Digital Marketing for Car Detailing: Leaving the Competition in the Dust
What if you were a car detailer faced with the following scenarios?
- People are constantly filling out your online booking forms.
- You get dozens of calls or texts per day from new customers interested in your services.
- Your calendar is so full that you need to hire more detailers for your team.
If you’re like most car detailing business owners, you’d jump at the chance to take advantage of these situations. In this guide, we’ll explain the process The Houston Marketing Agency will use to help you execute the perfect digital marketing campaign and build a more successful brand.
We’re a Marketing Agency That Specializes in Car Detailing
We’re experts in digital marketing. Our years of experience in the industry have taught us a thing or two about how to help customers like you.
Contact us for a free initial consultation with no strings attached and learn what we can do for your car detailing business.
Step-by-Step Actions for a Top-Tier Car Detailing Digital Marketing Campaign
We’re a top Houston Marketing Agency that implements clear strategies and processes to get top results.
We will focus on three critical components of your digital marketing journey:
- Setting up data analytics, which allows you to track your campaign’s performance
- Driving more inbound traffic to your website
- Converting that traffic into customers
While this process may seem straightforward, the results won’t be worth much if they aren’t trackable.
Can you correctly answer any of the following questions about your car detailing business’ digital marketing campaign?
- What is your website’s conversion rate?
- How many organic visitors did your site get from Google last month?
- What is your cost per qualified lead from Google Ads?
Feeling a little like this guy? Then you need our help!
We’ll lead you through the steps of our process and help you understand how everything works. While we are a digital marketing agency, we’re also a data agency. This means we can help shed light on what is successful and what isn’t — allowing us to build you a personalized, holistic, and high-performing campaign.
Phase 1: Build Robust Data Analytics
Trackable KPIs
Car detailing digital marketing best practices start with data. If you don’t have reliable tracking for your data analytics — or are making decisions based on a gut feeling — you aren’t going to get the best results.
Some crucial KPIs that you should be tracking for your car detailing business include:
- Revenue per vehicle
- Employee turnover
- Average downtime
- Customer satisfaction ratings
While these aren’t directly related to digital marketing, they’re incredibly important. Other KPIs that are centered around digital marketing would be things such as:
- Number of website visitors by channel
- Cost pers by channel:
- Cost per website visitor
- Cost per lead
- Cost per qualified lead
- Cost per conversion
Data Fidelity
Most other digital marketing agencies don’t seem to be as concerned about data fidelity as they should. We’ve seen campaigns that started with other agencies or freelancers and found many issues such as:
- Double counting conversions
- Not tracking every step of the funnel to clearly understand drop-off and conversion rates
- Tracking irrelevant conversions, i.e., someone making a Google Maps “direction request” to your store
The Houston Marketing Agency strives for perfect data tracking — we only want to deal with information that is completely relevant to the digital marketing campaign of your car detailing business.
Phase 2: Maximize Affordable Inbound Traffic
Many people are searching online for car detailing services, and they may have different search parameters depending on what they want. For instance, they could be looking for:
- Car detailing businesses close to them
- Detailing for specific types of vehicles
- Mobile detailing
- And more
An important part of building your digital marketing strategy is maximizing your site so that people looking for these specific things can more easily find you. We know exactly how to do this, but here’s a quick run-down of some of the things we’ll focus on.
Since Google has become synonymous with searching for something online, it’s clear that this is where you should start when analyzing your digital marketing data.
While there’s been a slight downtick from its high, the interest in car detailing businesses has risen sharply in the last decade and has remained relatively steady for a few years.
As you can see from the search results below, there are still almost 550,000 people per month searching for “car detailing near me” — that’s over 6.5 million people a year.
If you get more location-specific and search for car detailing in Houston, there are still more than 5,000 potential customers per month looking for you.
And for those searching for specific needs like mobile detailing, RV detailing, or luxury car detailing, you’ll see that the demand is quite high.
Why do you need to know this?
Because what people are looking for regarding your car detailing business should be a big part of your digital marketing strategy, and the right agency knows how to take advantage of this.
If you’re not performing well in both organic and paid traffic, you’re missing out on potential customers for your car detailing business.
Organic
There are two places you can rank organically on Google for keywords like “car detailers near me.”
The first is known as the Google Local Pack.
We’re sure you want to know how your car detailing business can rank in the Google Local Pack.
