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The Blueprint for Success: Achieving Financial Freedom and Early Retirement in the Cleaning Industry – with Shawn Barrett

The Blueprint for Success: Achieving Financial Freedom and Early Retirement in the Cleaning Industry – with Shawn Barrett

PODCAST EPISODE

The Blueprint for Success: Achieving Financial Freedom and Early Retirement in the Cleaning Industry – with Shawn Barrett

Mastering the Marketing Mindset: Lessons Learned from Shawn Barrett’s Journey to Financial Freedom

In the world of cleaning business success, marketing plays a crucial role in determining a business’s trajectory. In a recent episode of the Carpet Cleaner Success Podcast, host John Clendenning sat down with Shawn Barrett, a seasoned cleaning and restoration (former) business owner with a wealth of knowledge and experience. Throughout the interview, Shawn shared valuable insights and lessons learned from his journey, emphasizing the importance of a marketing mindset in achieving business growth and success. In this article, we will delve into the key takeaways from Barrett’s interview and explore how they can be applied to your carpet cleaning business.

1. Understanding the Power of Marketing:

One of the fundamental lessons highlighted by Shawn is the recognition that marketing is the lifeblood of any business. Gone are the days when relying solely on traditional advertising methods, such as the Yellow Pages, was sufficient. With the advent of online platforms like Google, Facebook and digital ad targeting, cost-effective marketing strategies have become the new norm.

2. Wearing Multiple Hats:

Shawn identified three key hats that every business owner should wear: technician, manager, and entrepreneur. While each role is significant, the marketing hat holds tremendous importance. As the visionary of the business, it is crucial to cultivate a marketing mindset and continuously seek ways to promote and differentiate your services.

3. Strategic Expansion:

Shawn’s journey also exemplifies the importance of strategic expansion. Starting with carpet cleaning, he gradually added additional services such as duct cleaning and restoration. By identifying customer needs and expanding their service offerings, carpet cleaning businesses can tap into new revenue streams and solidify their position in the market.

4. Creating Memorable Moments:

To stand out from competitors and foster customer loyalty, Barrett emphasizes the importance of creating memorable moments. Whether it’s through attention to detail in equipment cleanliness or providing additional memorable perks like booties for clients and an after-care kit, every aspect of your business is an opportunity to showcase your commitment to excellence.

5. Investing in Your Business:

Marketing is not a cost, but an investment. Shawn suggests allocating a minimum of 15 to 20% of revenue toward marketing efforts. By having a marketing calendar, setting aside a marketing budget, and regularly evaluating results, businesses can optimize their strategies for long-term success.

6. Continuous Learning and Improvement:

Marketing is a constantly evolving field, and staying informed about industry trends is vital for success. This interview highlights the importance of self-study, absorbing information from industry experts, and continuously testing and iterating marketing strategies. Through split testing and analyzing results, businesses can refine their approaches and maximize their reach.

Conclusion:

Shawn Barrett’s business journey is a testament to the power of adopting a marketing mindset and continuously improving your business. From understanding the importance of effective marketing to strategic expansion and creating memorable moments, the lessons learned from his experience can guide cleaning business owners toward growth and success. By investing in marketing, embracing continuous learning, and applying innovative strategies, you can set your business apart from the competition and become a leader in your industry.

Remember, in the world of carpet cleaning success, marketing is the key to unlocking new opportunities and maximizing your business’s potential. So put on your marketing hat, stay informed, and embrace the mindset of continuous improvement. Your business and your customers will thank you.

Now, it’s time to take these valuable lessons and apply them to your carpet cleaning business. The journey toward success begins with a marketing mindset and a commitment to excellence.

Listen To The Podcast:

You will learn:

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Discover why Shawn stresses the importance of making marketing a core function of your business.

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Understanding the significance of continuous learning and improvement

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Marketing techniques that will set your business apart in the carpet cleaning industry

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Learn how to differentiate yourself in the marketplace, become an authority, and generate never-ending referrals

Audio Transcript:
John Clendenning [00:00:00]:

Hey. Today, guys, on the carpet cleaner success podcast, we have, a good friend of mine, Sean Barrett. Sean is retired out of his carpet cleaning business in his early fifties. The focus of this this interview today is, how to start a carpet cleaning business. In a town of 30,000 people and retire in your early fifties with financial freedom. So if that sounds intriguing to stick around. We’re gonna have a conversation and just kinda dig into the weeds and and and see how all of that happened and get some nuggets out as we go.

Shawn Barrett [00:00:30]:

Welcome to the carpet cleaner success podcast. A show created to inspire carpet cleaning business owner to build their own thriving residential and commercial cleaning business. Your host, John Clintonning, has built and sold successful cleaning businesses for multiple six figure over his marketing into a lead generation machine. Tune in is John shares proven tips, strategies, and expert interviews to help fast track your success in the carpet cleaning industry.

John Clendenning [00:01:05]:

Welcome, Shawn. Thanks for joining the Carpenter Success podcast podcast. And I’m glad we finally were able to catch up and do this.

Shawn Barrett [00:01:12]:

That’s great, John. It’s been too long since we’ve actually sat down and done something like this. So Thank you.

John Clendenning [00:01:19]:

Yeah. Exactly. So, just a a a brief bio, on your background, you know, who you are, where you where you’re where you’re from, and, just just that kind of job. Just, you know, just, you know, a little bit about Sean and, and and that kind of thing.

Shawn Barrett [00:01:35]:

Yeah. No. That’s that’s perfect. Well, like you said, my wife, Leslie and I, we actually 8 eighties in the early nineties. We right out of high school. We decided that we wanted to own, restaurants. So we’ve heard of a a deli and you’re not the plumbing city. And, we were fortunate enough that not going at the time, but looking back now. Like, a lot of the success principles we put into that rush are the same that pull through to Clendenning, effecting, whatever. So from, like, 89 to 92, I believe we owned that and we sold it. For a profit. And, the cool thing was, a local franchise used to clean our carpets, and he hooked us on beanie carpets. All my wife and I moved back back home and started, with 3 franchises in our local service area. As you said, it was around 30,000 people at the time. It’s closer to a 100,000 now in in that service area, but, yeah, started that and not too long after that in 92. I think you and I probably met some time in 90 495.

John Clendenning [00:02:47]:

I’m more in there. Yeah. Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:02:48]:

We’re in there. And, And the cool thing for me at that time is that you and I were very like minded and, you know, being able to have that connection with a market. I’m to be able to come up with ideas that nobody else was doing and, you know, just get on all in control with that and not actually able to try this. Hey, hey, John. Did you have any success with this? Yeah, I did and what about this and just a tweak here, a tweak there certainly helped us, expand our carpet cleaning business. And then from there with the carpet cleaning business, what we actually did was, we felt restoration. This is probably gonna be a bigger updated business — local service areas. So we actually be back on our carpet cleaning business to get or to begin for that flood call for the insurance companies, brokers, homeowners directly, and we were able to build a pretty decent restoration company up to forty people, 22 vans, and we sold that in 2020. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s I mean, there’s there’s a lot of stuff in between all that, but that’s that’s a quick version.

John Clendenning [00:03:59]:

Yeah. No. That’s good. And we’ll and we’ll dive into that as well because you’re right. It is that, the part that that we like to talk about on these podcasts and we I talk daily to carpet cleaners, whether they’re clients of ours or just people learning, you know, learning what what we do or how to how to grow their business. We’re we’re talking about that marketing mindset a lot, and it’s something I’m really trying to drive home, how, you know, you you wear multiple hats as a business owner. We talked about the 3 different hats that you, you know, you you wear and you can take off the the management hat. You know, you take off the technician hat first. You should be, you know, you might be the guy in the truck, but let’s get somebody in the truck out working for you so that you can take that hat off as you grow the business. The next one might be the the manager hat. You you can have an office manager or a general manager as you grow. And and, you know, be the entrepreneur. But as we we like to say, the that marketing hat really is, is the on superner and the owner of the business, the visionary of the business. They they have to see where the company is going. They don’t have to know how to do all the little pieces, but they have to see where the company is going and get that messaging in the marketplace while you’re unique and and continue to learn that craft so that you can continue to stand out in a crowd. And that kind of thing. So let’s let’s talk a little bit about the services that you offered because, again, you started with the carpet cleaning. You, you added, The duct cleaning came along at one point. The the restoration came along. And then even when the restoration came along, I remember, popping up to your place and watching you giving seminars and building a dry room in, you know, to hold the the the to bring in the insurance adjusters in the area to see it and have them fill out an application to see if they qualify for you to be their vendor turning the tables on them and and all of that kind of stuff. So Let’s talk a little bit about sort of, that that progression from from, quote, just doing carpet cleaning to adding multiple services to to grow to the next level and and thinking through that process. What, you know, you you saw the writing on the wall. The restoration was gonna be bigger, but it’s still it’s not a hard it’s not or it’s not an easy business just to jump into. So, let’s talk a little bit about sort of what what took you that, you know, gave you the the the the the gumption to take that next leap and and actually invest that next level. Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:06:17]:

I think, and I’ve heard you on some of your, interviews in in your YouTube channel talk about the email by Michael Yeah. Probably the not a reader. Probably the first book I ever did from start to finish are probably the best investment I ever made back in and it’s still everything in that book still stands today. And I think keeping that that book actually thought, I think they had them, you know, being with for HVAC. Yeah. Really doesn’t matter, but it’s all it’s it’s all whatever the word would be at all, to any service. Yeah. I just you know, for anybody watching this, if you’ve never read the Emith, it just get both the read and you should have a Although you I still like the hard copy, so I will write all over it and highlight areas so I can refer back to it. And, that’s just the way I learned, but great book. Yeah, as far as, it really we were just very fortunate. I think it’s something that we always preach. Was making sure that whoever you insure your business with, you know, whether it’s gonna be for carpet cleaning restoration, whatever, you’re a real key source for us, that was our first need to go be insured herself in a very large brokerage area.

John Clendenning [00:07:39]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:07:40]:

As we put the confidence in the training to do restoration, use them as a resource to get that first phone call. Any insurance industry has gained, but that’s certainly still the focus It’s still about people at that level. It’s not always about social media or, you know, flyers or however you’re attracting your clients. Sometimes it is still a No. Carpenter Clendenning, the natural progression, I think with any carpet cleaning company probably is cleaning because then you can, you know, duct cleaning can be done. It’d be very horrible. And so I don’t like yourself. We got into got into the duct cleaning as well, and It was it was great to get us into fire jobs. Another job. So, again, just setting your, hey, this is what we wanna call to let’s say, the cleanup during after end the duct cleaning. So that was the starting point, and it just it kinda blossomed from there because We wanna do. I I still remember that this day thinking, man, if I could just stay awake 24 hours a day, I’d be rich because I can just work 24 hours a day. And now I just told my god, how could I hear him think?

John Clendenning [00:08:49]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:08:50]:

But, at that time, I I did feel that way. And it’s really not about working in your business. Working. Right? And that’s advice you.

John Clendenning [00:09:01]:

Yeah. And the working on your business part of it, again, that there’s that marketing that we talked about because nothing happens until you you you you you a sale until you make a sale, there’s nothing else to do. And then the very next thing to do is deliver on that promise in the marketing message and have staff that buy into that as well. So, you know, making sure you’re hiring well and and and getting great technicians who are representing the company in the home, in, you know, in the restoration world that, you know, you got great subcontractors you’re working with as well as the on staff team and stuff like that and making sure everybody buys in as well. And it’s part of it is even I like to always consider your marketing to the employees as well on why you wanna deliver a great service so that you’re marketing to them. And I remember walking through your office and seeing the signs all over the place. Every everywhere you turned to look, there was and it wasn’t a picture of a field of flowers. It was a sign with, you know, with with a message on it to the staff to keeping engraining in their heads. What you what the company actually means. So you you promise something to the world, and then you build the company that can deliver it as well. And all of that is still just a a great marketing message. Just like we were talking about, or I’d mentioned earlier, like, you know, when it expanded golf tournaments, in the early days, I had employee appreciation or, sorry, client appreciation, barbecues, which I didn’t even know if anybody would show up, but back in my early days in Stratford. I went down by the Avon River and took a barbecue and invited people, and I I I I had hand picked 5 or 6 people to that I knew would show up, but it was like, how many packs of hamburger did you need? But it was, you know, it was to get the name of the business out even more and have those conversations and stuff like that. And, that was something that, I know you did with the, with the adjusters and agents and stuff like that to hockey games and to golf tournaments. And and and actually invest back in your business.

Shawn Barrett [00:10:53]:

So on a

John Clendenning [00:10:53]:

carpet cleaning level, talk a little bit about, sort of one thing I do notice is some some cleaners are shy these days. I guess they always were, but I just I just see it a little bit more not walking into car stores and making those having those conversations and having those referral sources, interior designers and, real estate agents and just that marketing outreach that needs to happen, part of it, just personally meeting people we talked about, but also the marketing outreach to to get people to, you know, you know, come out to lunch with you or, you know, come to your, drying room and an event that you’re having in the facility and stuff like that. There’s a lot of outreach and marketing that that needs to happen there as well. So, just if you remember a little bit of the stuff that you did you know, back in the day to get to get those things to happen to to make those connections.

