The foundation of any marketing program in the cleaning industry should encompass all available vehicles. The market is too competitive to rely on old reservation systems that worked in the past. Companies that are experiencing strong growth understand today’s market.
Traditional companies that don’t understand the market have seen stagnant or stagnant growth. Not understanding the current competitive landscape will lead to disappointment and waste valuable limited resources, especially in a small market or start-up in today’s market.
Vehicles that MUST be used include traditional;
1. Networking through professional associations
2. Telemarketing
3. Direct mail
4. Follow-up by fax
5. Personal sales calls
6. Public relations, that is; write for local media, volunteer programs, community involvement.
Now, with the widespread use of computers, these vehicles MUST include;
1. Email campaigns
2. A meaningful (optimized) web presence including a website, responsive device, continuous blog updated twice weekly, video / audio links (NO cheesy homemade videos, just PAIN)
3. A unique selling proposition (a position that differentiates one company from all others)
4. Presence on social networks
All vehicles must be employed and then integrated to work together. No vehicle will run on its own and each vehicle cannot pull in separate directions. Using one or two will not work effectively, period. Not having them integrated will not work either. Now here’s the really important piece, only one or two methods worked at a time. Many great companies were created with just networking or just personal sales calls.
The old standard advertising vehicles just won’t work anymore, and if the truth be known, they never worked so well. Newspaper advertising is dead. Television and radio never worked for commercial cleaning services. In some markets, good-sized office buildings receive three to four sales calls before lunch. There has been a five-fold increase in the number of cleaning companies over the past 30 years in the United States.
One reason is the proliferation of cleaning franchise companies and prepackaged “hit” kits being sold on the Internet. The secret to the cleaning franchise business is that the money paid to the franchise company eats up what were once profits and individual franchise owners are little more than employees with no benefits. Insiders admit that the owner of a main franchise or the franchise company itself is a license to steal.
Gone are the days of 4 television channels as well as the days of horses and buggies, THINGS CHANGE. Some people recognize the changes and others are trapped in a nostalgic fog. That’s why today you see 60-year-old boys running around with Jefferson Airplane Concert ponytails, earrings and T-shirts, punctuating every phrase “faaar out.”
You have two options, acknowledge the current reality or “keep walking” down the nostalgia line and you too can end up in a multi-colored VW minibus covered in daffodils and peace signs, broken down on the interstate, which is definitely NOT “faaar out.” “!
Ed selkow