Local SEO is complex and there’s a lot that makes it tick, but the basic formula is:
- Have an optimized and highly-reviewed Google Business Profile.
- Have plenty of localized content on your website.
Below the Google Local pack on the search engine results page, you’ll see organic results.
How do car detailing businesses rank in the top organic results?
You can start by:
- Creating a content-rich, comprehensive website
- Optimizing your on-page SEO such as title tags, meta descriptions, and more
Google Ads
Google Ads is a paid option that helps you rank at the top of the results page. If your digital marketing agency plans your sponsored ads the right way, your target audience will click on these, leading them to your site and a possible booking.
YouTube Ads
Car detailing is a very visual business, so creating quality, highly-geotargeted video ads showing before-and-afters or shining, squeaky-clean cars could earn you lots of new customers.
Statistics show that YouTube has 2.49 billion active users per month, so if you aren’t tapping into that market you’re potentially missing a huge part of your customer base.
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok Ads
You must have stunning videos for your car detailing digital marketing, but you also need equally beautiful photos of your detailed vehicles for Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok ads. There’s a lot happening on social media, so if you want to compete you have to give people something remarkable to see.
Car detailing businesses have audiences across the board. Those with SUVs and RVs or car enthusiasts with really expensive cars may be willing to spend a lot of money vs. someone who is trying to sell a car and wants it to look better on a budget. There’s a lot of variety in groups of people who will pay for car detailing.
Your digital ad campaign should have these targeting options locked in. If you’re trying to target someone who owns a sports car, you should be using keywords like:
- Sports car
- Luxury
- High-quality
- Etc.
If you throw in a photo of an old truck or an RV for one of these campaigns, you’ve likely lost your audience. It’s too broad. The right digital marketing agency can help guide you in these choices.
Phase 3: Increase Conversion Rates
The strategies we’ve already discussed focus on getting users to your website. This is an important first step in the process.
But that’s only the beginning. A big part of your job is converting those users to customers and then keeping them loyal for future purchases.
Let’s look at some practical ways to make this happen.
Use CRO Best Practices
Conversion rate optimization can include the following:
- Ensuring your images and videos are high-quality and unique
- Having a mobile-friendly, easily navigable website
- Adding reviews and testimonials to your site
We can’t go into every possible strategy here, but here are some things car detailing businesses can focus on to increase conversion rates.
Let Customers Schedule Directly Online
When people are searching for mobile car detailers, they clearly want convenience — someone who can come to their home or workplace and clean their car while they’re busy doing other things is a godsend.
So it’s pretty obvious that these people want an easy way to book and even pay for their appointments. Offering multiple options to schedule (call, text, book directly) in several different places is likely to optimize conversion.
The book online button should take you to a page where you can schedule directly. Businesses that don’t have this option are missing out because people want the booking process to be streamlined and easy.
In fact, one study shows that 69% of customers are more likely to book with businesses that have an online system.
Have a Section on Your Website for Specific Vehicle Types
We saw specific search results earlier and know that some people may be searching for car detailing by vehicle type. Having a vehicle page on your website is likely to help these searchers find you and increase sales.
Offer Clear Pricing
If your pricing isn’t clear or people are encouraged to call for more information, they’re likely to move on to another car detailing business where someone will tell them exactly what the job costs. Be upfront with your potential customers, even if you need to give them a range or let them know that certain options or situations will incur a higher cost.
Increase LTV on Autopilot
Fortunately for you, car detailing isn’t a one-time experience. Cars get dirty inside and out from environmental situations like tree sap and pollen, highway use (hello, bugs!), pets, kids, and more. While some people don’t care about their cars that much and may only get them detailed once per year at most, others could become regular customers — increasing their lifetime value, or LTV.
Be sure to collect your customers’ information so you can send them email or text marketing to try to get them to sign up for service again. If someone has one car that needs to be cleaned, they may have more vehicles that also need the service: other cars, trucks, or SUVs; boats; motorcycles; RVs; etc.
You may also choose to offer subscription services like the one shown below. This incentivizes customers to sign up for regular service at a slight discount, increasing their LTV.
Digital Marketing for Car Detailing Doesn’t Have to Be Rocket Science
The Houston Digital Marketing Agency wants nothing more than to help local and national brands predictably increase leads and sales, no matter their industry.
We want you to increase sales and grow your customer base with our digital marketing for car detailing businesses. We even offer a 100% refund if we can’t improve your performance within three months.
Contact us today to learn how to get started.