Shawn Barrett [00:11:43]:

Yeah. For sure. I think It is it is gonna be some personal driven aspect. I mean, if that’s not your comfort zone, your comfort zone is just texting. I mean, eventually, then So, and and we’re still human. I mean, there’s still a connection. You know, whether they like you or don’t like you, just be yourself and share what you’re offering. I think I think we’re missing that in today. I think a lot of people, still value that. So for us, things will, you know, if there’s an organization, so when we built the flood room, Part of that was for the insurance companies for sure, but we also had a local colleague that was writing to, environmental study Yeah. And so not only would we flood it and dry it, we’d also do testing of microbial growth in the insulation and the floors and the walls. And we would invite the local college to bring their classes over, which then, of course, you would also be.

John Clendenning [00:12:45]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:12:47]:

On, you know, for that unused, whatever. So that in itself, but there was a book and I know you and I both read it, but not the obvious expert. And, I mean, you know, we did that without saying here the expert. It just

John Clendenning [00:13:00]:

— Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:13:00]:

We were obviously expert of the local media for training.

John Clendenning [00:13:04]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:13:06]:

Again, a lot of it is just you know, if if you want a job, then go be a car if you want a business, then you gotta think like a business owner. And, and even back in our, you know, our day when we had, I think that was still the way a lot of people think, well, I can make my 60 or $70,000 a year Clendenning carpets, but a lot of times I think what we don’t realize is running on cash not really an investment. Then when you hit 50, 55, 60

John Clendenning [00:13:35]:

— Yeah. —

Shawn Barrett [00:13:36]:

or you have to retire, are you gonna start to clean till you’re 7?

John Clendenning [00:13:39]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:13:40]:

I don’t know.

John Clendenning [00:13:41]:

Yeah. And are you gonna sell the business for the price of the vehicles and the equipment, or are you gonna sell it for the goodwill, the database, the name, and And, like, but, again, the authority that you’ve built that that that brand in your local marketplace up to, and that’s a decision you have to make you know, not not the year you plan to sell, but 20 years before. So yeah. I remember the phrase that you once, you I think you brought up to me at one point, but It was that the difference of running, you know, growing your business over 20 years versus running your business year 1 20 times. That you’re you’re never you’re never you’ve never really moved me on year 1. You do the same things. You’re just running year 1 again and again, and you didn’t sort of expand and grow and learn. And tap into all of these resources. Like, this podcast is designed to be a resource, but the books, listen, I don’t I I tend to I remember the first time I saw one of your books. Shocked because I always believed that books should be, you know, revered in this this this pristine thing. I barely wanted to break the spine. I saw one of yours dog ear written on in highlight. I think I borrowed one at one point. I went, holy crap. This is, you know, this is butchered, but it made sense because you’re coming back to the stuff. It’s a study notes. Right? So I kinda picked up that trait from you because it was and it was a hard one because I always thought they should sit neatly on the bookshelf. You read them and they put them down. But what I tend to do now is, it I listen to a a book, of the audio version of the book. And then if I’m getting a lot out of it, it turned out to be a a a good recommended book, regardless of what it is, whatever field it’s in, And then then I’ll pick up the physical copy of the book to then listen to again with the book in front, read, and listen, and highlight, and note, and and all that kind

Shawn Barrett [00:15:24]:

of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:15:24]:

So, yeah, just a way to absorb the information. So —

Shawn Barrett [00:15:28]:

Well, and I think we were both, people went to one point in time, and I I still do it, but I’m trying to contemplating trying to learn Spanish. The holiday perspective and what my clients would be, but, Cyprus cybernetics, right, within Kennedy and, you know, and just willing to sleep, this thing, the same thing over and over. It’s amazing. Sometimes I go, I don’t even know where I learned that, but it’s in

John Clendenning [00:15:51]:

there. Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:15:52]:

And, again, a simple way for someone to be learning when they’re sleeping.

John Clendenning [00:15:56]:

Yeah. And if you’re the guy in the truck, I guess if we’re, you know, like, we can go down many paths with this conversation because there’s just so many things we won’t even get to, but when you’re driving around, you’re the guy in the truck Clendenning, or you’ve now handed over the cleaning and you’re out doing the meeting and becoming the obvious expert and the authority in your marketplace. You’re meeting with, the carpet store owners and the the flooring store owners and things like that. You’re joining you go into the chamber events and, you know, making those connections of referral partners and stuff like that. You’re, you know, you’re out meeting commercial clients or whatever you’re doing. There’s a lot of time between stop to stop to stop, and you should be using your vehicle back in the day. We used to put cassette tapes in, and then see it showed up And you’d listen to CDs of, you know, of people teaching you great marketing ideas and advice, and you get one nugget out of that 60 minute interview or or or listening to, you know, buying a course by Dan Kennedy or Michael Gerber or you know, Jay Abraham or any of these guys. Right? It’s just you buy the course. You learn a bit. You go, wow. Can I use that in my marketing swipe and deploy? And today’s day and age, it’s like you shouldn’t be driving around listening to the Joe Rogan podcast. I think Joe’s cool, but that’s that’s that’s a waste of 2 a half hours of your time when you could be listening to the game by Alex Harmozzi. He’s he’s the guy, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk or you know, anything Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson put out and and stuff like that, the the the whole magnetic marketing world and stuff like that. All of it is just you’re absorbing it. And then when you go to, you know, when you go to do something, you’ve got these ideas in your head. Oh, there’s a better headliner. Why don’t I send this book in the mail with a little note on it and said, you know, not to one guy, but to five people, but make it personal. And, you know, hey. I just wanted to reach out. I read this book. I thought it was cool. And just, you know, to somebody that you want to make a connection within your local community and, a really good chance that they’re not getting books sent in the mail by anybody else, and they’ll, you know, they’ll call you up. And, and thank you for the book, and there’s the conversation starter. So —

Shawn Barrett [00:18:02]:

And really don’t. Like, just imagine, you’re embedding this, but me looking from the outside in, There was somebody who was putting out the kind of content that you’re putting out back then.

John Clendenning [00:18:14]:

Yeah. I

Shawn Barrett [00:18:14]:

mean, you know, how much if they follow, and I think that’s the key is following it. Don’t don’t get your it works on the concepts that you’re sharing or you know that. If you just get, you know, other carpet cleaners or other service, I shouldn’t just say carpet cleaning, but service industry, stuff under. Yep. And that. There’s a formula for success. All the way I did for you. I mean, your book alone, I just go, well, you’re actually giving step by step processes as well, which back in the day, there wasn’t a lot of back. There was a lot of theory and a lot of do this, you know, and and buy this and so on. And you have some of that, but but, I mean, your book alone, I just go in. You couldn’t if you can’t start a nursing business or a service business and follow that process, I don’t know how much better it did. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you. For your 3.99 for your Yeah. If it is, Yeah. 299. I think it

John Clendenning [00:19:11]:

is US. 399 Canadian for the, the, the Kindle version. Yep. Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:19:16]:

So I just I just go in. But the, you know, again, if I was back that realm, that part of my life.

John Clendenning [00:19:22]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:19:23]:

That’s 3 99 Anderson.

John Clendenning [00:19:25]:

Yeah. There you go. And it’s, like, the the the interesting thing about internet marketing is, we’ve been around, like, my my carpet cleaning journey started in 95. In high school, I started doing window cleaning as most of the people listen to this now and then jumped over the side of forty story buildings till I realized, hey. Wait a minute. People 1 in 10 dot jumped, like, fall to their death at one point. If if you keep up this career, so decided to go on the ground, and that was carpet cleaning and started that whole thing. But and then realized, you know, bought into a franchise. Like, you and I, we met at the the same franchise. We bought into chem and realize that franchises are good at selling franchises, but they’re not and they’re good at selling their brand and the glossy. So and it looks pretty, but it’s not what resonates with people. You you have to then decide, holy crap. Now I need to learn marketing. I can’t just hand that all off. Whether you’re an independent business owner, because we both own the independent business outside of franchises and in in the franchise world, and you can kinda see that comparison, And whether it’s the internet or not, the psychology is still the same. Who is your ideal customer? Who do you want to actually listen to the the marketing message? Are you getting in front of them with the right words? Are you weeding out the ones you don’t want because you’re you’re you’re not trying to be everything to everybody. You you know, if you If you don’t want the people that want $99 whole home cleaning, then let them know that you offer the finest quality cleaning at a reasonable price. Prices start at $200, $250, they’re not gonna call you if that’s right in your ad. If you’re looking for a cheap discount cleaning, please call somebody else. That was in all of our Yellowpage ads. That was, like, that was the near the headline of the there’s a headline and and that that same psychology still works today when somebody lands on your website. Well, what is your website? Well, it’s still it’s gotta convert. It’s gotta influence and convert. They came there for a reason, so they’re they’re at least in the game. They found your website from an ad or from seeing the van on the driveway, somebody’s driveway, whatever. But when they come there, how do you keep them there? It’s there’s a psychology involved so you don’t show the picture of the of the baby lying on the carpet because everybody shows the picture of the baby lying on the carpet. Show the team. Show the owner why you got into this business. Things like that. Have your risk reversal guarantee right up at the top. If you choose us, here’s what we’re gonna do differently. You’ve gotta be different in the marketplace and stand out and then become the authority. And then people will refer you. Your customers will and referral partners will as well. So it’s not much different than putting out 50 or 100,000 flyers in a new market to open up a to to open up a new area, a new territory. And, you know, back in the day, it wasn’t the internet. It was know, get in the yellow pages. It’ll eventually, you know, the the crappiest leads, but you you get a volume of them and you cherry you’ve you’ve you work your way through the ones that are willing to choose you with a good script, and then you you you just blanket market into the ideal neighborhoods the, the message that that you want, and it’s not about a discount in a deal. It’s about what you do differently with a good marketing message and it it starts to build that momentum and the internet’s the same way. It’s it’s just a different medium. It’s, you know, marketing is just message market and medium. And the message is the psychology. It doesn’t change. People still fear the same things. And the the market is, like, you know, how your market is still the same crowd. Your market is who you want. The medium is the only part that that changes over time.

Shawn Barrett [00:22:45]:

So — And it’s probably become more costly. It has come more costly effect as well. But if you

John Clendenning [00:22:50]:

think

Shawn Barrett [00:22:50]:

about the money we need to spend on yellow pages,

John Clendenning [00:22:53]:

How much was an average? Sorry to cut you off. How much was an average customer? Because you knew your numbers well as well. If you can remember back, the average carpet cleaning customer who finally, like, came through a yellow page ad. So you put call tracking numbers in. 99% of carpet cleaners didn’t. We did. You you put a call tracking number and how many people came from the yellow pages versus versus this, how much did I pay the yellow pages? Cause again, that was the that’s where you found your cold leads was people would flip through the yellow pages when they really didn’t have a name in mind. And at the end of the day, you made a paid, like, we’re paying at $1,560,000 a month to the yellow pages because it was the number one source of cold leads And then doing all the database marketing and everything else on top of it. But what would if you remember back, what was the average cost to buy a new customer after they called? And then you finally booked them in, At the end of the year, you you’ve got x number of carpet or customers from the yellow pages be before that as much as, you know, 30, $40,000 a year investment to be in a number of the different books. Do you kinda remember, do you remember back what the average cost of a a a an actual customer was accurate.

Shawn Barrett [00:23:57]:

And, I mean, it varied every year because I think as you and I talk more, like, we it depends on how many points of contact you were having every death of the client as well. Right? But I I’m pretty sure the first thing was was free, and I, you know, if that average is 150 bucks at the time, it was it was free. And the whole idea of it was a very enough funnel so that you kept it as a client so that the next one was more or less your profit and slowing down the line. So that’s why that offer of Recarpet cleaning because we’re almost doing it for free anyway with all of our teaching. You might as well get enough free carpet cleaning.

