We’re back with another two part series around building successful marketing plans for your car wash. Marketing has been a really hot topic in the car wash industry lately and creating a marketing plan helps you build the habit of getting content ready to be able to share with your followers. Even if you don’t currently have social media or email marketing, starting this habit can help you start your social media or email marketing campaign on a great foot. Keep in mind, what works for you, won’t work for the car wash down the street. Each operator has different customers, operations, services, and need for social media. Join us in part one as we discuss how to define your goals for marketing as well as how to obtain those goals.
Step one of building a successful marketing plan is identifying what your goals are. Are you working to build awareness, bring in more customers, nurture your community, or learn about your audience? Discovering what your goals are helps bring attention to where it is in your business you are trying to improve. How do you do this? Step one is to take an audit of your current social media, email marketing, and website presence. What are you currently posting on your social channels? What kind of content is on your website? Gain a grip on this to better understand what your goals should be. You can’t identify success or failure if you don’t know how much closer or farther away you are from reaching your goal.
Once you’ve done an audit and chosen what your goal is, the next step is to make sure you have some help in getting a marketing plan going. One of the first things you should do is look in a scheduling system for your social media posts. There are paid tools available, but there are also free tools such as Buffer or Later. You can also use the old tried and true method of pen and paper and manually posting to your social channels. Either way you start looking at scheduling posts, this is a huge help in organizing, seeing a calendar, and understanding the types of content you are sharing on a regular basis.
Creating a monthly marketing calendar is a big first step to getting consistent content on your social channels. Consistency is important. It shows customers and potential customers that you are available, that you are tending to your business, and that you’re keeping up with the times.
Now that you’ve defined your goal, started gathering content, and are ready to push forward, what comes next? When putting together your monthly marketing plan, it’s important to think of any holidays you can use to help fill up some space in your content plan. Holidays are important pieces not to forget in your marketing plan as you don’t want to push other important content aside for things you forgot in your plan. Don’t forget any fun “National Holidays” like national dog day, or National Car Wash Day, or National Hot Dog Day! This is where seeing a calendar with holiday events is important when first building out your marketing plan.
From there, you want to make sure you are scheduling a weekly or monthly event that you create specific for your wash. Whether it’s “Wednesday Wash Wisdom” or a monthly special you have available. Getting that on your social calendar helps you “see” where spaces can be filled in with other content. And truly, once you have filled in your bank holidays, your more fun holidays, and events or specials you are hosting, you’ll see at that point you have a pretty well filled in calendar. From here, finding articles around why you should wash your car at a car wash, or videos showing your equipment working, or a million other ideas can help you build a full calendar with your social content.
With all that being said, in this next month, take the time to do an audit on your social media and website. How are you connecting with customers now? Then, figure out what your goal is going forward. Next month, we’ll come back and help you get to the right audience for your goals. Make sure to come back and check it out!