The collision shop slow season: a month by month marketing plan
Why body shop volume swings, what to run in the slow months, hail and winter surges, and how to build customer-pay work that does not depend on claims.
Collision volume is weather and traffic. Neither one takes your cash flow into account. Most shops in the northern half of the country see the year shaped roughly like this: a strong winter from ice and early darkness, a soft spring, a hail spike somewhere between April and July depending on the market, a quiet late summer when everyone is on vacation and driving less locally, and a rebuild through the holidays.
The southern markets look different. Less ice, more hail and more year-round parking-lot damage, and a real slump in the deepest heat.
Whatever your curve is, the mistake is the same everywhere: shops market when they are slow and stop when they are busy, which guarantees the ads arrive four weeks after the need. Marketing has a lag. Plan against the calendar, not against the current week's schedule board.
Find your own curve first
Pull the last three years of repair orders out of your management system and count vehicles delivered per month. Not revenue, vehicles. Revenue hides the pattern behind severity swings.
You are looking for two things: the two months that are consistently your worst, and the month before your best. The worst months get customer-pay campaigns. The month before your best gets capacity planning and staffing, not advertising.
Most shops that do this exercise discover their slow period is one month earlier than they thought.
The slow-month playbook
When claim volume drops, you sell the work that never depended on a claim. Four campaigns, run in this order.
1. Past customer reactivation. Export every customer from the last three years and text them. A shop delivering 45 cars a month has over 1,500 past customers within three years, and almost none of them have heard from you since delivery.
"Hi [name], Ray at [shop]. We repaired your [model] in 2024. February is our quiet month so we are doing paintless dent repair at $99 a panel and bumper scuff repair from $299 through the end of the month. Reply with a photo and I will give you a price today."
Cost: nothing but the message fees. This is the highest-return campaign in this guide and roughly nobody in the trade does it.
2. Paintless dent repair and cosmetic offers on Meta. Cheap clicks, visual proof, discretionary spend. Creative and budgets are in the Meta ads guide. Run this at $20 to $30 a day for the whole slow stretch.
3. Fleet and commercial outreach. Local plumbing, HVAC, electrical, landscaping and delivery companies all have vans with damage they have been ignoring. Their vehicles get hit constantly and nobody markets to them. One list of 60 local companies, one call each, one visit with a folder: your certifications, your turnaround commitment, and a fleet rate.
Fleet work is not glamorous and it fills bays in February. It also does not care what the weather did.
4. Dealer and used-car lot reconditioning. Independent lots need dent and paint work on trade-ins constantly and they pay quickly if you can hold turnaround. The pitch is turnaround, not price: "48 hours on recon, and I will pick up."
Hail season, which is its own business
If your market gets hail, this is the highest-return three weeks of your year and it is entirely about being ready before the storm, not after.
Have this built and paused in the ad account, ready to switch on:
- A hail damage landing page with a free inspection offer and photo upload
- Meta creative showing hail dents before and after
- A Google Ads campaign with hail terms, paused, with a budget already set
- A text template for the past customer list within the affected zip codes
- Saturday inspection hours on the Google profile, which only 36.1% of collision shops publish
Within 48 hours of a storm your market will be full of out-of-state chasers renting a tent in a parking lot. Your advantage is that you are still going to be here in March. Say exactly that in the ad: "Local shop, here since 2009, lifetime warranty, we will be here if anything needs a second look."
Busy months: do not go dark
When you are three weeks out on the schedule board, the instinct is to pause the ads. Do that and you will be slow again in six weeks, because the pipeline you turned off takes that long to refill.
Instead, in the busy stretch:
- Keep the ads running, raise the published prices, and let the price do the filtering.
- Push review velocity hard, because you have more deliveries to ask at. A busy month should produce your best review numbers, and reviews are the asset that carries into the slow month. See the reviews guide.
- Take photos. Twenty before-and-after pairs shot in a busy month is the creative library for the slow one.
- Fix your cycle time. Busy is when the process breaks and where the one-star reviews about time get written.
A twelve month rhythm
- January and February: past customer reactivation, PDR and cosmetic Meta offers, fleet outreach. Slow in the north, so this is campaign month.
- March: spring cleanup and pre-summer paint correction offers. Get the hail assets built now.
- April to July: hail readiness, launched within 24 hours of a storm. Otherwise steady collision.
- August: typically the quiet one. Repeat the reactivation campaign with a different offer, and run the pre-lease-return campaign.
- September and October: back-to-school traffic and deer season in rural markets. Volume returns. Push reviews and photos.
- November and December: first ice, holiday traffic, parking lot season. Busy in most markets. Keep ads on, raise prices, bank the reviews.
The measure that matters
Track the percentage of your revenue that comes from work no insurer routed to you. If a single program can take a third or more of your revenue with one email, you are not running a shop, you are subcontracting.
A realistic goal for a single-location shop over two years is to get customer-pay above 40% of revenue. Everything in the slow-month playbook serves that number.
Frequently asked
Should I discount in the slow month? Discount cosmetic work, never collision. A collision discount cannot be seen by the customer anyway because the carrier is paying, and it just lowers your own margin.
How far ahead do I plan campaigns? Six weeks. Ads take two to four weeks to stabilize and another two to produce booked work.
Is it worth advertising during a hail event if I have no capacity? Yes, but sell the schedule honestly: "Booking hail repairs for the first week of June." Customers accept a wait if you tell them the date.
Any one of these campaigns can be built inside the free 14-day trial, in your own accounts. Check where your shop sits in the benchmark report before you decide which one to run first. Text or call (385) 832-6175.