John Clendenning [00:24:35]:

Yeah. Find your ideal customer and and if if they’re right for you, offer to do that one room for free. That’s been around for decades now, but it’s still you know, it’s a great offer. What we teach people right now is, like, if you want a great referral partner, reach out, make that contact off just say, hey. Your clientele are people that use our types of services. You’re an interior designer. You have a higher end clientele. Sometimes they need their chaise lounge cleaned, their carpet cleaned, whatever. You’re not you’re not replacing everything in the whole house, and they’ve knit you’ve now renovated the upstairs and the rec room needs a cleaning and stuff like that. You’re a great referral source. Let me come and clean a couple rooms in your house for free. Let’s have that conversation. Let me show you why we do things differently, how we do it, and see if we can be your referral, you know, the the person you refer. But let’s lead with the giving hand. Let me come in clean for free. We try and teach all of our clients, like, make sure you’re doing that outreach, you know, not once a month. Like, once a week pick somebody else that you’re giving, a free cleaning to that could be, you know, even just in that sense, a referral partner, but, yeah, good neighborhoods you could be offering the neighbor one room free just to try you out if it’s in around a golf course road or around your ideal customer and stuff like that. So What I remember is I remember it was about $80.82 was the last number I had before Yellow Pages, you know, crashed and burned during the you know, the as as 2007 iPhones were invented or it came on the market and within a short period of time, the recession happened and you come out of the recession, you’re pumping back your marketing in and realize that these little consumer devices became where the attention of the audience went. So they went away from needing to look at the yellow pages to find anybody or other areas because they’ve now even even grandma and grandpa, you know, ended up checking out Facebook and things like that. And on the internet, they they learned how to do basic searches. So it became the the new attention thing, but about $82 was the last number I remember, average cost to buy a buy a customer. From the yellow pages. And I think it’s funny. I was just talking to one of our clients the other day there, and they were a little concerned that it cost them $15 for a lead from Facebook to raise their hand and say, yeah, I’m I’m interested in your cleaning services. Now Facebook’s disruptive. They didn’t type in looking for a carpet cleaner on Facebook. Right? They do on Google for Google ads and your your rankings of your website. But on Facebook, you came a like, you know, we try and target an ideal, the ideal demographic, uh-uh, you know, a thirty five to fifty five year old college university educated, woman who’s managing the household has a career outside and usually has 2 kids and a dog. That’s the average client. Right? And for for a decent carpet cleaning business, And that person is on Facebook. So let’s let’s target some ads in front of those people that meet that demographic in in your in your marketplace, but $15, even if it takes you 5 of them before one conversation with, oh gosh, you know, god forbid forbid. You just bought that customer for 75 bucks. That’s still less than it cost us in 2004. With the yellow pages. Right?

Shawn Barrett [00:27:43]:

And what would an average? What’s in that? You know, just because I, as I mentioned, Jennifer, on on on a lot of this stuff now that sold the businesses, but it is 350 in average. Yeah. So anywhere anywhere between

John Clendenning [00:28:00]:

300 should be sort of like your average job at the high at the lowest end. If you’re below that, there’s a lot you can do to bring your average job up. You’re trying to sell on price, not on service quality and value, and customers buy on value the best customers and the ones that come back year after year buy on value, the ones that buy on price, you probably won’t see them the next time anyways. So, again, as we said, why waste your money on a give give a free cleaning to somebody who actually pays well in your marketplace, for the services, but 300 is a bottom end. We’ve got some clients that their average job is over 600. In just carpet cleaning. Right?

Shawn Barrett [00:28:34]:

So — — easily. Even after their costs and their expenses, they’re easily doubling that $75 Facebook. Generated that. Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:28:42]:

Yeah. Just for that one, Lee, and and the other thing that we did in the sort of the grunt grass roots wish we had systems that worked better is, you know, everybody called up on the phone. That was your number one way of getting leads. You picked the phone up right away. And, if, you know, you you get their phone number either from caller ID or ask them, hey. If we get disconnected, what’s the best number to call you back on? And at the end of the call, as technology advance. And, again, I don’t wanna sound like the old dog. Oh my gosh. We we I remember the day when, you know, you had to wait 3 hours for the computer to boot up and stuff like that, but it felt like it. Now but we asked for the email address so that we could send over, what we just discussed, if they didn’t book by the end of the the end of the the sales script conversation, then you asked for the email address. Why? Cause now the next day, your office person was to call them up if they didn’t book yesterday. Send them the information, call them the next day, see if they’re ready to make a decision, wait 2 or 3 days, have that list of people, call them again, send them an email, and just start dripping on them. All of your good marketing until they either, you know, buy or tell you to go away. Which either one is totally fine, either they’re not qualified to be your one of your clients, or you’re chasing them because you’re not gonna get them all from that first conversation. It’s you have to have lead nurture built in. So building a lead database that was just a piece of paper on the desk beside you in the day is now so much easier with technology. Every lead that comes in, they’ve either come through a phone number that’s recorded, you know, digitally on call tracking or they filled out a form on Facebook that’s now a into a lead database that you can text message them and drip on them and and and tell them why you started this business and you know, the charities you’re involved in and just let get them to start to know you. So if they didn’t book right away, maybe 3 months, 6 months, 9 months from now, Are you still messaging that lead, not just your database, but that lead so that, yeah, you you now can influence them. Right? So that that goal was, like, that didn’t change. That we just had to do it with pen and paper back in the day. So —

Shawn Barrett [00:30:48]:

You did. And I think and and I think it was saying, Kennedy has resonated with me. Was it if you’re not you’re not pissing off at least 1 or 2 people a day with your marketing. You’re not marketing partner. And, yeah, and then, and and then the reverse happens because you’d send out your your postcards or your reminders to people or whatever, and they would literally call the office apologizing that they still need your services right now, but they’ll call us another time. So you know your marketing’s working. Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:31:18]:

Well, let’s let’s talk about that for a second. Some clients weren’t worth that many touches. Some clients were the apartment rentals. You got them, but you might as well still stay in front of them. They paid your minimum charge, but they’re probably moving out soon, and they don’t own the carpet. They don’t care about it as much. And then some of your clients were like, you know, you know, off white carpet, off white furniture, off white dog, off white everything, and they just want it cleaned three times five times a year, right, and everything in between. Well and segmenting your database to know those is is one step, but then How many times do you touch them? And, I I think the listeners might be a little bit shocked when, when you mentioned your A list customers, how many times would you touch touch them in a year? On average.

Shawn Barrett [00:32:05]:

Yeah. It it was you have to see nominal 100% on my head, but during that, over five times a month.

John Clendenning [00:32:15]:

5 times a month. I’m, yeah, I remember 40 to 50 was the number that, you know, we used to talk about because we we would we would tell other people that, like, other other carpet cleaners and franchise and business owners and stuff like that. That and they’re going, what? How will you not be? Like, I talked to them once or twice a year. I re I reach out if it’s a reminder, and it’s like, well, if you do it well enough, then, you know, you wanna be a welcome guest, not an annoying pest. And that’s so as long as you’re giving them something of value, they’re not gonna be annoyed that you keep sending them stuff.

Shawn Barrett [00:32:46]:

And I think a couple things you it really well. That is Everything that we did was from, like, our fame.

John Clendenning [00:32:55]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:32:55]:

So every marketing piece that went out, and we had pictures of, you know, of my daughter going to school and had a crown written, happy father’s day at postcard. And people resonated with us because we were just is going back to me when you’re going out and marketing person to person. Yeah. People, just people. We’re just people trying to run a business and give you a good service and if I see you on the street, I remember you talking about this on another interview, like, I never had to cross the street once because I upset somebody with cleaning or with our restoration service. It’s a small community. If we’re at the hop arenas together, I wanna make sure that person is more than talking to

John Clendenning [00:33:34]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:33:34]:

So it’s everything you do, which I think is something that you’ve talked about many times before too. It’s Mark marketing is everything. It’s not just it’s just not the media that you’re using. It’s it’s your names. It’s your uniform. It’s the show you put on in the house. Follow-up after it’s

John Clendenning [00:33:51]:

— Yeah. —

Shawn Barrett [00:33:52]:

everything that you do.

John Clendenning [00:33:53]:

Yeah. It’s it’s drive. It’s at the end of the street where you had the flower shop. That air brushed the name of your business on the were they yellow roses or karnate with yellow? They’re Yeah. And every customer you arrive to the door, you hey. Thank you for allowing us in our home, and you give them a little gift bag and a flower. Like, nobody has to do that stuff, but that’s the the amount of how memorable that is. Well, where does that come from? Well, that didn’t come from, hey. You know, Sean Barrett is the smartest marketer on the planet ever, and he just came up with this in a dream one night. It was somewhere along the way learning about marketing absorbing that information. And somebody said, hey. I always do this. Every customer that we we we go and see, we hand them something. And it was like, what can I hand them? And it’s it’s it’s it’s creating that next memorable moment. Right? So, yeah, if everything is, like, if your vans, if you leave the drive, then you leave the shop, and drive through a car wash before you head out, you know, out on the road. You make sure your equipment’s clean and neat and tidy. Does it have to be? No. Do your technicians? Do they have to wear cocky pants versus jeans? No. They don’t. Do they have to wear, you know, you know, neat looking indoor shoes and outdoor shoes and layout roll out a red carpet and put booties on when they’re walking around with the client, hand the client booties to walk around and look at the job afterwards and deliver it a full client experience. Do they ever have to do that? No. We’ve we we see pictures of, you know, we ask some of our clients send us pictures of your team. And they’re in jeans and and and, like, a feel, a long, hockey jersey. And that’s the technician out cleaning. It’s like, Yeah. You the customer might like you, but you’re not referable. You didn’t create a a referable moment by just taking it up that notch to that professionalism that that that stands out and makes you look different. And that’s all marketing. Every bit of it’s marketing.

Shawn Barrett [00:35:50]:

It is. And your brand can charge more than you

John Clendenning [00:35:52]:

Shawn Barrett [00:35:53]:

Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:35:53]:

Shawn Barrett [00:35:53]:

those are the things. And so instead of cleaning 4 or 5 houses a day, you clean too because you’re making the same kind of money. Better margins.

John Clendenning [00:36:01]:

Yeah. Yeah. As we always say to clients, like, the the internet’s a mixed bag. No different, like, back in the day, it was flyers, flyers, flyers, everything was flyers. And it was like, hey. How can I design that that that one flyer? What’s that one offer? I get those calls every day still. What is the best what, you know, should I be doing Facebook? Should I be doing Google? Google paper collection? Should I be doing local service ads now? Should I, you know, what should I be doing? Where is the and what is the best offer that I should put out? We get asked that almost all the time from from our new clients is. What’s the best offer, John? And my answer is the the best offer is the one that resonates with your clients right now. So what are you split testing? What is your AB test right now? Have you come have you put something out that became the control in its working and test something against it? Always to be testing and tracking, right, because the offer is not gonna be there isn’t one great offer. It’s it’s what’s resonating and how can you deliver a message around the offer? Is it Father’s Day? Well, could you give out a barbecue set with, hey. You know, book for bar book for Father’s Day, and you’ll get a $60 barbecue set for free with your carpet Clendenning. Buy a bunch of them on Alibaba. Nowadays, so much easier to get them from the wholesale guys we used to have to find them from. And now they’ve got, you know, they’ve got the barbecue set as an offer just on Father’s Day. If you don’t sell out all of them this year, guess what? You got some for next year’s promotion. Things like that. It’s just thinking through. Right?

Shawn Barrett [00:37:23]:

It really is. And, again, I just got a reiterating of giving you too much of a a plug here. Anybody in our age bracket didn’t have these, didn’t have the tools that you and others are sharing with. And it’s just all the information it’s provided. It’s just, you know, how much simpler it can get. Right? I still don’t understand if someone would go wearing jeans at a a jersey of between clean or do plumbing or do whatever. I don’t understand that. Yeah. You used to have your staff all used to work tie.

John Clendenning [00:37:55]:

Shirts and ties. I see. It’s like, I it was painful when I finally switched to the polo shirt. It was painful. It’s like, I didn’t want them to stop. It’s just like it finally became sort of a cultural thing where it just like, it was a and it was probably only I sold two two and a half years ago, my final brick and mortar business, I think it was probably only about 4 years 5 years before that. We got rid of the ties. So it was still, like, you know, 2015 or somewhere 14, somewhere that we I finally said, okay. We will go with very, very neat and tidy polo shirts. With the khaki pants and and stuff. But, yeah, it was because, yeah, the tie still stood out. Every customer would say, why are you wearing a tie to clean carpet? Because we provide a professional service, and we wanna look professional in your home. That was a script. It was a script. Right?

Shawn Barrett [00:38:42]:

So And, again, you were probably the first person who really helped our own this understanding. We had that. Right. But until it was put in put in front of the staff that we’re actually doing that’s selling in house and on the phone at the time. Yeah. But that script was so important to close.

John Clendenning [00:39:02]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:39:02]:

I’ll ask you, but you’re not going to get the calls.

