bslfujoh (vjef - carpet cleaning...

Marketing Guide

1

© 2013 Rotovac Corporation. All Rights Reserved

Welcome to the Rotovac Business Startup Marketing Plan. Our goal is to give you simple, clear, tried and tested advice on how to get your carpet cleaning business going, and how to keep it growing.

You’ve made the best first decision – you’ve purchased a Rotovac, the finest carpet cleaning machine available. As your business grows, you’ll find that the Rotovac’s astonishing cleaning results and the word of mouth that follows will become your most persuasive marketing tool.

There are many business marketing plans available, and some will even tell you what size yellow page ads to purchase and what color shirt to wear. At Rotovac, we believe in allowing you to shape yourbusiness to your needs. If you are starting part time for example, you won’t need to budget for expensive advertising. Part or full time, theRotovac Business Startup Marketing Plan with help you toprofessionally begin and sustain a successful carpet cleaning career.

2


Writing a Business Plan

Before you do anything you need to come up with a business plan – and I know it’s not fun, but write it down! It’s easy to get lost in thedetails if you haven’t taken the time to actually sit down and plan out your marketing goals. Start with the basics – what is the name of yourcompany? I would strongly suggest somethingshort and easy to remember.

So instead of “Zachariah’s Carpet & TileCleaning Service” try...“Zeek’s Carpet Cleaning”

Instead of “Jabrowski Brothers QualityCleaning” Try... “Portland Carpet Care”

If your business name is even slightly complicated you will have to spell it out on the phone more times than you can count, and if it’s hard to remember then your clients might very well not be able to remember your name next time they need a cleaning.

When planning out your business give yourself regular goals – like make a goal that in three weeks you will have approached the owners of 15 different apartment buildings to become their new cleaner. Set goals to have business cards, fliers etc made up. Set goals to buy new equipment, stock up on chemicals etc. Being successful when you are self employed is all about careful planning, and all about follow through.

Commercial Vs. Residential Work

When starting your business you should decide if you are going to focus on residential or on commercial work, there are clear pros and cons to both. Usually people go after commercial work because places like apartment buildings,retirement homes etc. will typically have you clean the entire building and will have you do so on a regular basis. The downside is that people seeking cleanings for commercial buildings will usually expect you to drastically reduce your prices, and getting paid often takes 2-3 weeks due to the fact that you are dealing with

bureaucracies. On a regular 2 bedroom apartment you might get $120 if a person hires you, but if you are cleaning a whole building they might insist on paying no more than $60 a unit. I think it would be prudent for you to go after both actually, since regularly scheduled apartment buildings can be a great way to supplement your income from doing houses and apartments.

3


Upselling your Services

There are many different ways toupsell your services and make some extra cash as you go about yourscheduled cleaning jobs. Many people start with Scotchguard, which is a great spray that will make your carpet last longer and do better between cleanings. Typically cleaners will charge $10-$15 a room for Scotchguard treatment, which can add up to be a substantial boon.

For regular stain treatment, consider using a formula called “Stain Magic”

which is excellent at getting up those more difficult stains and discoloration spots. Typically you would charge $10-$15 per room for this regular sort of stain treatment.

For cat urine stains you really need a Water Claw or some other kind of spot lifter tool – and even then about 10-15% of the time the urine will have soaked through to the carpet pad and you will not be able to remove the odor. My recommendation would be to buy a Water Claw, use a chemical called OSR (an odor and stain remover) and also have your clients sign a waiver saying theyunderstand that if the urine has settled into the carpet pad there is a chance the odor may return.

Retaining your Customers

When you are doing your next cleaning, take a moment to ask your customer about the last carpet cleaning company they hired. I’ll bet you a dollar they thought they did a good job but can’t remember the name of the company. The truth of the matter is that most people don’t think any more about their carpets than they have too, and usually forget the company they hired as soon as they walk out the door.

To be as successful as you can be as a carpet cleaner, you need to make your company memorable. There are several ways to go about this. First, I would recommend getting some “swag” which is to say giveaway products with your logo and number on it – squish balls, pens etc. One popular tactic is to get cleaning spray bottles made with your logo and customers number on them. Tell them “if you get a small stain on your carpet, spray it with this and then dab with a rag. If the problem area is still there you can call the number on the bottle.” This works really well.

The number one best working idea for retaining customers is booking their next appointment directly after the cleaning. Say something along the lines of “We recommend a regular cleaning every six months, can I put you down for a 10am appointment on September 25th?” About sixty percent of your customers will say “ok” and then you have jobs set up for the future. If you depend on new clients for all your business it is very hard to grow, but with a regular client base every new client is one more client – and more money you are making in the fiscal year.

