We’ve been blasting out our marketing materials pretty much non-stop since we opened our wash. I’m starting to run out of ideas for what to post on social, and what kind of promotions we should be running. Any advice?

Any advice you say? That’s like asking a goat if it wants to eat a can. Or a fish if it can swim. Or a bear if it … well, you get the idea.

It’s easy to get caught up in the fervor of starting up a business. There is an almost tangible pressure to make sure you’re pushing out promotion after promotion, or post after post, to attract customers. We end up spinning our wheels and doing work that could really be avoided.

Yes, you need to market your wash. Yes, you need customers. But the path to that does not require more work as much as it requires the right work.

Today’s marketing landscape calls for content that is relevant to the target. If it’s not, it ends up right in the rubbish bin. But how do we figure out what’s relevant?

It starts with understanding who your customer (or your target customer) is. This can be as simple as having a basic level of understanding like knowing that your customer base is more female than male or in the ages of 25-50. But, if you really want to be relevant and keep your efforts out of the trash, you’ll need to dive deeper.

In traditional marketing, it starts with building customer personas. Develop key audiences that make up your customers and build actual personalities around them. That will help you figure out the best way to speak to each audience in ways that connect.

For example, you might know that your wash is in a developing area with a lot of young families. One of your personas might be “Mother Mavery.” Mavery is a working mom, with at least one child under the age of 14, who typically washes the car on her way between weekend errands. Her family falls into an upper middleclass tax bracket. Mavery has a college degree.

Knowing that information, you can start to craft messages that are relevant both in subject matter and in the way you speak to the target customer. For example, based on the persona, we know that Mavery doesn’t have a lot of time in her days/weeks. So, we might provide content that is centered around the time savings you can offer. “We get you in, out, and on your way in 7 minutes or less.” Or, you might play to the idea of lightening the workload “We can’t clean your house, but we can clean your car!”

You can build these personas out for your different target customers, and before you know it, you’ll have very distinct and repeatable ways to create content that is relevant to your target audiences.

The best news of all? Instead of having to blast out messages over and over and over again, you can create a content calendar that enables a segmented, personalized approach to attracting and connecting with customers.

Champ Savage is a marketing expert. It says so right on his business card. He has traveled the world bringing ideas to business owners of all kinds, and his accolades are even more numerous than his passport stamps. Now, Savage lends his expertise exclusively to CAR WASH Magazine and its readers.