John Clendenning [00:39:05]:

Yep. No. And it’s it’s it’s like that there’s a psychology to every moment of sale. So it’s Some of it came naturally because, oddly, I’m I’m a naturally shy fellow. So I chose chose carpet cleaning put myself in front of customers to force myself to have to go into homes because I didn’t wanna just be a factory worker or or, you know, somebody that shied away from society. So I did that in my early twenties as a way to challenge myself as self improvement, you know, reading Tony Robbins and all that fun stuff, and that was my entry into carpet cleaning. And when I got a no, I took it painfully, direct. It’s like, oh, I got so the next customer, the next driveway I pulled in, I would say something slightly differently and slightly differently and eventually start getting yeses more yeses than nos and when Oh, well, that’s the way I should say that. It became it was just naturally intuitive to keep myself out of out of pain, you know, as they say. And then I started learning neural neurolinguistic programming and just sales scripting and started picking up when you went into a a commission sales place and hear that somebody’s been trained in their actually weaving you through a conversation and going, I know what you just did there. You just did the assumed close, and you do, you know, whatever. And it’s it’s it’s good to learn, but your front office staff need to know that. The people answering your phones need to know that. 20 years ago answering the phone on your phone on your hip, while out cleaning, was definitely a recipe for failure because you couldn’t deliver that that, you know, scripted response that converted more people to a yes booking and understood why they should choose you over somebody else and make that differentiation. You couldn’t do that while you’re standing in front of the customer or cleaning their couch. And you just pause for a second. And we learned that early on that that was actually the one of the secrets to successes of all of our competitors. We’re still just answering the phone while out in the job. Were gonna be twice as bid busy as them just by having somebody on the phone’s answering properly. In today’s day and age, the phone call is only about 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time people want to text so you better have chat to text of some sort on your website and the person answering better treat that as a phone call. You’ve got about, you know, less than a minute to get back to them by by text and, some automation that starts talking to them right away. And even when they fill out a form on your website, back in the day, I was guilty of it too. That we would check the the email inbox in the morning maybe midday and at the end of the day, nowadays, you should be alerted the second a new a new request comes in, and you’re right on the horn with them. We actually built into one of the tools we have for our websites carpet cleaner lead pro, the second somebody fill fills out a form on your website, your phone rings in the office. You pick it up you if you can take that call, like, you’re not busy, you which you shouldn’t be, somebody should be answering the phone. You press 1 and you immediately connect with the person who just filled out the form. If they can’t take the call. They get a text message saying you just tried to call them, right from the system saying, hey. We just tried to give you a quick call. I noticed you filled out a form. How else can I help you? And you try and start the text communication if they’re not in a place they could take a phone call. But just by filling out a form of the website, you should be on the phone with that person or on text with them within one minute. Because your chances of 80% higher chance of converting just by doing that. So —

Shawn Barrett [00:42:16]:

And that that I mean, that goes for Every server. Right? Like, plumbers, HVAC guys. Everybody. It’s just yeah. There are amazing tools that are that are available that I mean, I know what I spent roughly over the years with educating myself and stuff, and I’m pretty sure we were in the same range. Like, there’s 100 of 1000 of dollars of information on into all your systems.

John Clendenning [00:42:40]:

Yeah.

Shawn Barrett [00:42:41]:

And I love the you said, use hand opponent, but we’re on it and scan it and just carry that on. Just — Yeah. That just make any sense to me, but

John Clendenning [00:42:55]:

Yeah. And that whole implementation is everything. Lock and load it. Like, when you learn something new, put it in place, plan plan your first iteration of everything to be, like, when you look back on it, laughable, which is fine, but you still did it. Nothing has to be perfect. Just iterate, put something in place, lock it into a system where it happens every time, and then move on to the next, and move on to the next. So your business is growing because you’re building systems. That’s that working on your business. If you’re working in your business, you never get to the point of of developing this. So if you can step away and work on your business, even if it’s just one day a week at the at the beginning, and then 2 days a week. And, eventually, you’re training you’re working on your business, training technicians to say things the way you say it, you know, to show the customer the spots and the stains and the the before and afters, the way you show them, stuff like that, you’re you’re creating a system in the company that’s repeatable, and now you’re working on your business and you can continue to say, okay. What hey. What can we do next month? What can we do next month? You know, as a marketing thing, plan a month in a in advance, Eventually, that becomes, hey. What’s the year look like? Like, you and I both had a yearly marketing calendar, not year 1, But by year 5 or 6 in the business, there is, hey. I know what I’m doing every month of, you know, every month of the year, what promotions are running out, what types of, you know, campaigns I’m running, it was in advance. The budget was ready and everything. So and now you’re just iterating, hey. Can I tweak this and make it a little bit better? Can I split this a little bit now because that’s that’s a great back to school flyer or offer or mailing or phone call sequence? And yeah. So can I can I tweak and do a split test and send this to 2000 of our database and this to 200 and see if the 200 beats the the the 2000 is the control? And if it does, gonna we’re gonna ramp that up next time and maybe do half and half and try and see if we can beat the control and just get better and better because I learned something new over the last few months that I wanna try when it gets back to September and back to school, you know, marketing and things like that. So but yeah. So it’s kind of a weird conversation to have when we’re talking about, you know, internet marketing and how to get your internet marketing right. And but, again, carpet cleaner success series is all about these are the sort of, like, the tried and true stuff that you just you you’ve gotta get back to if you’ve known them before and kind of forgotten and let things fall off, let let’s reinvigorate that. And if you didn’t know them before, go out and start self studying, like, learn this stuff inside note.

Shawn Barrett [00:45:27]:

Most definitely.

John Clendenning [00:45:28]:

Cool. So, you know, I think we got a good conversation. I I think it’s we’ve left with a a a lot of nuggets of value people are gonna go back and relisten to this again and have a bunch of questions, but, just, you know, in in in in a close here, what what nuggets, any additional nuggets of wisdom you would give to say, you know, go back 30 years and you know, 30 year ago, Sean was starting a business right now in today’s day and age in the home service industry. Home cleaning, home service industry. What advice would you give to yourself that it took you the years in business to sort of, learn and and and really refine. What would what would you say to as a as a as a parting shot of vice to the listeners?

Shawn Barrett [00:46:16]:

Yeah. I think I mean, Dane Kennedy always used to say this. You you don’t really you don’t delegate the marketing or the money, and I’m a firm believer in not delegating the marketing without understanding it, but I think you need to delegate not need to delegate the media, but not the massive. Yeah. And, you know, well, man, I I would have been retired at 40 if we had to had 6 years in place, back then to say reading them, for 30 years. Not to that point. So if I was gonna start again, I would research everything in your system that I would And it was in the HVAC. I find out who are the marketers in the HVAC industry as well. I’ve heard about them. Yeah. And then also what I love about parka cleaning HVAC, the plumber, whatever it is swipe swipe and deploy. I would just, hey, that’s something the HVAC guys are doing that I could perfect thing. I think it’s so peaceful and narrow minded. Take it all in and figure out what you can do on your end to do that. Automate yourself and systemize yourself?

John Clendenning [00:47:24]:

No. And that’s that’s that’s that’s great advice. It’s just there’s so much going on nowadays. You know, if if there’s a a landscaping guy in your mark in your neighborhood that’s tick talking every day and and Scott is little, you know, one minute videos, and he’s doing 2 or 3 a day. And blowing up with followers, follow him, learn from them. Can you adapt that? Like, that’s, you know, there’s is the roofer? Is there is there one roofing company standing out among among all the other ones, and what do they do different? How is their message different? Are they, you know, we’re a family owned business. Here’s grandpa that started it. Here’s dad. Here’s me. You know, they doing that or are they trying to hide behind, you know, logos and graphics and without telling you who they are? You you can start picking up these these little pearls of wisdom from even the market around you realizing that the best businesses actually marketed themselves to that point. It didn’t they didn’t just get lucky. There is a million roofers and a million landscapers and a million, you know, stereo installation businesses and carpet cleaners and pool services, but in every town, there’s really only 1 or 2 that are kind of every area that has become the authority and stand out and double check what they’re doing marketing wise, and you’ll realize it’s light years different than what the average person’s doing. They’re investing more in their marketing. They didn’t really get into that, but we I tell everybody that, 15 to 20% is the sweet bought and stay closer to 20 percent of your revenue going to marketing because that takes you from 200,000 to 275, 300,000 the next year to 400,000 to, oh my gosh, I I I there’s no more carpet cleaning customers in my area. It’s not big enough to go to 608100,000, but I should open up a duct cleaning and a hardwood floor Clendenning because I’ve got this database, and I know how to market now, and it’s the same demographic. Let me give them more services and let’s build this to a $1,000,000 business or whatever you wanna get to. But, it’s by investing in the marketing and not trying to say, well, you know, I don’t really market. I rely on word-of-mouth. Well, you know, word-of-mouth is still turning people to go, okay. Well, should I trust these guys? Let me go see what they look like around. Let me ask other people. Let me check the internet. Let me see what they’re all about, and that’s all marketing as well. So so invest in it as well is a is a big message we like to say, not just because we we do digital marketing. We’re we don’t wanna be you know, the bulk of your marketing, but it’s part of a mix, but you should be investing your in your marketing and your marketing knowledge. So, well, thanks for jumping on. I hope, I hope everybody got something out this. I hope it’s another one of those great interviews, where you you go back and listen to it over and over again and bookmark it and, and and write down the things that, you know, inspired you to do to do something and aim at those and send us a message and tell us which things you, you you you liked, which things you actually are planning to implement. And, that way we can we can even tailor more of these sations and some of the master classes we do to the things that you need to know more information about. So, anyways, thanks Sean for hopping on. I really appreciate it. And, yeah, we look to look to catch up with you soon, and we’ll I’ll let you know what the, the listeners say about this episode.

Shawn Barrett [00:50:29]:

Sounds good, John. Thanks so much.

John Clendenning [00:50:30]:

K. Take care.

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8 Strategies to Get More Carpet Cleaning Reviews

8 Strategies to Get More Carpet Cleaning Reviews

Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters

8 Strategies to Get More Carpet Cleaning Reviews

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As a carpet cleaning service provider, your reputation plays a vital role in attracting new customers and generating referrals. Online reviews have become the modern-day word of mouth in today’s digital age. To help you boost your carpet cleaning business and outrank your competitors, Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters presents eight effective strategies to generate more online carpet cleaning reviews tailored explicitly to the cleaning industry.

How can I generate more leads for my carpet cleaning business?

In addition to your marketing efforts, generating online reviews is crucial for building trust and enhancing your ranking on Google. Online reviews serve as the digital currency for trust and directly impact your business’s online visibility.

Why are online reviews so important?

More carpet cleaning reviews build TRUST in your business.

While managing online reviews may seem like an additional task on top of your cleaning jobs, implementing simple strategies can help you capture more positive reviews. Let’s dive into these strategies!

1. Provide exceptional service and customer experience

Although it may sound fundamental, delivering excellent service is key to generating positive reviews. When your customers are satisfied, obtaining reviews becomes much easier.

In today’s society, meeting expectations alone is no longer enough. To exceed customer expectations, focus on details and go the extra mile. Simple gestures like promptness, clear communication about expectations, showing up in a clean, tidy uniform, and wearing shoe covers in the house can make a significant difference, especially with the younger generation.

Mitigate negative reviews.

This strategy encourages positive reviews and serves as a deterrent for negative ones. It takes at least five positive reviews to offset the impact of a single negative review. To minimize negative feedback, strive to exceed expectations in every carpet cleaning project.

Remember, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Small gestures and attention to detail can leave a lasting impression on your customers.

2. Claim your Online Citations

Online citations, also called online business directories, can greatly improve your online presence. These platforms allow you to showcase your business to a wider audience, attracting potential customers using these platforms and apps and building credibility with both consumers and the search engines who crawl these citation sources. Utilizing online citations is a valuable way to expand your reach and grow your business. Embrace the impact that online citations can have on your digital footprint and use them to expand your business’s reach in the online world.

What is a digital footprint?

Your digital footprint refers to the extent of your online presence on search engine results pages (SERPs). Having a website, a Facebook page, and being listed on various online directories increases the chances of customers finding your carpet cleaning business rather than your competitors.

Where to start?

Nearly every online directory provides a review feature. Diversifying the sources of your carpet cleaning reviews is crucial. For carpet cleaning service providers, we recommend starting with the following online citations:

Keep your NAP consistent

If you’re familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), you may have heard of the “NAP” acronym, which stands for Name, Address, and Phone number.

It’s crucial to maintain consistency across all your online business listings. For example, if your business address includes the word “Street,” but you are using the abbreviation “St.” on your Google Business Profile then ensure that you use the abbreviation “St.” consistently on all directories and profiles.

Why is NAP consistency important? Inconsistencies confuse Google and can lead to lower Google Maps rankings and even penalties, negatively impacting your website’s ranking and your overall local online visibility.

In summary, the easier it is for Google to index your business accurately, the higher your ranking will be.

3. Request feedback and reviews in person BEFORE leaving the job site!

This is the most effective method for acquiring new online reviews for your carpet cleaning business.

While it may seem like a basic strategy, remember that you’re asking your customers to invest time and effort into leaving a review. Their motivation is highest while you’re still on-site and diminishes significantly once you leave.

Here’s a script you can use to generate more feedback and reviews online:

  • When you are completing the job and before you pack up your equipment, approach your customer and ask them to take a walk around to show them your results. You can give them booties to wear so they are not worried about getting damp feet or leaving marks on the freshly cleaned carpet. This is when you can ask:

“Are you satisfied with the carpet cleaning service we provided today?”

  • If the response is positive, request a review using this script:

“We’re about to finish up here, but before we do, I’d like to ask a favor.

Our business relies on our reputation. Positive reviews help us feed our families and keep our phones ringing.

If you have a few minutes to spare, could you please leave us an online review?

I can send you a text right now with a link to leave the review if you’re interested!”

  • IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not incentivize your customer to leave a specific rating, incentivizing customers for their review is against Google and most other directories’ terms of service, and businesses who have been caught doing this in the past have been penalized and some have been permanently banned from Google Maps. Instead, you can offer to compensate them for their time with a small discount off their bill – but in most instances, simply asking then and sending them a link will be enough to get the customers willing to write a review to do so.

4. Utilize emails to capture new reviews

Always request their email address and phone number when acquiring a new customer. This information will enable you to request reviews once the job is complete.