4


Other Services you can Offer

Carpet cleaning is just the tip of the iceberg, there are all kinds of extra services you can market. Tile is a big one, probably the biggest one. You can actually make more money from cleaning tile – anywhere from $75-$150 an hour if you are charging correctly! Many people actually start cleaning carpets and end up exclusively cleaning tile because the money is better.

Upholstery is also a good money maker, all you need is a detail tool and a standard sized couch shouldn’t take you more than 20 or 30 minutes. Typicall cleaners charge about $25 per couch, and $15 for loveseats.

Flood restoration is a very profitablebusiness if you can get the work – atypical smaller job will make you $5,000 to $6,000 and only take you a few hours. Not only does doing flood restoration require a LOT of classes and education, but you must be certified and licensed. Your company has to be in the position to be able to accept insurance. Nobody will be paying for emergency services out of pocket. Flood restoration is the kind of business that is difficult to get, but once you get hookups in the insuranceindustry it’s not unfathomable that you could be making $500k – to a million a

year. Realistically this isn’t something you should even consider doing until you have been doingcarpet cleaning for awhile, and feel comfortable with that.

It’s easy to start with tile and upholstery though, so every time someone calls about a carpet cleaning just say “we have a 20% off special on tile and upholstery cleaning, did you need any tile orupholstery cleaned while we are there?”

Handing out Fliers and Knocking on Doors

There are free flyers on our resources page than can be modified for your business. Just bring the Photoshop files to a Kinkos and ask someone there help you swap out the business name and phonenumber. There are a million places where you can put up flyers but try and think about who hasmoney, and who you want as customers. Laundoymats usually let you post notices and cards, but if you think about it people only go to laundromats because they are poor and can’t afford their own washer and dryer. If on the other hand, you put up flyers in the community center of a richneighborhood, or at a coffee shop in an upper end area; you can attract potential customers whoown larger houses that you can charge more for, and upsell different services to.

5


Surprisingly, just going door to door and handing out fliers in good neighborhoods is (timeconsuming) yet very effective way to generate new business. I’ve heard people tell me that theyusually sign someone up every hour and a half to two hours they spend knocking on doors. So if you finish a job in a nice area, why not knock on a few doors and hand out a few fliers?

Yellow Page Ads

Yellow Page ads are surprisingly hit and miss. I have talked to cleaners who told me they worked, but I have talked to more who barely broke even (the ads tend to be very expensive) or even lost money on them. Personally I wouldn’t risk it – it’s a dying medium and there are just too many other, better ways to advertise.

Yard Signs

Yard signs are both very time consuming to set up, and highly effective. Putting up signs is pretty much a sure thing but it’s a pain to deal with (driving around and putting up signs in intersections) A cleaner I spoke with who tried this, said he spent half a day setting up signs and got three or four jobs from it. He also got calls from a few people calling to ask that he take down a sign on their property. It’s been said that usually city workers whose job it is to fine people for putting up signs illegally only work Monday through Friday, so if you put them up and take them down on the weekends you can get away with putting your signs in very obvious, well trafficked places.

Google Adwords

When you do a Google search you will see 10 website results, and three at the very top with a light yellow background. The ones with a yellow background are paying a set amount of money for clicks they receive. Usually in the $2-$6 range but it depends on where you live. You can look and find “promo codes” online that give you anywhere from a free $50 to $150 credit towards this.

Groupon and Amazon Deals

With these sites you agree to a deal – where you list your special at half of your normal rate. So if you do a 6 room or less house for $300, you would list it on Groupon for $150 and give Groupon $75 of that leaving $75. Then Groupon sells X amount of cleaning (usually a ridiculous amount – beprepared for that.) Typically you can expect to make anywhere from $2,000 to $7,000 depending upon how big your area is. You can expect to be doing these special internet deal jobs for 2-4 months.

You might be thinking that $75 for a big house isn’t much, and you would be right – but that is where upselling and booking their next appointment come in. You can sell Scotchguard treatment for $10-$15 a room and stain treatment for the same. There are also cat urine treatments, which you can charge even more for. For an average sized house (if you pitch them properly) you should be able to walk away with an extra $20-$60. Every time you do a job and they seem happy try and schedule their next cleaning, say something along the lines of “Ok, so we recommend setting up a cleaning 6 months from now – does August 5th work?” Most people will go for it, and in six months you will be booked solid with well paying jobs doing larger houses.

6


Google Organics

The first step in getting ranked highly on Google is a good amount of written content. There is one thing 99% of all high ranking websites have in common - they have a lot of text. In the marketing community there is an expression, “content is king.” Make that your mantra. All the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work in the world isn’tgoing to do you a lick of good if you don’t have a lot of words on your website. The reason for this is pretty simple, Google is a word driven engine - the more content it has to find, the more it will index. (Indexing is when Google puts one of your sites or pages in their searchdatabase.)

