Steps to Car Wash Success: Improve Brand Awareness with Car Wash Advertising
Loyalty in any competitive marketplace is an extremely valuable commodity. The car wash business is no different.
One of the best ways to build loyalty? Through advertising.
This could be said of most industries, but the car wash market is more competitive than most people might realize. Big names have more brand recognition, attention is hard to get, and people are loyal to places they know. All of this sounds familiar, because they’re problems that exist in every marketplace.
So, are the solutions the same too?
When most people think of advertising, they think of CPGs (consumer packaged goods) like food, cosmetics, toiletries, and any number of other things we generally see on store shelves – but advertising is just as important when it comes to businesses that provide services, it’s just much more underused.
Ads that promote services are slightly different than those that promote products. Mainly, it’s about what we’re selling. In the case of a car wash, for instance, one of the main things we’re selling is the feeling of pride that someone has when they’re driving a car that looks good.
It’s up to you to define yourself in a way that will turn those people who do decide to give your business a shot into loyal customers that can help you to establish a strong client base. How you do that depends on how you want to be perceived.
A passionate mom and pop shop? A team of experts that take care of your car like it’s theirs? Whatever it is, your advertising needs to sell that story.
Advertising isn’t just one thing, though. There are many moving parts to an effective marketing plan. Things like search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, online customer reviews, referral programs and more can (and should) all be implemented in your larger outreach strategy.
Now, let’s dive in to a few of these tactics.
Think of how you search for things when you have convenience in mind. Need a happy hour spot? You might search “bars near me” or “cocktail lounge in Denver”. The same is true for how perspective customers find car washes. Because of this, it’s important where you land on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is where search engine optimization, or SEO, comes in.
It is more than likely that your website already has basic information like your physical address, email, phone number prominently featured. All of these things can work in your favor to geographically direct potential customers to your site from whatever search engine they are suing. What else can you do to help boost your exposure from an SEO standpoint, though?
Informative articles and updates can do a lot when it comes to optimization. To use ourselves as an example, someone searching “car wash construction” or “architectural documents” might stumble across some of the recent content we have written and posted to our website. Making sure that some commonly searched industry keywords are featured in our headlines and copy in these posts increases our chances of getting seen. Regardless of where your target audience reads these reviews though, positive word-of-mouth advertising can do nothing but boost your trustworthiness in the eyes of potential customers.
Of course, website exposure isn’t the only way businesses gain new customers.
Credibility is huge, and reviews are a great way to make sure that’s how you’re being perceived. The opinion of a fellow customer will always carry more weight than yours does, because the customer has no ulterior motive. Sites like Yelp or Google Reviews are visited all the time, and not just for restaurants – people look into service providers like car washes on these sites more often than you might think.
We’ve only touched the surface on the different kinds of marketing tactics that could help you to increase your reach, but hope this article might help you start to take advertising seriously as a potential driver to overall car wash success.
We understand that it’s challenging to take on even just the idea of implementing all of these different initiatives into the way you do business. Each one involves upfront research, implementation, monitoring and evaluation to work they way you want it to – and most busy car wash owners barely have time in their day to keep things running as is.
Just like we encourage our clients to let us do the heavy lifting when it comes to architecture and design, we encourage them to contract with outside experts in areas like advertising if the want to stay competitive in this evolving industry.