Hey guys! I’m Mike Berlin from Slam Car Wash Marketing. Every two weeks, I’m going to bring you some new ideas to consider when marketing your car wash. I call it the Slam Six.

This week, I discussed the importance of YouTube Marketing at the car wash show in Nashville. Operators asked me a lot about Google ads and Facebook ads, but let’s not forget about YouTube. YouTube has over a billion users. A billion with a “B!” That’s over a third of all internet users. It has become the world’s largest video search engine so if you’re thinking about advertising your carwash and want to try YouTube, here are six things to consider.

1. Discovery & In-stream Ads

There are two types of ads: discovery ads and in-stream ads. Discovery ads show up at the top of your search results on YouTube. They have a little gold icon next to them. In-stream ads, formerly known as pre-roll ads, are the ads that you skip when you’re watching something fun on YouTube. In-stream ads is what I would use to promote an unlimited wash club because people are not really on YouTube searching for the phrases “unlimited wash club” or “car wash,” but we can serve ads to those people who fit our buyer persona.

But how do we get the phone number from the customers and how do we send them texts?

2. Geofencing & Radius Targeting

Bring geofencing and radius targeting down to a tighter one mile rather than the 5-mile radius of Facebook or the whole DMA area of Spotify. You can focus your efforts just around your car wash and not pay to serve ads to people in the whole city.

3. Custom Affinity Audiences

The sneaky little thing here is you can load a URL for a website. Say your competitor’s website and make a custom group from that list of users then hit them with an ad now. This might be something better suited for business of businesspeople but something you can think about. For example, let’s say there’s a CrossFit gym right next door to your site. Well, we know those people are in your area all the time and obviously in the mindset of buying subscription services. They would be a good fit. I would make a group of them and serve them an ad for an unlimited program, and I’ll do you one even better after I serve them the first ad. I put them into a new category and serve them a follow-up ad the second time around. I’d hit them with a refer-a-friend promotion.

4. Behavior-based Retargeting

This is why after you search for how to change the water pump on your car all you start getting hammered with ads from AutoZone. We can watch the habits of people based on what they search for on YouTube and serve them ads. For instance, we can serve ads to people that recently looked at new car reviews on YouTube. They probably just bought a new car and want to keep it looking nice. They’re a prime candidate for an unlimited plan.

5. Free if it’s Less Than 30 Seconds

A quick random fact: if a user only plays your ad for 28 seconds, then gets skipped, you don’t get charged for it. It has to play for the full 30 seconds for Google to count it as a play.

6. How is it Priced?

CPV or cost per view meaning it’s a bid system. Like Google ads, the general rule of thumb is it’s about 1 to 3 cents per view. To view that full 30 seconds, you get a ton of extra impressions to the people that watch the first part of the ad and skip it. Something like Spotify will cost you a tenth of a cent per listen but it’s not nearly as focused.

That’s your SLAM 6 for this week on YouTube advertising. I hope this gets you guys thinking about your carwash and how to market it to capture your unfair share of the business. If you want some advice, need some help or have a question, please email me and I will respond.

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