a Google Ad you kind of have like this top piece and then you've got this intersection same for a social media ad you kind of have like this top hook line and then you've got this bottom section here. Google search ads. So here's some of the keywords to to purchase your ads for descriptions. These are the descriptions to put in there. Meta Facebook and Instagram same thing. And then YouTube pre roll scripts. So here's some ideas to shoot some videos around if you want to and then some TV ads that you might want to run. Some ideas for TV ads are run by your TV media buyer. Budget sanity check. So I wanted to no matter what budget you put in there, I wanted it to either tell you you're overspending, you're on par with or you are under spending on marketing. So again budget is what's comfortable to you. Not saying you have to follow this, but this is best practices. So you're your clarified funnel. You have lead to booked estimate. 75% booked estimate to deliver repair 70% because 30 of them total out implied lead delivered. So there's your percentage there. To get to 65 cars we need to add 15 more a month. So we need 29 more leads a month. We need 22 more booked estimates a month. That's pretty doable I think. You know, with a good marketing campaign you should be able to in a normal time, not right now maybe, but in a normal time you ought to be able to increase your booked estimates with both some sales work and some paid marketing to get 29 more leads and get 22 booked estimates. Average RO I just put in there at 7,500 and gross profit margin. So saying $6,000 gross profit per delivered repair, you know plus 15 repairs a month, 90,000 incremental gross profit per month. So $7,500 a month marketing budget is directionally reasonable if it reliably produces 29 incremental leads per month. Recommended budget ranges if you were a clear go, no go conservative would be $5,000 a month. Mostly search local, you know, local search area. Google business profile minimal TV competitive 7,500 to 10,000 your current level and include some TV if it's measured and aggressive would be 12,000 to 15,000amonth. Faster learning and heavier video low budget triage plan what to keep cut or delay Keep Google business profile work search and retargeting cut TV because it's hard to measure and then delay any kind of broad YouTube paid tracking until the leading the landing page stack is solid channel allocation per table. You can read through this. Not going to read through all those numbers. You can just pause here and read all that. If you want to see that it'll be different for you anyway. Lead capture stack tools and implementation Every channel should route to a measurable outcome. A call form or booked estimate. So call tracking attribution use call rail or call tracking metrics we used CallRail. If you're not using a call tracking number. This is a fight I used to have with every body shop owner and this used to drive me nuts. But it's the only way that I could really dial in a marketing campaign. CallRail will do a dynamic number switching so you can actually have a number like on your Google business profile that will track any call from Google business. And then if you ran a Facebook ad, put that number there a different number for Facebook and then different number for Google. The argument that I would have with buy shop owners is like, well I want them to store my number because what if they need us again? Well now the research is coming out that you need a collision repair. Mike Anderson's saying now it's 18 years. So are you really gonna, are you really gonna not be able to track your marketing dollars this year because you're worried that 18 years from now somebody's gonna remember you and want to look you, look you up on their phone because they once got their car repaired from you? I think that's the silliest argument and I will die on that hill. But if you really want to, if you're putting money into marketing, please for the love of God measure this stuff. And the easiest way to do that is with a call tracking number because you pull up your CallRail report and the beautiful thing is you can list, it'll actually transcribe the calls and you can look down there and see quickly are the leads any good or are they trash. So and then you can tighten up your marketing off of that. So call rail. I can't recommend that enough. The problem that solves it'll show you which channel is producing the results for you. How to deploy it. Plain language Assign one unique phone number per channel. Photo estimates Appoint booking So here's some some photo estimating and appointment booking and I did sneak it in here that put my, my marketing tool vault onic I do have a a tool much like a body shop booster where you can send Photos through the customer can send photos and do appointment scheduling. But what's cool about mine that I could not get out of Buy Shop Booster was you can create tags on there utms and it'll track the lead back to the ad. So if you ran a Facebook ad and somebody converted on that, it'll tag it as Facebook. If somebody did a Google Ad, it would target as Google. So that's why I'm suggesting it if you really want to get good at tracking this stuff. CCC Engage is what it also recommended. I'm not sure what that is. Is it car wise? Possibly. And then BioShock booster, a lot of you guys already have that. So if you have BioShot booster just leverage that the problem it solves converts. I'm shopping into a booked estimate faster. How to deploy one landing page per intent so a Tesla landing page, an OEM landing page, an ADAS page. Basically create a landing page on your website for every ad campaign. That's kind of like basic marketing agency stuff. So if you're working with an agency, they're probably already doing that. If not, have a call with them, talk to them about this strategy. But it's a way to track. It's another way to track lead conversion because you can track how many people came that page and how many converted on that page with a simple tool like Google Analytics. Let's see what else we have here. So weekly scorecards. So track your calls by source, booked estimates by Source. Close ratio 90 day content plan 13 weeks starter for launch 2026 UN I'm not going to go through all these. I'll just pause here so you can see it. But starting January 5th, cadence three short videos, two Google business posts, two Facebook posts and one YouTube long form. This is if you got the resources and the budget or an agency working behind you. But I am going to do a. Like I said, I'm going to do a video on how to use AI to make videos very quickly for this kind of stuff. So stay tuned for that. Don't have it done yet but it is on my roadmap 13 week plan themes OEM certified