Instagram Marketing, NVS Audio Style

By posting build photos on Instagram, you will be able to demonstrate the skills of your shop to potential clients. Learn how NVS Audio uses strategic tagging and striking photography to inspire new and repeat customers.

WORDS BY CARLOS RAMIREZ

I opened NVS Audio in August of 2003 with only one employee and one authorized line to offer customers. We currently have five employees, and we are an authorized dealer for over 30 lines. We also have one of the nicest wood and fab shops in the entire state. When we first started, we barely made payroll each week. Now, we are blessed enough to be booked out two to three months for custom work. We moved into a bigger building in January and it’s already filled beyond capacity.

We were early adopters of all the major social media platforms, but we picked Instagram as our main focus because of the almost immediate return on investment—and by investment, I mean time. Customers see our builds and screen-shot the picture, then ask us for a price via Instagram direct message. That doesn’t really happen with Facebook or YouTube, at least not for us.

Which Social Media Platform is Best?

I don’t think shops should invest in only one platform. I think you should use all of them. Consider which age group is your shop’s main focus. For example, Facebook works better for attracting 35- to 65-year-olds, while Instagram works best for attracting 20- to 40-year-olds.

Remember that these platforms are often changing. When they do make a change—as Instagram did a couple of years back—the change may cause the platform to not work as well for you as it used to. After the change, the rate of our growth was cut by 60 percent and our messages from potential clients were reduced by half.

What makes Instagram so useful for us is the fact that it’s all about the photos

and the hashtags. People don’t go on Instagram to read. All you need to do is post a few photographs, a description and hashtags, and you’re done.

Instagram and Facebook work very well for all businesses. Every business should have one, even if it’s just to keep customers up to date with events, sales and holiday store hours.

We follow Viper and Compustar on Facebook. If there is a service outage on Drone or Smart Start, it’s always posted there first. When a customer called telling me the device wasn’t working, I already knew the reason. Facebook and Instagram take seconds to update and post, while it can take much longer to update or change a website.

Methods to Best Utilize Instagram

The Instagram platform has been the most successful for us over the years. We

use Facebook and YouTube as well, but we have had the most success with Instagram. We have over 20,000 followers and book two to three jobs per week directly from Instagram. The platform changed its algorithm a couple of years ago to force businesses to pay to gain followers. If it hadn’t been for this change, we might have had over 60,000 followers by now. We do not pay for followers, nor do we use Google Adwords. We just use social media to promote our business for free.

The only thing this approach costs us is about an hour per day total—30 minutes in the morning for Facebook, and 30 minutes at night for Instagram. We use our advertising budget to host and compete in local car shows. That has worked really well for us. At KnowledgeFest, I went over some key points that are very important to posting on social media.

Make the Time

Social media for business is very important. You need to make time for it like every other important task in your business.

Post Every Day and Be Consistent

Show off your build pictures, not just finished pictures. That way, customers will understand why the project will cost more and why it is worth more.

Post Photos of Your Team

It is important for customers to feel comfortable with the technician who will be working on their vehicle.

Keep it Simple

I update all social media from my phone. All the apps I use are available for under $5 each. Remember to post more than one photograph. It takes at least five pictures to tell the story of a build.

Social Media as a Business Card

Your business’s social media tells the story of who you are and what you are about. It works way better than a two- by three-inch piece of cardboard ever will.

That said, your business’s page and your personal page should be separate. There should only be work-related pictures on your shop’s Instagram.

You can also show off your business by posting short videos of two minutes or less. If the video is longer, post the first minute on Instagram or Facebook and post a link to the full video on YouTube. Always remember to post about all of the events you have planned, with enough time to let people know so they can plan to be there.

What is the Best Way to Use Tags?

When we use hashtags, the first thing we do is tag our own shop with #nvs and #nvsaudio. That way, when a customer searches “nvsaudio,” all of our builds come up together.

Then we add hashtags for the type of car. This means that potential clients who own the same car or truck will be able to see what we have done to the same type of vehicle, giving them an idea of what is possible with their own car or truck. Examples include: #ford #f350 #f350kingranch #f350customaudio

Then we include hashtags for the manufacturers whose products we used in the build: #compustarpro #Macintosh #soundskins #audiofrog #soundigital #phoenixgold #sony

If the company has an Instagram page, we will also tag them in hopes that they’ll share it on their page. This is a great way to draw more followers to your page. You must directly tag the company in order to notify them that your post is available. For example: @sonycaraudiousa @hertz_audio_offical @soundigitalusa @phoenixgold_stinger @compustaronline

Start Using Instagram Today to Attract New Clients

Recently, we got a big job directly through our Instagram marketing. The customer had a lot of work done by another shop in the state, but he didn’t like the way it sounded or the way the install looked. He ended up spending upwards of $7,000 with us. Now he loves the way the truck looks and sounds.

The client chose us because we show all our builds in detail on Instagram.

We show our style of install, as well. We offer a lifetime guarantee on all our labor and fabrication work. The first shop our client worked with did not use a digital sound processor and just bridged the two four-channel amplifiers into the four passive crossovers for the front and rear components. This gave the customer little to no control over the sound and made it impossible to align the sound stage.

We ran an eight-channel DSP and made the front components active and the rear passive. We bridged one four-channel to the front mid bass drivers and used channels one to two on the second four-channel to make the front tweeters active.

We used channels three and four to drive the rear components passive. We upgraded the 500-watt amplifier that the other shop sold him to a 1,200-watt so that the subs would match the output of his two large Macintosh amps driving the mids. We were then able to tune and time align everything.

After we got the car sounding the way he wanted it, it was time to make the truck look the way he wanted. The customer had purchased a large pre-made under-seat subwoofer enclosure that sounded great, but the headliner finish did not match the King Ranch leather interior, so we sanded it smooth and trimmed it in factory-matched vinyl to match the King Ranch seats.

The previous shop had stuffed the bass amp under the seat and the two Macintosh amps behind the seat screwed to a piece of wood. The customer was upset that the amps hadn’t been mounted better. The wood pushed the amps too far forward and they were being scratched by the back of the seats.

To fix these issues, we fabricated a steel amp rack that sat flush with the rear wall of the truck which allowed us to move the amps back 2.5 inches. That gave us seat clearance and allowed room for a nice cover panel to show off the amps and conceal all the wiring, factory amp, DSP and the bass amp.

For this and many other builds, we post photos on our Instagram account that continues to vitalize our customer base. Because of Instagram alone, our work is exposed to thousands of people— more than we could ever reach with simple traditional advertising. Posting build photographs not only reaches our potential clients, but in a way that inspires them and gets them thinking about what we could do with their vehicles. If you follow these steps for social media marketing, your business will also begin to reach potential clients who might not find you otherwise.