As a car wash business owner, one of the important duties for your business is to ensure that your car wash business consistently grows over time. For this, it is essential that you keep on attracting new customers while retaining your old customers. If you become slack in advertising your car wash business, some other competitor of yours will be taking over the opportunity to capture new customers. We have therefore provided some of the best car wash marketing ideas, which on implementing, are sure to give you a big increase in the number of clients that your business serves currently.
1) Upgrade Facilities
One thing that most businesses forget while trying to expand their customer base is that they look for new customers while they forget that their old customers might move out to some other competitor if not given proper attention. To give a good experience to current customers and to make the experience better for potential new customers, update your car wash business with facilities like a waiting area, Free wifi, TV, massage chair, free coffee, etc. Once you equip your business with these facilities, you can also actively market these facilities on other marketing materials that you will be employing for getting new customers.
2) Professional Presence Online
Most of the recent day searches for various businesses and services begin with a search engine (especially on Google). Though getting a website up and running for your car wash business is an easy task, the real task is to ensure that it gets found online. For every query typed online in Google, it shows 1000’s of results but the actual cream of these potential visitors is taken by the first page results as no user is ever going to visit all the 1000’s of results. So a professional presence means that your car wash website must definitely show up on the front page of Google for queries like “car wash services near me”, “car wash business in [name of your city]”, etc.
To get your website to appear in these top 10 organic rankings, you can start implementing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques by yourself or can get it handled by an SEO agency.
3) GMB Domination
GMB stands for “Google My Business” which is an excellent marketing and lead-generating tool for local businesses. Out of all the organic listings displayed by Google, it shows a dedicated space with 3 selected listings for local searches. Since there are many car wash businesses having GMB pages, Google will only select 3 of them to show depending on various factors. The extent to which you can control these factors will determine how prominently your car wash business will be displayed here. To dominate the local listings, any expert internet marketing agency can help you with car wash marketing through GMB.
4) Paid Ads
If you want your car wash advertising methods to yield results quickly, then choosing paid ads marketing for a car wash business is the best option. Paid ads can generate car wash leads very quickly. However, paid ads on different platforms will yield different qualities of leads. Google ads is the best among all paid ads platforms to generate high-quality leads followed by Facebook ads. Since operating paid ads requires knowledge of several parameters like choosing target keywords, adjusting bids, selecting the right location, et, it is advised to learn respective ad platforms and ad operating basics before jumping right away in it. If the optimization of ads is not good, then instead of gaining profits, you may end up losing money. For professional help, get any digital marketing agency to get it done for you.
5) Reviews
More people are now habituated to search for the authenticity of a business due to the power of the internet in their hands. So whenever people type the name of your car wash business in Google and will find good reviews about it, they will be more likely to use your service. The same holds true on the flip side too i.e. if they type your business name and find no reviews or negative reviews, they will get a bad impression of your brand which will ultimately hurt your business. So ask each of your customers to leave feedback online or incentivize them to leave feedback with discounts or gift cards.
6) Press Release
To grow your car washing business, one of the essential elements is to establish your business as a brand. While most people may think that brand building requires a huge sum of money, it is not in reality as it can be done on small scale too with press releases. You can start building the brand of your business by issuing press releases due to which the name of your business will be seen across many popular news sites. These press releases will also help your business website to get a good ranking in Google by virtue of the backlinks that they generate from many websites.
7) Social Media
Since billions of people are there on social media platforms, no sane marketer ever ignores marketing their business/service on social media platforms, especially on Facebook. Social media marketing for a car washing business is a long-term process because it won’t happen that you make your business page on social networks and it will start providing you leads. The common reason why some businesses complain that social media marketing does not work is because they adopt aggressive marketing on such platforms. Social media is more about engaging people with good content and building a good audience followed by subtle marketing. Social media marketing requires you to spend a few weeks building your following first and then doing promotion.
You can find many local groups relevant to your location on Facebook. You can join these groups to connect with more people. You can also message admins of these groups to forward your marketing message to group members for a pre-decided fee. Almost on all social media platforms, you have to first remain dull on the marketing side for some period of time during which you must focus only on building your audience.