Some customers may not be available to leave a review on-site, or you may not have access to the decision-maker. In such cases, the following strategies can be effective:

  • Requesting the customer’s “feedback” through a short feedback survey sent from the owner or general manager is a great way to elicit comments and know what your customers are truly feeling about your service, your staff and your business.
  • Offering to enter them into your monthly Feedback Content drawing can also help entice more input.

With our agencies carpet cleaning clients, we find that they will get between 50% and 70% of their customers will complete a private feedback survey where about a max of 15% to 20% will provide an online review – so requesting “feedback” is a great strategy to combine with your online review request process.

  • When asking in the house or in your follow-up, prioritize requesting reviews for your most prominent online directories. We have found that the ideal mix is to get 70% of your reviews on Google Business Profile, 20% on Facebook, and 10% elsewhere such as your Better Business Bureau listing, Yelp listing etc.   This mix of review sources can significantly impact your organic/local search engine rankings.
  • Some people choose to “cherry pick” and will only request reviews from customers they are sure had a positive experience and are likely to leave a favorable review. Obviously, this will not only limit the number of reviews you may be able to get, but any unhappy customers will often still go around and leave you negative reviews on Google and elsewhere.

This is why we prefer to ask for their “feedback” first and then follow up with a review request afterward. This way you can mitigate any concerns that may crop up after the job is done have a chance to turn any complaint or concern around, and as a result, have a raving fan vs a negative review.

  • Personalize your request for carpet cleaning reviews by using the customer’s first name and mentioning a specific aspect of their project. For example, you could say, “By the way, I loved the choice of colors you made for the carpets!”
  • Use subject lines like “BIG Favor” to express your gratitude and acknowledge the effort required on their part.
  • Include direct links to your online profile to make it as convenient as possible for customers to leave a review.
  • Follow up with a text message if they haven’t responded to your email request after a few days, follow up with a text message.

5. Ask past customers to leave a review

It’s never too late to ask for a review. Every review matters, so even if it’s been a year since you served a customer, it’s worth reaching out to them. Typically, customers remember their carpet cleaning experiences, particularly if the project was significant and the results were great.

To approach this effectively, allocate time to create a spreadsheet of your past customers and reach out to them via phone calls, text messages, and emails. Always personalize your request!  Again, sending over a “feedback survey” first with the offer of entering them into your Feedback Contest, is a great way to reach out and let them know you are always looking for ways to improve your services and service delivery. Those who provide positive input to your survey can be approached and asked to leave an online review as well.

6. Respond to every online review

Monitoring your online reviews is essential—both positive and negative ones. Always respond to reviews with a comment.

Why is responding to reviews important?

Engagement is a ranking factor, and responding promptly allows you to address any negative reviews that may arise.

Whether positive or negative, responding to each review demonstrates your commitment to your customers. It shows that you appreciate positive feedback and are willing to address concerns raised in negative reviews. Promptly offering solutions to make customers happy is the best way to build trust.

7. Showcase reviews on your website

Leverage the power of reviews by featuring them on your website and social media platforms. Testimonials help establish trust and inform potential customers that you are a legitimate carpet-cleaning business that values its clients. But don’t just show static, curated reviews in a slider on your homepage, it’s obvious to the visitor that you have just picked a couple of your best comments from over the years, and it may not accurately reflect what people are saying about you right now. 

It’s better to use a plugin or tool that streams your live, current reviews from Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other sites, so your website visitors can click on the review and be taken directly to see it live on the review site.

Improve onsite SEO with reviews

While you may not consider testimonials as content, search engines consider them valuable. Google, in particular, values reviews as a key local search engine ranking factor.

Include schema tags

Schema tags are snippets of code that provide information about a review, such as the rating, comment, and reviewer, to Google.

Why are schema tags important? You may have noticed rating stars in organic search results. These stars are included through the use of schema tags. They provide instant visual feedback and increase your click-through rate (CTR), which is a critical factor in organic rankings.

While various resources are available to help you generate and implement schema tags manually, we recommend using the Schema WordPress plugin. It’s user-friendly and doesn’t require coding experience.

Schema: WordPress Plugin

 

Don’t forget to include a call-to-action button on your website, encouraging visitors to leave a review. The more opportunities you provide, the higher the chances of capturing new reviews for your carpet cleaning business.

8. Automate review capture Work smarter, not harder.
Automation is your ally.

Whether you have a backlog of customers or simply manage a high volume of jobs, automating the review capture process can be a game-changer. We have our own enterprise level solution specifically designed to help you automate this entire strategy.

Text Message & Email Review Requests

While emails are effective for reaching out to past customers, using text messages yields a higher review capture rate for new customers. We recommend using our proprietary tool, RepIgnition™ which includes both text message and email campaign automations to request feedback and reviews from every job you or your technicians complete!

Looking for a hands-off solution

As a carpet cleaning business owner, you understand the value of word-of-mouth referrals. The same concept applies online. By leveraging the visual feedback of online carpet cleaning reviews, you can generate more leads for your carpet cleaning business.

To capture more leads through online reviews, schedule a free strategy call with Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters today!

Building a strong online reputation through reviews is crucial in the carpet cleaning industry. Implementing these strategies will help you generate more reviews, enhance your online presence, and attract more customers. Start implementing these strategies today and watch your carpet cleaning business thrive!

Contact Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters for expert guidance tailored to your carpet cleaning business’s unique needs.

About the Author: As a business owner in the carpet cleaning and cleaning service industry for over 30 years as well as a marketing consultant and author, with well-over a decade of lead generation experience managing a results-driven marketing agency for Professional Carpet Cleaning and Residential Cleaning Companies, John Clendenning is wildly known as a leading Marketing Expert within the Professional Cleaning Industry.

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Google Ads for Carpet Cleaners: The Ultimate Guide

Google Ads for Carpet Cleaners: The Ultimate Guide

Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters

Google Ads for Carpet Cleaners: The Ultimate Guide

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Take a moment to think about how you search for information online. Do you rely on social media recommendations, or do you, like over 90% of the population, start your search on Google?

If you’re like the majority of your customers, you probably type a few words into Google’s search bar and hit Enter. But which words do your customers use to find your carpet cleaning business? Why do they choose those words? And how can you target those customers effectively?

This comprehensive guide will explore how to use Google Ads for carpet cleaners and residential cleaning businesses to reach your target audience online.

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is an advertising platform that operates with Google’s search engine. It requires experience, judgment, and understanding. Let’s begin by answering the core questions: What is Google Ads, and how does it work?

First, it’s important to differentiate between Search Ads and Display Ads.

Google Search Ads (Text)

Google Search Ads appear above the organic search results in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). They enable businesses like yours to connect with consumers who are actively seeking information. These ads are often referred to as “pull marketing” because they attract consumers toward your business.

Google Display Ads (Image + Text)

Google Display Ads are shown on websites that participate in the Google Display Network. This form of marketing, known as “push marketing,” targets customers as they browse the web. It serves as a reminder, pushing them back to your website and encouraging them to engage with your carpet cleaning services.

Which One is Right For You?

While there are other types of Google Ads, such as Video and Apps, for carpet cleaning businesses, we recommend focusing on Search and Display Ads. Why? Because these are the two types that yield the best results in this industry.

We suggest allocating 100% of your advertising budget to Search Ads (not to be confused with Dynamic Search Ads). After a few months of driving traffic to your website, you can incorporate Display Ads to further attract and engage potential customers.

How Google Ads Works

Google Ads operates on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. In other words, you are charged each time someone clicks on your ad. Advertisers define their target demographics, such as “homeowners in need of carpet cleaning services,” and bid on keywords they believe their customers will use to find their business. Popular keywords tend to be more expensive to advertise on.

The Principles of PPC Advertising

Click-Through Rate

For Google, click-through rate (CTR) is a crucial metric. CTR represents the percentage of viewers who click on an ad. A high CTR indicates that the ad is relevant and effectively entices your audience to visit your website. Ads with a high CTR will have increased Quality Scores, leading to lower costs per conversion.

Conversion Rate

To profit from Google Ads, users need to click on your ad and contact your carpet cleaning business, converting it into leads. Conversion Rate reflects the number of users who click on your ad and complete a specific action, such as requesting an estimate or scheduling a service. Google Ads provides reporting and analytics to track conversion rates. Identify the best-performing ads and replace underperforming ones to achieve optimal results.

Keyword Research: Key to Success

What Are Keywords?

Placing your ads in front of the right audience is essential for running a successful Google Ads campaign. How can you achieve this?

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Keywords help Google understand search intent, which is closely tied to buyer intent. Which keywords do you think your customers use when searching for carpet cleaning services? Are they searching for “residential carpet cleaning” or “carpet cleaner near me”? Understanding these keywords will help you target the right audience and ignore irrelevant ones.

Choosing the Right Keywords

Consider your ideal customer profile (ICP) and use the language they would use. Common keywords often have high competition. Think of specific keywords that differentiate your carpet cleaning business from your competitors when they appear in search results.

For example, if you specialize in eco-friendly carpet cleaning services, targeting the key phrase “eco-friendly carpet cleaner in INSERT CITY NAME” will help focus your ads. The more targeted your advertising campaign is, the better results you can expect.

To assist with keyword research, we recommend utilizing Google Trends to compare search volume and identify terms that are likely to generate new leads for your carpet cleaning business. A common strategy is allocating a core set of main keywords for most of your advertising budget while continuously testing new keywords each month. Use Google Ads’ reporting tools to evaluate the success of your advertising campaigns and the performance of your target keywords.

Using Google Ads for Carpet Cleaners The Right Way

Understand Your Customer

Boost your conversion rate by understanding what your customers need, want, and expect from your carpet cleaning business. Are they looking for a quick spot treatment or a comprehensive deep cleaning? Analyzing their keyword choices provides insight into their mindset and enables you to tailor your Google Ads and landing pages to meet their specific needs. Avoid using generic ads; create separate ads for each keyword. For optimal results, link each ad to a relevant, dedicated landing page on your website that aligns with the ad’s content.

Set a Daily Advertising Budget

If you’re new to Google Ads, it’s important to avoid overspending. Set a daily budget based on what you can comfortably afford. In the carpet cleaning industry, a single click can cost between $4.00 and $20.00. Based on our experience, we recommend a daily budget of $35 to $55 for target audiences within a population of under 1 million.

Craft Compelling Ads

Headings and descriptions are your primary tools for attracting clicks for Google Search Ads. At the time of writing this article, you have a total of 810 characters to work with.

To make the most of these characteristics, describe your carpet cleaning business effectively. Incorporate your target keywords into both headings and descriptions. Google Ads currently offers 15 headings and four description fields—use all of them.

Include a strong call-to-action (CTA) and highlight unique selling points, such as “Eco-friendly cleaning solutions” or “Certified and Insured technicians”.

And be sure to take advantage of all relevant Google Ads Extensions, such as Sitelinks, Callouts, and Locations – these add-ons will make your add take up more space on the page, giving you more real estate to be seen by the searcher.

Convert Clicks into Leads

Once a consumer clicks on your ad, providing them with a seamless experience is crucial. Why? Because that’s what turns traffic into leads.

Consider this: If someone clicks on an ad for carpet cleaning services, which do you think would yield better conversion: landing on your websites general homepage or landing on a dedicated page specifically about carpet cleaning with specific CTA’s for that? The answer is the latter.

A well-optimized landing page plays a critical role in a successful paid search campaign. It should be designed to convert traffic into leads. After thousands of A/B split tests and hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad spends, we can certainly provide you with in-depth information on the features and psychology that goes into a great, high-converting landing page… so give us a call.

Integrate Google Ads into a Comprehensive Strategy

The keywords you choose and the strategies you implement with Google Ads should complement your existing marketing efforts, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Email Marketing. For optimal results, incorporate the same keywords used in your Google Ads campaigns into your blog posts, emails, and social media content to strengthen your website’s authority.

Remember, running Google Ads should always be part of a broader digital marketing strategy. It should serve as the starting point of your sales funnel rather than a standalone strategy. When someone clicks on your advertisement, they initiate a conversation with your business. While immediate results from an ad campaign can be satisfying, some consumers may require time to evaluate and commit to your services.

Monitor Your Results

When running a Google Ads campaign, measuring your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is essential. Similar to Return on Investment (ROI), ROAS evaluates the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.

ROAS = Total Revenue Generated / Total Marketing Costs

A good target ROAS is anything over 5. In other words, for every $1 you spend on advertising, you should aim to generate $5 in return. We recommend waiting until your campaign has generated at least 30 conversions or has been running for a minimum of 60 days before assessing the results. Keep a close eye on metrics like Click-Through Rate (CTR) and ROAS (or “Conv. value/cost” in Google Ads).

Create a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy with Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters

PPC marketing may initially seem complex, but it can be a cost-effective method to grow your carpet cleaning business. Understanding how Google Ads works is just the first step in establishing a long-term inbound marketing strategy that generates leads.

Before investing in online advertising, consider scheduling a free strategy call with Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters. Our team can provide guidance on how to dominate your local market with effective Google Ads campaigns. We offer bulletproof strategies tailored to the needs of your carpet cleaning business.