So it follows that many (most) peopledoing all these search engine tricks to get their websites ranked highly would get a better return on their time by adding new written content to their websites. What kind of written content you ask? Add a frequently asked questions page. Make a page about the history of your company. Really it can be about anything as long as some of the words relate to the keywords you are trying to rank for.

What I mean is that if you are selling a cleaning service making a new page and using phrases like “Seattle hardwood floor cleaning” and “carpet cleaning in Seattle” repeatedly will yield much better results than some page using less descriptive words.

Your website through Rotovac will already be built with meta information. “Meta Information” is the very first part of your websites structure. The meta info tells the page what its “title” is (the text in the top of your menus tab) they also tell the page what the description should be in the search engine.

Once your website itself has been optimized for Google you will need to get people linking to you. Google is an “authority based search engine.” Much like high school, Google takes your overallpopularity into account when determining your status and rank within their system.

Typically websites that have NO incoming links only rank on the first page of Google for very small towns. If you live in a city with a population of 25,000 you can probably get to first place on Google with no real work, but if you were to live in say... Brooklyn New York you will be competing against hundreds of carpet cleaners. In big cities you will need to have many hundreds of backlinks in order to make it to the first page of Google.

7


Ways to get Backlinks

1.) Ask for them. This might seem glib but simply asking people if they want to trade links is a very successful strategy. Consider doing Google searches for “carpet cleaning in Arizona” or “carpetcleaning in Texas” Do searches for states OTHER than the state you are in. Compile a list of ahundred or so email address. Now that you have the list email them all at once with a form letter.”

2.) Buy banner space on popular websites. For example - if there is a website called “fun things to do in Kentucky” you might inquire as to how much traffic they get and how much they would charge you for banner advertising. Purchasing ad space does two things: it counts as a backlink, and it brings you potential customers.

3.) Comment on a lot of blogs. Just do random Google searches for different things related to carpet cleaning. Even if it isn’t related this will help you on Google (although a link from a page about carpet cleaning is better.) Remember to include your website URL when asked. Many blogs will allow you to create a link back to your website.

4.) Hire a worker to build backlinks for you. Check out Odesk.com, you will find that since these workers may live in poor areas like Vietnam, India or the Phillipenes they will be willing to work for as little as $3 an hour. Ask for a daily spreadsheet that lists all the links they have created for you. A good worker will be able to leave upwards of 50 comments and create dozens of internet profiles a day.

Google Maps

Have you ever Googled something and seen a group of search results labeled A, B, C, D etc? Those are “map listings” which according to Google’s algorithms, are businesses in your area. It’s important to note than you can either be on Google Maps OR you can be on Google organic listings – but you

can’t be on both at the same time.Usually you want to be on Maps.

To get on Google Maps first you have to claim your listing. To claim your listing go to this URL: https://maps.google.com/Click the blue link that says “Put your business on Google Maps”

If a competing company “flags youraccount” a Google employee in India will call you up and let you know they are removing your account. I would strongly suggest you find a person paying for an office space who will let you claim that address for a small monthly fee.

8


If you sign up with a residential address or a business address with some other company sign out front, you risk the very real possibility of having your listing removed by Google.

So how do you go about getting high rated on Google Maps? It’s simple really, very time consuming but very simple. You need to add your business to hundreds of business directories. Here are a few examples of directories to add your business to:

yelp.com, citysearch.com, superpages.com, insiderpages.com, yahoo.com, dexknows.com

For this to work you have to use the EXACT same address on every listing. For example, if one lists your address as “Fake Street”and your Google Maps page lists your address as “1234 Fake St.” then that listing will not be counted. Be advised that adding yourself to 10 or 15 directories is a complete waste of time – you really do need hundreds. If you can’t be bothered to do this yourself you canalways hire somebody on www.odesk.com to do this for about $3 an hour. Be prepared to pay a worker to work 20 hours a week for about two months before you get listed in a good spot.

Networking for Business

Of all the methods of promoting your business, this is arguably both the very hardest and most important. Getting in good with the owner of a string of hotels in a large city can potentially make your whole business. Getting in tight with real estate agents, maid companies etc. can be a HUGE source of new leads. I spoke with one cleaner who worked out a deal with a maid company where the agency get $20 for every referral. It is a good bet that anyone hiring a maid also isinterested in maintaining their carpets, and has the income to make that happen.

Consider joining the BNI group for small businesses, I have heard many a cleaner tell me the BNI network was bringing in as much as 30-40% of their cleaning gigs. The Chamber of Commerce is also a great way to network with other businesses – all of those people you meet in the Chamber will be able to refer you others, and many will own buildings that will need regular carpet cleanings.

Networking really is king in this business – a person good at networking and horrible at all other forms of marketing is likely to do better and be more successful than a person bad at networking but great at all other forms of advertising and marketing.

bslfujoh (vjef - carpet cleaning...

Documents