8) Add on Free Facilities
Using add on services can get you more customers for your car wash business. You can do add-on facilities on your car wash premises like free air checkup and filling, free coffee, free sliders for kids, free balloons for kids, etc to get people encouraged in checking out your business.
9) Service Expansion
You can get more business by expanding your service area to two-wheelers and big vehicles like trucks. You can also let out some portion of your premise for associated businesses like oil change, car service, etc so that any person will have more than one reasons to come to your business.
10) Pick and Drop service
Some people are lazy while some are busy and some are in between them. There can be many reasons why someone is not using car wash service despite their car looking dirty. You can make money from both busy people and lazy people by offering free pick up and drop services for their vehicles so that they do not have to come and wait for getting their cars washed.
11) Referral Rewards Program
People trust real people much more than reviews and this is why word of mouth marketing is one of the highest converting marketing methods. You can ask your customers to refer others but in most cases, few people will do so as they don’t have any direct benefit in doing it. To overcome this issue, you must design a 2-way referral program which means that you can give a referral book to your customers which they can give to their friends so that both the people get a discount/offer/reward.
12) Bulk Packages
Instead of a one-off service from every customer with no surety of coming back, you can design different packages with discounts to ensure that the client keeps coming back. You can also do this through a loyalty rewards program to give your customers a good reason to visit your business regularly. There are many services online that can allow digital handling and operation of loyalty rewards programs that you can utilize for growing and advertising your car washing business.
13) Free Wash Opportunities
This is a creative marketing method that you can utilize to get more customers for the car washing business. A big percentage of the human population is driven by the term “Free”. You can utilize this to get more customers. You can get a lucky wheel created with different offers like 10% Off, 20% off, Free wash, Better Luck Next Time, etc and ask the users to spin it and get the appropriate offer as they land on it after spinning the wheel. After devising this offer, promote it extensively in your locality through flyers to get the word out.
14) Custom Merchandise
You can buy low-cost merchandise in bulk with your business name and contact details printed on it. For example, you can order 100 mugs with the name and phone number of your business printed on it. You can give it away for free to your customers so that they remember your service. You can also use this in other creative ways which are discussed in the next topic.
15) Generating Social Media Engagement
You can generate attention on social media by rewarding your customers with free merchandise (discussed in the previous topic) who share your business content on their social media pages. This method can also be used successfully to get reviews and blog posts about your car washing business from your customers.
16) Free Community Dinner/Party
The first thing to spread worth of mouth publicity starts with establishing connections with people. You can start with your local community by inviting 50-100-200 households for dinner or a party on your premises (as per your budget). As a welcome gift, you can give a low-cost merchandise gift (with name and number printed) to make the event worth remembering.
17) Partnerships
You can partner with associated businesses to send you more leads for car washing. These businesses can include car repair services, spare parts dealers, used car dealers, etc.
18) Showcase Good Cause
You must showcase spending some portion of the profit from each car wash for charity purposes. This way the potential clients will also have a feel-good factor while getting their cars washed using your service. You can announce this on your other marketing channels too.
19) Exploit Crowded Places
Get your car wash ads in front of people in the major crowded locations of your city. This can be done in form of banner advertising (or even flyers for low-budget marketing). You can also get your offline ads in big vehicle parking premises, parking lots of malls and other big buildings, etc.
20) Aesthetics
Work on the exterior and interior design of your car washing business. To stand out, you can get your external building surface to look like a big car or can create a big hallmark design unique to your business.
21) Offline Marketing
Offline marketing is a great complement to online promotion methods for a car washing business. You can also utilize offline marketing methods like ads in local newspapers, flyers, billboards, door hangers, etc to generate more awareness of your service.
The above-listed car wash marketing methods, if implemented, can open a new dimension of your business growth by attracting more customers to your car wash business. If you are not clear on any of the topics or have something related to this topic, kindly put your reply below.