Remember, successful digital marketing extends beyond Google Ads. It involves integrating various SEO, email marketing, and social media channels to maximize your online presence and attract customers. Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters can help you develop a comprehensive strategy combining the power of Google Ads and other proven marketing techniques.

Contact us today to take the first step towards growing your carpet cleaning business and achieving long-term success in the digital landscape.

About the Author: As a business owner in the carpet cleaning and cleaning service industry for over 30 years as well as a marketing consultant and author, with well-over a decade of lead generation experience managing a results-driven marketing agency for Professional Carpet Cleaning and Residential Cleaning Companies, John Clendenning is wildly known as a leading Marketing Expert within the Professional Cleaning Industry.

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How to Estimate a Commercial Carpet Cleaning Job

How to Estimate a Commercial Carpet Cleaning Job

Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters

How to Estimate a Commercial Carpet Cleaning Job

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Estimating the cost of a carpet cleaning job can be challenging for home cleaning service providers. In this article, we will delve into the process of estimating commercial carpet cleaning projects and provide valuable insights on how to secure those cleaning jobs once your estimate is delivered.

Let’s explore the world of commercial carpet cleaning estimates and discover the key factors to consider.

Factors to Consider in Commercial Carpet Cleaning Estimates

The price estimates for commercial carpet cleaning projects can vary significantly, depending on several factors that must be taken into account by cleaning service providers. Here are four essential criteria that every reputable carpet cleaning company should consider before providing a commercial carpet cleaning estimate:

Determining the Quantity and Type of Cleaning Products Needed

The overall cost of a carpet cleaning project is heavily influenced by the amount of cleaning materials required to complete the job. To provide an accurate cost estimate, assessing how much cleaning solution will be needed to thoroughly clean and protect the carpets in the interior spaces is crucial.

Consider the following questions when estimating costs:

  • What is the total area of the commercial building that needs carpet cleaning?
  • Will multiple cleaning passes be necessary to achieve satisfactory results?
  • Are there specific types of carpets or stains that require specialized cleaning solutions?
  • Does the carpet require any additional treatments or protective coatings?

Addressing Preparatory Tasks and Potential Challenges

Commercial properties often present various imperfections and obstacles that can add time and labor costs to a carpet cleaning project. It is essential to account for these factors during the estimation process.

Most commercial carpet cleaning projects involve significant preparation work, such as:

  • Identifying and addressing carpet imperfections and damages.
  • Protecting furniture and/or moving furniture during the cleaning process.
  • Dealing with textured or heavily soiled carpets that require extra attention.

More extensive preparation work will increase the labor cost and possibly the amount of supplies needed, ultimately impacting the final commercial carpet cleaning estimate.

Effective Negotiation Strategies

Commercial property owners are always looking to save money, and as a professional carpet cleaner, you can offer various strategies to accommodate their budget. Consider the following negotiation techniques:

  • Offer a free estimate regardless of the commercial property size to attract potential clients.
  • Provide options for different grades of cleaning products, including mid and high-quality alternatives.
  • Utilize pricing psychology by quoting three tiers of cleaning services, a basic clean, a more advanced cleaning, and an option with all the bells and whistles.

Calculating the Cost per Square Foot

Determining the amount of cleaning solution and labor required can be simplified by calculating the cost per square foot. The larger the carpeted area, the longer the cleaning process will take, and the more cleaning solution will be needed.

Pro Tip: Remember that commercial carpet cleaning projects usually have a lower cost per square foot than residential spaces, so avoid using the same formula for both types of jobs.

Bidding for Commercial Carpet Cleaning Jobs

Consider the Estimate in Terms of Hours

Estimating the duration of a large commercial carpet cleaning project is not always straightforward, but it is essential to account for it when providing an estimate. Instead of relying solely on the cost per square foot, consider estimating the labor costs per room or section of the building. This approach provides a more accurate estimate of both the cost and the duration of the project, allowing you to better plan and schedule your services.

Pro Tip: To accommodate the business hours of your clients, offer to complete projects during off-hours, which can be a compelling selling point.

Account for Inflated Costs

The cost of carpet cleaning materials has significantly increased due to the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Many costs have soared, and the prices of essential equipment, such as cleaning solutions, brushes, and other supplies, have also risen. As a result, commercial carpet cleaning bids are currently higher than ever before.

It’s important to remember that contractors are adjusting their prices to cover the increased overhead costs. While new carpet cleaning companies may be hesitant to increase their rates, most prospects will understand the need to account for the rising material costs and will look beyond the price tag.

Don’t Hesitate to Decline a Commercial Carpet Cleaning Project

Many cleaning service providers are tempted to accept any offer for commercial carpet cleaning projects simply because they involve a significant amount of square footage and promise a substantial paycheck. However, bidding for projects solely based on their size can sometimes do more harm than good. This is particularly true for new business owners who may not have clear and specific requirements.

If a client’s demands are too demanding or vague, it’s advisable to refrain from taking on the project. This helps avoid potential misunderstandings and ensures that you can focus on delivering high-quality services to clients with clear expectations.

Calculating a Commercial Carpet Cleaning Estimate

Estimating the amount of cleaning solution and materials required for a commercial carpet cleaning job, as well as the associated costs, can be challenging. To simplify the process, break it down into smaller, manageable steps.

Start by determining the cost of your supplies:

  • How much does one gallon of pre-spray and/or cleaning solution cost for this project?

Next, consider the materials you’ll need:

  • How many cleaning supplies, spotters, and other equipment will be required?
  • How long do the brushes, skids, sprayers, and other items typically last during a large carpet cleaning project?

Carpet Coverage Estimates

  • One gallon of pre-spray: Covers approximately 250 to 400 square feet
  • Average coverage: 325 square feet

Carpet Calculation for Interior/Exterior Cleaning

Total square footage of carpeted area / square footage covered per gallon = total gallons of cleaning solution needed

For example: If the carpeted area is 20,000 square feet and the coverage per gallon of pre-spray solution is 325 square feet, the calculation would be as follows:

20,000 sq.ft / 325 sq.ft = 61.54 gallons (round up to 62 gallons for safety)

Total square footage of carpeted area / average square footage per hour your crew cleans = total amount of crew hours needed.  Multiply that by the hourly rate of your crew (and add on 1 to 2 hrs for setup and teardown), and you have your approximate labor costs. For example:

20,000 sq.ft / 1000 sq.ft/hr = 20 hrs X $70/hr (crew of 2 inc. payroll tx) = $1,400

Remember to account for multiple cleaning passes on carpets that have not been maintained on a regular schedule. Depending on the condition, location, and color of the carpets, in heavily soiled or neglected areas it’s advisable to plan for at least 2-3 cleaning passes.

Keep track of your material costs, labor costs, and the size of each project. With sufficient data, you can calculate your estimates by multiplying a fixed percentage by the total job cost.

For example: If your material and labor costs amount to $1,700, divide that by 0.7 to get a rough estimate of $2,500. You can adjust these numbers based on the square footage alone to fine-tune your future estimates.

Closing Your Commercial Carpet Cleaning Leads

Calculating the total square footage, material and labor costs, and estimating the required preparation time are crucial aspects of the carpet cleaning process. However, successfully converting leads into clients requires additional effort.

Demonstrate Your Expertise and Excellence

Most business owners consider multiple carpet cleaning service providers before making a decision. To stand out from the competition, you need to prove that your company is the best choice. During the initial consultation, implement the following strategies:

  • Prequalify your carpet cleaning leads to focus on projects that align with your expertise and capabilities.
  • Make a positive first impression by arriving on time and dressing professionally.
  • Showcase pictures and/or videos of high-quality work in buildings with similar square footage.
  • Provide testimonials from satisfied clients, and consider offering references so prospects can directly inquire about your service quality.

It looks more professional when you use a custom quoting form, you take measurements of the total square footage to be cleaned, you test and rate the spots and traffic lanes (brownie points if you are using your own company-branded spotter and a nice white towel), you note down areas of concerns, wear, and damage – and let the prospect know you will take the information back to your office, crunch the numbers and provide a formal quote package with option in 1 to 2 days.

Provide an Attractive Proposal

After providing the estimate, it’s crucial to follow up with a detailed and attractive proposal. The proposal should outline the scope of work, the timeline, the cost breakdown, and any additional services or benefits you offer.

A well-crafted proposal can help instill confidence in your potential clients and make them more likely to choose your carpet cleaning services over competitors.

Offer Flexible Scheduling

Commercial clients often have specific time constraints and preferences when it comes to scheduling carpet cleaning. To increase your chances of closing the deal, be flexible and accommodating with your scheduling options.

Unless it is a commercial business that regularly takes a specific day of the week off, you will need to offer evening or weekend appointments to minimize disruption to their business operations. Your level of flexibility around the hours you have crews available can make your services more appealing and increase the likelihood of securing the job.

Stay in Touch and Follow Up

Even if you don’t close the deal during the initial estimate or proposal stage, staying in touch with your potential clients is essential. Regularly follow up with them to remind them of your services and maintain a presence in their decision-making process.

Phone calls, text messages, and emails can all be effective ways to stay on their radar. Additionally, following up allows you to address any questions or concerns they may have and provide further information to help them make an informed decision.

Conclusion

Estimating and closing commercial carpet cleaning jobs requires careful consideration of factors such as material costs, labor, square footage, and client preferences. By accurately estimating the scope of work and providing detailed proposals, you can increase your chances of securing commercial carpet cleaning projects.

Additionally, showcasing your expertise, offering flexible scheduling, and maintaining regular communication with potential clients can help you stand out from the competition and win more jobs.

Learn More with Carpet Cleaning Marketing Masters

Carpet Cleaning Marketing Masters is an agency dedicated to helping professional carpet cleaning companies enhance their digital presence, generate quality leads, and close more jobs.

Rather than relying on generalized advice from marketers who may not fully understand the industry, partnering with a specialized agency like Carpet Cleaning Marketing Masters can provide tailored strategies and solutions specific to the carpet cleaning business.

Contact Carpet Cleaning Marketing Masters today to explore how they can assist in generating consistent and high-quality leads for your carpet cleaning company.

About the Author: As a business owner in the carpet cleaning and cleaning service industry for over 30 years as well as a marketing consultant and author, with well-over a decade of lead generation experience managing a results-driven marketing agency for Professional Carpet Cleaning and Residential Cleaning Companies, John Clendenning is wildly known as a leading Marketing Expert within the Professional Cleaning Industry.

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Creating Omniscient Presence: The Key to Becoming the “Best-Known Carpet Cleaning Business”

Creating Omniscient Presence: The Key to Becoming the “Best-Known Carpet Cleaning Business”

PODCAST EPISODE

Creating Omniscient Presence: The Key to Becoming the “Best-Known Carpet Cleaning Business”

In a world where consumer habits are constantly evolving, the need for carpet cleaning businesses to stand out in their local markets has become more crucial than ever. In this podcast episode, the Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters team reveals the secrets to achieving omnipresence in your local market. By implementing the strategies discussed, you can become “The Best Known Cleaner” attracting more jobs, the best customers, and ultimately growing your business like never before. Let’s dive into the core message of this podcast episode.

 

Understanding the Power of Omniscient Presence:

Omniscient presence means being visible to your ideal prospects everywhere they look. It involves utilizing various marketing channels to establish a ubiquitous presence in your local market. By achieving omnipresence, you position yourself as the go-to carpet cleaning business in your area, gaining the trust and recognition of your target audience.

Understanding the importance of working ON your business rather than IN it, by continual learning and growing as a business owner are essential for developing a sustainable and successful service business and achieving omnipresence is one of the key aspects of that journey.

 

Our “Best Known Cleaner” Omnipresence Marketing System here at Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters consists of 3 key principles that make up the foundation of what we do for cleaning companies.

Those consist of the following:

  • Maximize Your Opportunities …to generate qualified leads
  • Maximize Your Brand Impressions
  • Maximize Your Conversions

When you focus on upgrading all three of these core success drivers simultaneously – your business growth becomes unstoppable!

Strategies for Achieving Omniscient Presence:

1. Improve Conversions on Your Website:

Your website is the digital face of your business. By optimizing it for conversions, you can attract and engage potential customers. The hosts discuss the importance of writing things down, as it helps cement information in your brain and increases the likelihood of taking action. They touch upon the significance of journaling in improving life skills and entrepreneurial mindset, stressing the power of putting your thoughts into words.

2. Utilize local service ads and pay-per-click ads:

To reach a wider audience in your local market, it is crucial to utilize local service ads and pay-per-click ads. These targeted advertising methods allow you to showcase your carpet cleaning services to potential customers actively searching for such services in your area. By embracing these techniques, you can ensure that your business remains at the top of their minds.

3. Implement Content Marketing:

Content marketing plays a pivotal role in establishing your expertise and building credibility. By producing high-quality content such as blog posts, videos, and podcasts, you can engage with your target audience and position yourself as a trusted authority in the carpet cleaning industry. The hosts emphasize the importance of storytelling, leveraging before and after stories, project stories, and branding to effectively connect with potential customers.

