Car wash marketing has for many years been associated with the local area.
Picking a good location for a facility has been a prime issue. However, once a facility is in place, traditional marketing is limited to print and standard media.
This still tends to be limited to local customers and maybe regional consumers. Reaching out further has often been elusive until the Internet became available.
Many car wash jumped on the Internet with websites, and then have found it didn’t deliver the desired traffic. Much of this has had to do with not fully understanding how consumers use the Internet to find business solutions for needs.
It’s not a problem exclusive to car wash businesses. Many companies have found themselves in the same situation.
Instead a good web presence has to be responsive to how a consumer searches for a good car wash business, and that gets into the workings of Internet searching.
The bread and butter of searches is search engines. There are two ways to take advantage of this tool:
1) A business needs to get a good ranking to show up early in search engine results, and/or
2) Pay for presence early in searches or whenever a given search term is used. This is where Google Adwords shines.
Google Adwords is a paid service that a business uses with Google by establishing an account and pre-paying ad charges for when they will be used. Placement is paid for by instance, so a client pays for 100 instances, for example, and then these are burned down as consumers trigger search terms and the Adword is displayed in the consumer’s search results.
For car wash marketing this kind of Internet tool addresses a number of needs right away. These include:
• Direct response to a consumer looking for a car wash service in a given area or location.
• A low cost advertising tool that is targeted instead of being wasted on a general population that may not need or care in general.
• Advertising that only gets triggered when a related interest is inputted into a search engine. This saves marketing money right up front.
• Direct linkage to more information about the car wash business. This is great for consumers who want digital information at their fingertips.
So there’s a lot of opportunity and benefit with Adwords for a car wash marketing program. How effective it is will depend a bit on the business getting used to how Google Adwords works. But with a bit of training or hiring a expert this learning curve can be mastered quickly. As a result, it’s definitely worth looking into as a car wash business marketing tool.