Hey! I’m Mike Berlin with Slam Car Wash Marketing. I’m going to run you through how to get your car wash slammed from day one.

1. Define Your Brand

Write out your brand mission, vision, your business purpose and your personality statement. Conduct a demographic study in competition research so you can figure out the opportunities in your area. If your direct competition is doing silly characters and bubbles, maybe you should go a little more serious with your brand and more community driven. Build a document that defines your brand. Then, create a logo and use a brand guide.

2. Develop a Killer Website

Make sure it’s optimized for Google search with proper h1 tags and keywords. It should be built with a content management system like WordPress, so it is easy to update. Your website should also be wired into your E-Commerce and your POS. Pay special attention to your location pages. Embed a YouTube video and Google Maps on your home page. You want to make sure it’s mobile responsive, so it works on phones and tablets because that’s where most of our users are these days. Be sure to host your site on a very fast cloud-based hosting server because page load speeds can affect how you rank on Google. Lastly, have an expert do a review of your site and make sure it’s optimized for Google search.

3. Sync Your Online Presence

Set up and sync your online presence properly. Set up your Google My Business page, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Bing and your Waze accounts. Make sure your business data is in perfect sync. Optimize your listings with photos, videos and offers. Update it once your wash is live and can be photographed fully. Next, build out a monthly content calendar to coordinate all messaging across social media for daily and weekly posts. Create a strategic plan to grow followers. After you do these first three things, set them aside and start working on how you’re going to get new customers.

4. Earn Loyalty

Design a loyalty program so that customers can earn points for free car washes. Use your POS to manage this program. This loyalty program will be the reason customers want to opt into your text marketing.

5. Capture Phone Numbers

Make sure you’re fully set up with license plate recognition (LPR) and text opt-in screens on your pay station so that we can capture each customer’s phone number as they come through the wash. The more phone numbers we have means the more people we can market to later.

6. Create An Ad Plan

Make sure whenever you spend money on advertising that it’s trackable. As part of your advertising, build in marketing automation with smart landing pages and retargeting ads. Coordinate your promotions with your digital menu and your LED reader boards. Utilize your POS for your central customer database so that we know exactly who we’re targeting. Lastly, consider small trackable direct mail drops and local radio ads. Make sure you can track all your advertising and do what makes sense for your location.

7. Launch a Grand Opening

Create an aggressive online exclusive promotion for grand opening days to get your car wash slammed from the very beginning. This could be discount washes or unlimited clubs. Run this promotion and drive customers to sign up ahead of time on your website. Your goal is to bring in revenue before the wash opens. Reward those customers for taking a chance on your new wash. Be sure they have a way to share it with their friends. We all know if our friends share a deal with us, we’re more likely to look at it.

8. Kick Off Sales

Get your staff involved with selling. There are secret ingredients to this special sauce. What you want to remember is your staff is on property and in front of customers all day every day. Use this to capture more unlimited signups, especially around the grand opening. Create goals, rewards and track sales from each person. Arm them with the materials to close the deal and the training to do it in a comfortable, authentic way.

9. Go Make Some Friends

Visit local businesses around your wash. Work out some deals with takeout restaurants or go give coupons and free washes to large offices. Make sure to connect with people in places of local influence. Make them feel like they have a connection to you and the new neighbor in town.

10. Opening Day

If you’re an owner, plan to be at the pay station and greeting the customers. Make sure your crew is well energized and hydrated. Have someone shaking a sign out at the road, if possible. Have your manager in the vacuum area talking to every customer and ask happy customers to leave us a review. Make sure everyone that leaves the property is happy.

If you need help getting your car wash slammed, give us a call at Slam. It’s what we do all day, every day and we love it!