 

Taking Immediate Actions for Best Known Status:

The podcast emphasizes the need to take immediate action to address specific challenges within your carpet cleaning business. It highlights the importance of making a big push to become the best-known cleaner in your marketplace and provides actionable steps to achieve that goal.

One effective strategy discussed is pre-roll advertising, particularly focusing on YouTube ads. The hosts reveal that Google, which owns YouTube, has access to user information such as search history, allowing you to target ads to people actively looking for carpet cleaning services. By strategically targeting competitors’ channels, URLs, or interests, you can reach your ideal prospects effectively.

 

Conclusion:

Achieving omnipresence in your local market and becoming the “best-known carpet cleaning business” requires strategic planning, continuous learning, and utilizing various marketing channels. By improving conversions on your website, utilizing local service ads and pay-per-click ads, implementing content marketing, and taking immediate action, you can stand out, book more jobs, attract the best customers, and grow your carpet cleaning business.

Remember, the core message of this podcast episode is to become omnipresent in your marketplace, ensuring that you are visible to your target audience everywhere they look. By incorporating the strategies shared in this podcast episode, you can elevate your carpet cleaning business and establish yourself as the industry leader, ultimately achieving the best-known status in your local market.

Listen To The Podcast:

 

You will learn:

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The Carpet Cleaner’s Video Ad Framework

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Making the Connection for Google Maps Rankings

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Building a Website for SEO & Your Visitors

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Your New Website Gallery: Social Media

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Google Ads for Quick Wins

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Don’t Miss out on Local Service Ads

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How to Use Facebook Ads the Correct Way

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Youtube Ads for Next-Level Growth

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Follow Up for Lead Conversions

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… and much more!

Audio Transcript:
if you want to be the dominant cleaning service this time next year this time two years from now in five or ten years you want to sell your business for half a million three quarters a million a million two million dollars and retire whatever that is if that’s you if you’re ready to take your business to that next step there’s a proven framework we just walked through it we talk about each one of these individually and in depth every single month this is the overarching framework of becoming the best known cleaner and becoming omnipresent and it is a mapped out framework it works repeatedly over and over and over again regardless of how technology is changing what AI is doing to us what the internet’s doing well on you know whether it’s online or offline omnipresence has a very specific path forward welcome to the carpet cleaner success podcast a show created to inspire carpet cleaning business owners to build their own thriving residential and commercial cleaning business your host John clendinning has built and sold successful cleaning businesses for multiple six figures over his 30-year career and is the founder of carpet cleaner marketing Masters a digital agency that turns your online marketing into a lead generation machine tune in is John shares proven tips strategies and expert interviews to help fast track your success in the carpet cleaning industry

we’re going to be talking about how to become the best known cleaner so as part of our omnipresence series it really is what’s necessary in today’s day and age everything is changing in our world around us and uh and consumer habits are changing economy is changing AI is changing everything and we as business owners home service business owners carpet cleaners maid services and anybody else that’s on this call that’s learning from our year 30 years of experience and training how much that is massively affecting where people find their service providers how they know to choose one over the other and how you can influence that to dramatic effect and literally take over your Marketplace so that’s what we’re going to be talking about today is how to become the best known cleaner and if you happen to me on this call and you’re not a a home cleaning service replace the word cleaner with the best known plumber the best known roofer the best known chiropractor whatever it is that’s LED you here but again most of our most of the people that follow our master classes and training have some sort of a home service home cleaning bent to them so let’s uh let’s dive into uh today’s information if you’re a home service business owner cleaning business owner and you’re serious about getting results let’s put our thinking caps on this is that part of your business where you’re working on your business not in your business you’re learning part of being an entrepreneur and a business owner is constantly upgrading your skills constantly understanding the changing environment around you learning new things and growing so that you’re not 5 10 20 years in business and just repeating year one five ten twenty times you’re actually growing year by year and becoming a Powerhouse in a dominant force and we want to help you with that this is part of that free training Series where we want to absolutely help you understand that so so what are we going to cover today well there’s a lot on the screen we’re going to go through a ton today but consider this the the overview training so we go really deep every month uh in a lot of trainings uh we’ve got a lot of resources on our website we’ve got a lot of resources on our social media you can tap into you can follow our YouTube channels our podcasts things like that all of the information goes goes deep on a lot of these subjects individually but right now we’re going to talk about sort of getting it all in your head and creating that full encompassing view what we find a lot when I deal with a I talk to hundreds and hundreds of of cleaners in this space all the time and individually and in group settings and for years and on stage and speaking at events and stuff like that and kind of what I hear a lot is the fragmentation of I know a little bit about this I know a little bit about that I don’t need to worry about this I don’t need to do any of that kind of thing not really getting sort of like that full cohesive view so let’s talk about that because we’re gonna what we’re going to cover today is we’re gonna create talk about your action plan we’re going to talk about setting your company apart with video talk about building your website for SEO and visitors there’s a fine line there and we’re going to talk about that and show you that we’re going to talk about the new website galleries used to be on your website you had to show galleries of stuff that you do that is now social media how does that play out what do you do there we’re going to talk about making uh the connection uh why you should be at the top of Google Maps and then what that means

and what that doesn’t mean like what areas does that cover where doesn’t it cover we’re going to talk about content marketing why you need it what it’s all about what does content even do what does it mean what types of content do you need we’re going to talk about reviews why they matter more than ever uh we’re gonna you know what you’re missing with Google ads because uh we we audit a lot of Google ad accounts and we got people saying that their Google ads don’t work anymore it’s too expensive well there’s things you’re missing that cause that and we can we can talk about that today as well we’re going to talk about your local service ads why you need to be there even if you’ve tried them you said it’s gotten too expensive they’re all just Tire kickers there’s a way to play that game as well that make it work really really well talk about Facebook ads the right way some companies only run Facebook ads they kind of got a phone call or a message from somebody going oh we know how to run Facebook ads oh that’s my only lead source this is there’s a reason why that doesn’t work long term but there is a right way to use Facebook ads and it’s Facebook and Instagram because meta owns both of them YouTube ads the uh sort of the the new kid on the Block in at least for Home Services obviously YouTube and YouTube ads have been around for a long time for local businesses just starting to scratch the surface on how impactful those can be so we’re going to talk about those as well uh we’re going to talk about becoming omnipresent using retargeting so if you’re not using retargeting it is one of those lowest hanging fruits as well and then we’re going to talk about doing follow-up and stuff so again talking about a lot today so um let’s let’s kind of let’s kind of dive into it right away so who am I why should you listen listen to me so if you’re new here uh for all the other people um yeah this will be really quick if you’re new here uh I’ve I’ve owned cleaning businesses since 1990 while still in high school on my first window cleaning business and then I started doing high-rise window cleaning with cruise job jumping over the uh the side of 40-story buildings in my early 20s and then um decided that that was probably a risky move and moved into janitorial and then started buying cleaning franchises and cleaning businesses and growing them and did that for a 30-year or so career started Consulting in that period of time as well and and marketing Consulting and business Consulting and operations and experience Consulting so delivering a great in-home service experience and a company experience and crafting all of that with businesses and networks and franchises and stuff like that and finally exited out of my actual brick and mortar in you know employees showing up every every morning going off in trucks business back in the you know just over uh two years ago now at the beginning or the middle of the pandemic and sold that for many multiples because of our Omni presence that we’re going to talk about today was allowing us to sell the business for many many times more than what anybody else is getting for their their their their home service businesses and things like that and you know just all about systemizing a business and and making it work also the author of the complete guide to internet marketing for carpet cleaners that you can pick up on Amazon so so that’s that’s about us like and about me and and our company we are um I’m considered an industry leader for uh 2023 and clean facts I’ve kind of appreciate the uh the accolades but more importantly I appreciate the Forum and being able to uh to uh share with a large audience through cleanfact through the Issa and through a lot of other resources be able to connect with people like Howard Partridge and and and do webinars with him and and trainings and stuff like that as well so and we obviously um host the carpet cleaner success podcast as well so but more importantly what about our clients we’d like to see our clients up 55 40 number one everywhere just you know screaming our accolades and letting us know that we have helped transform their business make things easier make marketing better help them grow help them stabilize if they want to have multiple Crews and continue to grow 300 500 000 three quarters of a million a million and more we’ve got clients that are at a million and a half and growing in in in in in fairly reasonable size markets and stuff like that we have other clients that want to stay as a one or two truck operation but want to be the premium service provider in the area make a ton of ton of of profit Revenue take home their 100 150 000 years the business owner and hire employees as well and have you know and and own that bit of a nest egg and have something that they can sell off that isn’t just all about them and their face as well so so that is the the you know the the type of people that we help than the type of businesses that we work with there’s a way to carve that out in any Marketplace so we like to talk about that but what we’re going to talk about is how to achieve omnipresence how to become the best known cleaner for all your ideal local customers doesn’t help that you’re if you’re the best known cleaner for people that are not at all interested in your services or can’t afford your

services uh you can be the best known cleaner on Groupon but that’ll probably put you out of business sorry to tell you the truth if you’re if you’re on Groupon but it’s one of those things where it’s just a law of diminishing returns people find the lowest price cleaner next time they come back and find the lowest price cleaner there’s no loyalty best known cleaner builds loyalty and and brand trust so how does that happen well it’s by leveraging the Three core principles of marketing success so you want to maximize your opportunities to generate a lead from your ideal customer so what does that actually mean what does it mean by maximizing the opportunities well the marketplace is fragmented there’s actually sort of if you think about it when somebody’s about to hire a carpet cleaner there’s going to be really sort of one of three ways that they’re gonna they’re gonna consider right first they’re gonna say hey I know somebody top of mind I have I’ve used somebody before there’s somebody I know like and trust somebody has influenced me so that’s the person they go to right the next is that they’re going to do sort of they’re they’re going to go out and do a bit of a of a bit of a search so they might ask friends they might ask in a Facebook group they they’ll ask around to see who other people are are choosing right then there’s going to be that crowd that’s going to just randomly search and Google it so there’s opportunities all over the place there and then there’s going to be people that were referred in right so we know that the repeat and referrals are the ideal crowd that’s part of that’s top of mind but part of that’s also generating a client experience that is referable but then there’s also that people again that they ask that that’s another way of getting referral they might ask the real estate agent they might ask a carpet or a flooring store they might ask their interior designer and they might ask their maid service they might ask their neighbor next door right we so and they might ask on net on the website next door they might ask on Facebook that you you know those kinds of things on Twitter wherever people are hanging out uh so that’s you want to maximize the opportunities because you want to be everywhere that gets in their head about hey I’m looking for this cleaning service for maid service carpet cleaning and you want to make sure that your present and in every place that there is an opportunity then you want to you want to also be maximizing your brand Impressions so that brand Impressions gets into that no like and Trust Factor so when you’re maximizing the brand Impressions to your ideal target market then they know about you they’ve heard about you they’ve seen you there’s something called the rule of seven and it is that people kind of you know it’s in marketing people need to see your brand seven times before they start to trust it feel good about it they need to see your brand message seven times they need to see your unique sales proposition or we like to call it your compelling sales proposition they need to see your risk reversal guarantees they need to see your customer testimonials not just reviews they actually need to be pushed not just poll marketing where they go and find you because they’re now ready to buy it’s that push marketing they see you all the time if you’re targeting that ideal that ideal demographic and so that’s with brand Impressions positive brand Impressions and then you need to maximize your conversions and maximizing conversions can be on the the website there’s ways to say take more of the traffic that already shows up and convert them into customers maximizing conversions can mean that your Google ads perform better that your landing pages perform better that you’ve built a lead database so people come into your funnel they’re interested they don’t necessarily buy right now or they buy from somebody else well how do you maximize conversions of those people well you bring them into a database and you talk to them and you automate that process of messaging them over time until they’re ready to buy again and maybe they didn’t like the other guy the other guy didn’t Market to them they forgot who they were and you’re always in their awareness so maximizing your conversions is is a big part of this as well so let’s get into it and let’s kind of go through that whole realm so the very first step is actually creating your action plan have you set your goals do you know what you want 2023 to be we’re at that sort of halfway mark so we’re moving into the second half of the year did you jump on our training call you can go back into our archives and see it how to set your goal planning for 2023 what is you what do you want to do how many calls will it take to meet your dollar totals do you know how to do that math have you figured that all out what is your average customer how many customers do you need how many calls does it take to book a job are you booking at seventy percent eighty percent um and I say calls a little bit old school calls messages texts emails all of the ways that people now get a hold of you how many of those leading or you know job inquiries do you need to then book enough appointments at your average dollar rate so can you up the rate of every job is there things you can do there can you deliver a better client experience can you create upsell routines can you

