Digital Upskilling For Car Mechanics: Bracing For The Unpredictable Future

February 22, 2022 The Mechanic Doctor

The presence of digital technologies in workplaces keeps growing. Practically every company is equipped with a computer, and others have broadband gadgets that connect PCs to the internet.

That’s not all; some companies own programmable robots and automated machines that will require staff members to be digitally savvy to operate them. Mechanics, too, must learn ICT basics. The essence of doing so is to improve productivity, business performance, competitiveness, and internal organization.

This article will highlight a few areas where digital upskilling could benefit mechanics. Let’s get started.

Core Digital Skills Mechanics Should Upskill to Future Proof their Business

Here are a few digital skills which, if you learn, could help your business flourish:

1. Web design and management

Every wise entrepreneur must represent their business online through websites. Getting one for a small business can cost anywhere between $100 and $500, and however, if it has to be customized to meet high-end needs, the price can stretch to thousands of dollars.

But what if you could create a website on your own? It’s not that detailed, and you don’t even need to learn how to code. Many no-code website builders such as WordPress, Weebly, and Squarespace make the process hassle-free.

All you need to do is Google “How to make a website in WordPress”, and you’ll get extensive resources that show all the steps from A to Z. Not good at following written instructions? Check out YouTube tutorials on how to make a website on WordPress.

Once your website goes live, there are a few management services that will be done every once in a while. This ensures the site works well, there are no downtimes, and a satisfactory user experience.

2. Email marketing

Email marketing can be an excellent tool for scouting new leads and retargeting old clients. This is a low-cost approach to increasing sales by sending emails straight to your customers’ mailboxes.

But before you send emails, the first step is to get the target’s address. Of course, there are many ways to grow your email list, but the cost-effective one is through your website.

Now, you’ll need to group your email addresses differently for precise personalization. Imagine what would happen if you send a repeat customer a welcome email. They’ll think you’ve forgotten they ever visited your shop. Now you get how important it is to group your emails into different audiences, right? Great. Let’s go on.

There are a couple of emails you can send out. These usually include welcome emails, invitation to connect (comes second after welcome email), monthly newsletter, and promotional email. Keep your emails short and strive not to get spammy.

3. Photography and graphic design

We cannot overstate enough the power of visuals in marketing. Diode Digital research indicates that videos are 600% more powerful marketing tools than direct mail and print combined. Photos, too, make blogs attractive to read.

To make your photos incredibly alluring, you’ll need to refine them in Photoshop. As such, learning Photoshop skills will help you create visuals that easily draw in customers. And before you ask where to get lessons, we’ll point you to the same place as before-YouTube. There are countless tutorials on simple tricks such as removing backgrounds to complex ones like creating animations.

4. Content creation

Writing isn’t exactly everyone’s cup of coffee, and however, learning the basics can help you review content before it goes live. After all, you are the mechanic and know precisely every step involved in fixing car problems. Therefore, while you can’t draft the entire article, you can cross-check facts and have the writer fine-tune it.

But like everything else, writing is an art that you can learn online. There’s a plethora of writing blogs and YouTube tutorials that teach how to write better. Once you learn this craft and coupled with the fact that you are an expert mechanic, your posts will be value-packed, resulting in massive shares that boost the visibility of your business.

5. Learning to work with software

As every business grows, management challenges crop in from payroll processing, hiring, running marketing campaigns to brainstorming plans. You possibly cannot keep tabs on all these activities. That’s where automotive shop management software comes in,

Modern software solutions are equipped with advanced marketing tools for running automated campaigns that save on resources while delivering outstanding results.

You can also process invoices, keep track of customer data, manage appointments, and a lot more. Put simply, you need a software program to streamline your workflow.

The good news is many software programs come with tutorials to help you understand how to use them better.

There are many more ways you can upskill yourself digitally to futureproof your business. For instance, learning social media marketing can help you sell your car repair shop on social media through posting on company pages as well as setting up ads.

Do you know how to communicate online through Skype, Zoom, and other video conferencing tools? You should, and it will improve how you collaborate with staff and business partners.

Speaking of collaboration, where do you store your data? Is it easily shareable? No? Well, it’s time you start leveraging cloud platforms. They make data readily available to all allowed members making it easier to scale your business.

Wrap Up

Technology has made everything more straightforward and faster. As such, your customers expect to get a highly digitized experience in your shop, and failure to do that can result in slow processing times that push away clients.

Take the opportunity to upskill your technical skills to compete in these rapidly changing times. Start with one topic, complete it and get to the next. In a few years, your digital skills will have grown tremendously.