Express Car Wash Colorado operated three busy locations in a hyper-competitive Colorado Springs market. They were handling marketing in-house. But in the digital age, there’s too much for any one person to do well. It led to inconsistent messaging and ineffective spend. They did have a superior customer experience, but they were digitally invisible compared to competitors. So it wasn’t giving them the leg-up it should. To level-up, they needed to market themselves, and especially their unique strengths, to a wider audience and grow their membership base.
ECWC brought in W&K to rebuild their digital strategy, replacing fragmented efforts with a synchronized multi-channel system. We scrapped generic messaging everyone else was doing in favor of a brand voice that resonated with the Colorado Springs community. By refining their audience and deploying high-quality content across social, search, email, and other digital channels, we ensured every digital touchpoint drove one goal: high-intent membership growth. They were doing a TON of things better than their competition; they just weren’t marketing it well enough.
Over a two-year partnership, ECWC transformed from a local favorite into a dominant market force and eventually sold. Revenue climbed steadily as our data-driven optimizations lowered acquisition costs and boosted lifetime value. This sustained growth caught the attention of major investors, leading to a successful acquisition. Our goal was to be a good partner with ECWC along the way.
Express Car Wash Colorado operated three busy locations in a hyper-competitive Colorado Springs market. They were handling marketing in-house. But in the digital age, there’s too much for any one person to do well. It led to inconsistent messaging and ineffective spend. They did have a superior customer experience, but they were digitally invisible compared to competitors. So it wasn’t giving them the leg-up it should. To level-up, they needed to market themselves, and especially their unique strengths, to a wider audience and grow their membership base
ECWC brought in W&K to rebuild their digital strategy, replacing fragmented efforts with a synchronized multi-channel system. We scrapped generic messaging everyone else was doing in favor of a brand voice that resonated with the Colorado Springs community. By refining their audience and deploying high-quality content across social, search, email, and other digital channels, we ensured every digital touchpoint drove one goal: high-intent membership growth. They were doing a TON of things better than their competition; they just weren’t marketing it well enough.
Over a two-year partnership, ECWC transformed from a local favorite into a dominant market force and eventually sold. Revenue climbed steadily as our data-driven optimizations lowered acquisition costs and boosted lifetime value. This sustained growth caught the attention of major investors, leading to a successful acquisition. Our goal was to be a good partner with ECWC along the way.
The team at Express Car Wash Colorado reminded us why we do what we do. They’re salt-of-the-earth people who genuinely love what they do and love serving their community. We were always met with a smile. That culture of kindness started at the top. Ownership treated their staff like family, and that energy was contagious. In a lot of ways, they made it easy on us. It’s not hard to market a business when the people running it are like-minded humans who want to do things different than everyone else.
We drew digital circles around other car washes in Colorado Springs (we picked the top 30 volume locations). When someone entered one of them with their phone, we made sure they saw an ECWC ad. We used messages like “sick of the water spots? Our dryers are better” or “tired of paying premium prices for your premium car wash membership? Switch to Express for 1 free month”. We also tracked how many of these cars drove into an ECWC lot after seeing an ad.
If someone searched for an ECWC competitor by name, we made sure an ECWC ad popped up above their organic listing. We intercepted lots of clicks from Googlers who were looking at other washes.
Meta and Google are smart. They can create a list of people with identical characteristics to your competitors’ customers, and send them ads. By getting strategic, we targeted these potential customers a bit differently by capitalizing on pain points we knew they were experiencing based on industry knowledge.
To poach customers from competitors, you’ll need a strong CTA. If they’re going to make a change, customers need a good reason. We used CTAs like “Free Month When You Switch” or “Shorter Lines Here” or “Brighter Shines, Brighter Smiles Over At Express”. This is the art form of creating the right message for the audience you’re targeting.
We tagged cars who went to a different car wash, and targeted them with ads. Here are the number of cars that visited an ECWC location after they saw our ads.
| Month | Fillmore | Republic | Dalby |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 2,191 | 130 | 587 |
| February | 861 | 93 | 698 |
| March | 615 | 307 | 724 |
| April | 592 | 152 | 346 |
| May | 719 | 246 | 553 |
| June | 455 | 280 | 595 |
| July | 364 | 123 | 444 |
| August | 317 | 240 | 861 |
| September | 295 | 267 | 1,139 |
| October | 416 | 692 | 1,273 |
| November | 445 | 788 | 1,055 |
| December | 390 | 578 | 887 |
We used the highest traffic digital channels to generate new ECWC wash memberships online. The ads needed to be hard-hitting, and they needed to be built for the digital platforms where everyone is.
Pro Tip: Lead generation ads need to be built for digital environments. 90%+ users will see your ads on a phone.
To our pals at Lunchbucket Creative, our killer good partner on this project.
There are zillions of car washes in Colorado Springs, it’s a super competitive industry. But that’s really unique. There are tons of industries like that. So…how to get a leg up? You’ll basically need to be smarter and more strategic than the tons of other organizations doing the same thing. The good news is, if you look around at your competition, you’ll probably see them all doing kind of the same thing. That’s a major opportunity. Level-up your messaging, dial in your data analytics, and do something different from everyone else, and you’ll stand out even in a highly competitive space.
Great marketing requires 3 VERY important things (we say this to every client): Communication, Strategy, Consistency. We always set up recurring meetings with our clients and always make sure communication lines are open and honest. We also create a well-rounded strategy for your organization. Most just piece-meal marketing tactics together and do the best they can. But that’s not really a holistic strategy. We help you navigate your entire marketing strategy from top to bottom and dial in a plan that works. Finally, consistency. Great plans take time (this is one of the hardest things for organizations to grasp). There are no magic bullets, and marketing is not a money faucet. You have to have more patience than your competition, and you have to be better at sticking to the plan. All these things together are how ECWC rose to the top and sold.
Great marketing requires 3 VERY important things (we say this to every client): Communication, Strategy, Consistency. We always set up recurring meetings with our clients and always make sure communication lines are open and honest. We also create a well-rounded strategy for your organization. Most just piece-meal marketing tactics together and do the best they can. But that’s not really a holistic strategy. We help you navigate your entire marketing strategy from top to bottom and dial in a plan that works. Finally, consistency. Great plans take time (this is one of the hardest things for organizations to grasp). There are no magic bullets, and marketing is not a money faucet. You have to have more patience than your competition, and you have to be better at sticking to the plan. All these things together are how ECWC rose to the top and sold.
In the age of AI and putting the bottom line ahead of customer experience, having great customer service is a major leg up. ECWC decided NOT to automate every little thing, and instead to provide their human customers with human service. This is the opposite direction most organizations are going these days, and we helped them market that to the public. Marketing pieces that showed they were still human went a long way. They got better engagement on those campaigns, and they repeatedly got new customers who chose them because they went out of their way to provide good service instead of automation.
“Okay” marketing can be cranked out in a day if you’re smart with tools like AI. And you’ll get okay results from it. Great marketing is a long game. We worked with ECWC for 2 years, and it took the first several months to create and dial in a plan that generated revenue. Testing, optimizing, and analyzing should be constant. If a marketing agency ever says you’ll be rich in 90 days, run the other way (we’ve seen it a million times). Take time to do it right, and you’ll be ahead of 75% of your competition.
Digital marketing strategy: tactical and creative
Social media page management
Paid social media campaigns: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube
Content production
Search engine marketing
Web
Display/Banner ads
Data analytics
Local search engine optimization
Special focus on growing recurring revenue and memberships in a monthly subscription-based business model, and gaining market share through differentiation in a highly competitive industry space.