insurance friction, Customer stories, you know, so on and so on. Here I'll pause right now. You can read that. Scroll here. We can. You guys can pause and read this. OEM certified in 30 seconds. ADAS after collision insurance Friction. Here's some review request scripts. Again, not going to read through all these, but here's some ideas for that. This would be to any customer that's leaving with a repaired car from you Next Action checklist the next seven days. 30 days. 90 days seven days owner plus priority. So tracking analytics. So the owner or the GM or the marketing team call tracking. Get call tracking live. Get unique numbers per channel. Front office owner operations speed to lead and script. So tighten up the front office on getting to that lead quickly and trying to convert it quickly. Google business page operations Owner Service advisor. Get your team getting you some photos, two posts a week. Website landing pages. So whoever's running your website, make sure that you've got landing pages for each campaign the next 30 days. Now we're going to move out and we're going to start doing some service page expansion, some internal linking. So link between the pages on your homepage and vice versa. I had it explained in plain English what this stuff means. Next 90 days. Creative system back batch film 2 hours per month. Slice into 12 to 16 shorts. Again, I wanted this to be able to work with any kind of shop. If you're smaller and you don't have the budget but you got the time or the staff, you know, you can do shorts. This the beauty of the marketing, like, you know, with shorts and things like that, they don't have to be overly polished. Just everybody's got a, you know, in your pocket you've got the world's greatest studio you got. And you can get free tools like Cap Cut. I edit everything in Cap Cut. So this video you're watching was edited in Cap Cut. You can, there's a phone app for that. You can shoot the photo really quick. You can run it into capcut and it will create the, they call magic episodes. It'll create those shorts for you and then just remember to put them out at a cadence again. Take seconds to do that. Channel optimization. Shift your budget towards the zips and campaigns, producing the repairable claims, sales process, scripting and then key assumptions. These are the things that, that it assumed in order to come up with all this stuff. So if any of this is off, you can tighten it up. Just run the prompt again if, if you, you're not quite getting the results you want. So this is, this is based on some of these assumptions. So you just say, hey, run the prompt again with blah blah, blah and fix anything that is not to your liking up here in the result. All right, that's a wrap for this one, guys. You know, I just wanted to say, just take a minute here and just say, I wish you all the best in 2026. Let's hope that it's going to be a great year. For collision repair. You know that car count's going to come up and we're going to get back into the fun times again in the collision in industry. Who knows what challenges are around the corner. I know. I can almost guarantee you there will be some though, because that's just the way it is. I did want to just take a quick note and talk a little bit about 2026 in terms of what's coming out in the Hero group. I'm doing these videos every other week and then a podcast every other week. I do have a newsletter I recommend that you get on that if you want to get more of this stuff in your inbox. We've got our first big AI product coming out in January of 2026 of called Reclaimer. There's a. There's videos on our website about what that product does or you can also go to www.reclaimer.AI and R E C L A I M R.AI it does estimates, scrubbing. It does. It'll. It'll do insurance rebuttal. And that's just one of a whole suite of products. We got four products that we're going to get to market in the first six months of 2026. So it's going to be a big and busy year for me. These things have been in development with my team over the last six months since I sold my marketing agency. It's all part of a bigger plan and we've getting some really great feedback. It's in Reclaimers in beta right now and we're getting really great feedback. It just helped find $3,000 missing on an estimate with one shop and it's picking up money on every single estimate that it goes through, that goes through it, let alone what you're helping. But it's helping to help you fight back and get from the insurance companies on the rebuttal tool. So Reclaimer is going to be a big one for us. The, the content that I'm doing again, every. Every other week I do an AI labs. I take a business challenge that I either hear about from somebody like this one that I just did today. I heard from a conversation with a shop owner turn it into an AI tool. If you have any ideas, any suggestions, things that you'd like to see. I do have a huge list of things I want to do. I'm always coming up with ideas. But if you have something that you think AI might be able to solve for you, it could be something small. It could be, you know, something about payroll or flag hours or you know, I don't know like I had the paint scale report, you know, things that, things that might help you with profit. Lead leaks in the, in the, in the shop. Please reach out, let me know. I'm, I'm a master prompt engineer at this point. I can build a tool for, for you guys. We'll get it out there onto our social channels. I'm going to get very active on Social in 2026 so, so that's kind of my plan for 2026. I hope this helps you plan your marketing for 2026. I do have some free tools. Every quarter we're going to come out with a free, free tool, an AI tool that will help you in your business. I'll hold it at that and then we'll let that tool come out because I'm working on some details so I don't want to say anything just yet because I'm trying to put some, some things into place that are bigger than me in my company to, to get that out to the masses. But it's something that I think is going to be really, really beneficial for all body shops to plan their finances for 2026 but also to see, to keep yourself on track at least every quarter until 2026. So that's coming up. But every, every three months or so we'll have a free tool that we're releasing to the specific to the collision industry geared specifically towards body shop owners and the people that work there to solve a significant challenge that we think AI can do. So so those are coming out. So anyway, lots, lots to come out in 2026. I'm very optimistic about 2026. It's a, it's a, it's an even year and even years are always good for me. So I'm hoping that the best for you. So that's it. Happy holidays and I will see you guys on the next one.