teach your technicians make the average job go from 250 to 350 to 450. we’ve got clients whose average job is over 500 where their competitors are offering through Amazon hall for 99 how do they get there well it’s not doing sleazy sales tactics so know your goals and that can help set up everything that you’re going to do in your marketing and how to really start creating that Omni presence then because you’ll then know your marketing budget so what is a reasonable marketing budget we like to say that uh you know for the 30 years I’ve done it for everybody I’ve consulted that between 15 and 20 percent of your revenue is a great marketing budget to go all in like for all your marketing for your database marketing for your referral remarketing your repeat marketing and also for your cold Outreach marketing and all of it combined together fifteen to twenty percent I never had a year where we dropped Below in 18 we grew consistently through recessions through downturns you know we we had a very active database and a very we marketed at our data our ideal customers in our database several times a month our best customers got in that range of 30 to 40 touches a year are our C lift list clients you know maybe they’re renting an apartment but um so they’re not our ideal client they don’t own the carpet but they’re a good long-term client they’re a senior citizen or whatever they got at least hit from us um with a piece of um welcome piece of mail so not an annoying not being an annoying pest but a welcome guest physical mail email follow-up phone calls um you know ringless voicemails all of those things text messages all of it uh maybe 12 a year right so some some just reminder things and also hey did you know this kind of stuff right so 12 to 30 35 times a year is that range depending on your customers well how are you going to Market your database how are you going to Market out cold how are you going to build a referral list how are you going to stay in touch with those referral partners and all that if you don’t have a marketing budget you don’t know what it is what you end up doing without a budget is you’re going to do a little bit of this you know stop that because then you’re going to do this did that work I don’t know I didn’t track my numbers I didn’t see the ROI on that it just feels like I didn’t get enough leads it should never be a feeling data and math determine how we run these businesses right marketing is just math plus psychology that’s all it is right so you want to Define your perfect customer who is it is your ideal customer right so do you know who that is do you because all of your marketing messages on your website on your social media all of the places that you’re going to Target people all of your audiences that the audience list that you build in social media all of that needs to be based on your ideal Target customer Avatar you might have a customer couple of avatars like for example you might mostly target residential customers right but you might have a commercial cleaning division that’s a different Avatar so you need to have Define the perfect customer in that realm and make sure that that marketing is carved out and looks slightly differently you might have your primary service being carpet upholstery area rug cleaning but you do have a hardwood floor refinishing cleaning maybe even do this not just the scrub and recoil but a sanding like really getting into that market as well and starting a sort of like a side service well that’s a little bit different than home cleaning services so that that ideal customer might be slightly different they have a different budget in mind and you know and a different need and stuff like that so who’s the avatar for that so you want to think of all that kind of stuff because that’s how you’re going to be able to deliver your message so setting your goals if you really we went deep with this with an over an hour an hour and a half training master class at the beginning of the year you can go back in our archives and look at that we’ve got future ones coming up but you really want to be good at goal setting right now what we’re going to talk about is really talking about setting your company apart with video so a lot of people go oh gosh John I don’t want to do video that’s for the influencers and the tick talkers and stuff like that I’m going to tell you right now that video has is becoming and has become one of the most important game changers in all of marketing so we’re going to talk you’re going to see video coming up a number of times in this presentation because it’s it’s that important so uh marketers who use video grow their revenue 49 faster than non-video users so if that’s not reason enough to start picking up your cell phone and just creating selfie videos having somebody follow you around for a day hiring a a a college a university marketing student or a media student with uh with a a nice you know dlsr camera that can do some filming for you things like that right 64 of consumers make a purchase after watching a branded social video so video on landing pages increases conversions by eighty percent what does that mean well you should have landing pages for your pay pay-per-click you should have landing pages for any you know Facebook ads or social ads that are not staying within that platform and those landing pages should have video on them your social media

properties are considered digital storefronts best way to think of your Instagram your Facebook your YouTube is a digital storefront well do you have a video right at the front of that hey thanks so much welcome welcome to our our page Welcome to our site Welcome to our whatever 80 higher conversions if you just have that video imagine having a video on every single one of your your service Pages as well and your service area Pages hey John here from John’s cleaning and yes we offer carpet cleaning the whole page about the services let me tell you a little bit of what we do differently and our 29 Points um Perfect Clean Service System and you know on you go and you have that little conversation hey it’s John here I want to tell you all about our risk reversal guarantee if you’re not happy we have our 200 money back guarantee what do you mean by 200 John let me tell you and all of that all the way through all of your marketing all the way through all of your pages all the way through all your landing pages so pay-per-click somebody clicks there they don’t go to your homepage your website they go go to a very dedicated page that converts at a higher rate we’re going to talk about conversion well that should have a video on it it will convert even higher 46 percent of of users act after viewing a video viewer viewers retain 95 of the message they watched in a video compared to only 10 of what they read in a text so so you need to be making videos now you’re going to go okay John I get it you kind of you kind of beat that home a little bit what kind of videos do I do I need to make well there’s four four categories let’s make this super super simple there are four categories of videos that you should be making you should be making brand awareness videos right so it’s just hey I’m John here I own this company um we do a great job you know let me tell you a little bit about it you should be creating lead generation videos lead generation videos would be hey click here to opt in and download this you know give us your email and we’ll send you a free report on how to care for your carpets how to hire a carpet cleaner things like that how to take spots and stains out for yourself all of that kind of stuff right how to you know click click here now if you’d like a you know a free in-home estimate and get this premium offer book now and we’ll add all these extra services on it no extra charge or at 50 off regular price for these extra services and stuff like that whatever that is so lead generation videos that’s where you give the offer before during and after videos so a lot of people talk about before after during is when you’re actually doing the job you should be taking video of before during and after we call those project capture stories so with all of our customers we create project capture stories where we’re telling a story of Mrs Jones who needed to get the carpets cleaned because her you know her um niece is coming from Europe and she hasn’t seen her in four years because of the pandemic and she’s now coming and her you know Mrs Jones’s little dog has peed all over the carpets and needed they need it she needs her house to look amazing and that would be a great story before during and after pictures create a project story they become pages on your website they become videos that you can Market out and and and retarget people with which is the next one as well retargeting videos anybody who lands on your website or any of your digital properties uh anybody who has seen part of your lead generation video your brand awareness videos and you’ve they’ve watched say 75 of those but they didn’t fill out the form they didn’t do the next action send them retargeting video hey I noticed you came to our website you came to our our offer and you didn’t complete it you know hey come here like you know finish that let’s get let’s get that uh book you in for a free estimate and then you’ll you’ll be locking in those those savings that that you saw as well so it works brilliantly and again what happens at a lot of times is people then say okay John well just a carpet cleaner just a maid service nobody watches our videos I’ve tried video before the numbers aren’t great I’ll tell you that there’s something called the the 9190 rule right or some people call the one 990 rule but ultimately what it means is that only one percent of people on social media are creators so there’s one percent of people that actually create the content there’s only about nine percent that interact with that content like it share it comment do anything with that content ninety percent of the audience are lurkers they are seeing you they are getting those brand Impressions they are starting to know like and trust you you’re starting to build that rule of seven and Beyond you become the best known cleaner in your Marketplace when they see you again and again and again and video is one of those places that they see you again and again and the way to use video from YouTube to to social media to retargeting all of that you can use video in all of your marketing so and on your website and when somebody refers you have a video like anywhere you can think of it it’s a it’s a great way to take that that sort of lurking brand impression crowd and really supercharge supercharger results from that so so one of the things is what kind of videos then okay I’m going to be doing a

bunch of videos John I you mentioned that there’s some that are brand impression and some that are for lead lead generation there’s the retargeting ones and then there’s the before and after ones and stuff like that so what are we doing here well here is a great outline of videos If you created a couple for each of these you would have a six right there if you claimed three for for each you would have 18 to 20 videos just like that that you can use throughout all your marketing and then you can just kind of you know kind of do them in batches and then do a bunch more down the road and you you know you’re just grabbing your phone and going through some stuff so a client success story you know of a whole bunch of clients that you’ve served that have done that you’ve done great things for it became very successful one of our best success stories was uh 30 years in business but I still remember to this day a a person sold a home and part of selling the you know the price on the home they they uh they agreed to touch up the railing on the staircase so white carpet throughout the house wooden railing they’re touching up the railing with some wood stain literally kicked the wood stain the little container of wood stain over down the stairs and the house was already sold and they would have been having to replace not just the stair carpet but it matched all the way upstairs through the bedrooms and all so big huge upstairs Landing sort of you know sitting room open area and then a whole bunch of bedrooms off it huge house right would have been thousands of dollars because of that little spill so they called our company they called the real estate agent went ah real estate I said ah don’t worry about it we know we have some we have our guys they’ll come over and see it we’re like oh no right red red dye removers all of that kind of stuff steam irons um rinsing to get rid of the oil stuff first we were able to get rid of that we got you know one of the world’s best testimonials we used that testimonial to get a whole bunch of other real estate agent agents to use us because we salvaged and saved them thousands and thousands of all the homeowner and and the real estate agent who had sold the home so the new buyers were all happy and solved the problem so client success stories that’s a great story to tell a video on right and character um character story so tell your origin story why did you get into the business what drove you what was different I’ve talked to uh I’ve got one of our clients who used to be a cop and got into doing cleaning instead because of a family story a reason why we have another one who had children that had allergies and they actually had to hire in cleaning services they kind of learned that you know you can make a healthier home with you know an air purifier and clean get everything clean they didn’t want to get rid of the carpets they actually realized that carpets could be the largest filter if they’re vacuumed properly HEPA filtered vacuum cleaners or Central Vac venting outside all of those good things we all know so tell that story tell your origin story why you got into the business what you did before this what led you to this you know your second generation your father was in it your uncle was in it you know things like that teach on a topic how many things do we as cleaners know about we because I’ve been in the industry for 30 years myself were you know trained all of our techness was in the truck for the first couple of years in my early 20s as a as a carpet cleaning business owner and things like that what do we know what training have we gone to have we gone to the IRC ircrc training have we gone to any you know John Don have you gone to any other trainings what do we know that the average customer could benefit from why is that first two or three steps off of the front entrance way going upstairs why are those stairs the dirtiest in the middle and then it fades going up how do you take care of that what about matting um you know when they get when they uh when they spill red wine do they really go after it with white wine well no that’s sticky what do we do club soda things like that blot don’t rub you know all of those kinds of things so we can teach on many many topics build that list grab your phone and teach on a topic right motivate and authenticity share your favorite Mantra don’t just be all about business you know be about yourself too like if you’re heavily invested in the church talk a little bit about why that you know why that’s important to you um if you’re part of the community I was talking to somebody the other day there that what they do to give back is they they um teach kids high school students as a in a young entrepreneurs program they’re giving back because they’ve spent years building businesses and carpet cleaning businesses and restoration businesses and now they’re giving back by talking about everything that they’ve learned over those years and and stuff like that so talk about that like you know you know in a very you know not boisterous sort of way but you can talk about that you know why that’s important to give back and and what you do as well maybe you have a clean water initiative you give to a charity a lot of people give to like the SPCA and stuff like a lot of carpet cleaners because a lot of clients have pets and stuff like that so why do we

give 10 of every job to that or ten percent of your pet you’re in job to that or things like that so all that kind of stuff motivational quotes mantras you know what what fires you up be the expert um so you want to show people like again this is a lot like teaching on a topic but be the expert and be the authority tell them when something in the media is wrong or right have your view on it that is related to the services that you do so if it’s you know if it’s becoming you know the the air quality is really bad right now why not be the expert say hey here’s things you can do here’s things that you can clean here’s the ways that you can deal with that become an expert on the helping them you know in and around their home we even say you know again videos work well newsletters work well as well and you can actually even just take some topics out of the newsletter that you write and talk about those as well and team stories share your team hey this is Carl here he’s he’s been with us for you know five years and you know Carl just got his new training on this and that or whatever you know hey this is just had a new baby here’s here’s Angelo on the team and you know whatever all of that’s all you know like whatever Angelo’s story is and why he joined your team and and have Angelo chat a little bit again technicians don’t tend to like to be on video but think about it they’re they’re in front of customers all day long they have to be personable it is you know the person you hire to be in the customer’s home you know on your behalf or with you has to have uh rapport with customers so let’s let’s pull that out of them to see if they can get a rapport on video as well so now Switching gears we now know video we’re going to continue to talk about video throughout the the rest of this presentation but you know what we need to move on to is talk about building that website that is not only for SEO why is SEO important that we can pause on that a little bit and but it’s also important for visitors I’m sure you’ve all gone to a website that is just you know you know it’s keyword stuffed it says the same words in the heading the subheading all the way through the text it doesn’t feel right it doesn’t read right it feels awkward feels like it was written by machine and it doesn’t doesn’t have anything that makes you go oh I like this company I’m going to stick with them right so so that that you might rank well it might show up and you might have found it but it doesn’t speak to you so on the other side of it you could have a website that looks pretty we see a lot of those I do a lot of website audits for for cleaning services and carpet cleaners and doing those audits I we just pick a part say hey here’s ways you can improve the site based on really really well-known metrics using tools like um um hot jars stuff like that that heat map the website and know what people click on and all that kind of stuff we know what actually causes people to convert which is part of the conversion we’ll talk about but we also know what that fine line between making the website SEO friendly and friendly for visitors so you want to have them clicking on call to action buttons or calling you we know that’s what we what we want them to do there’s three things that people do that we see on all of these websites they tend to do that they tend to go to the about us page more than any other page on the website other than the the page they landed on either the home page or the blog article or this the service area the city page neighborhood page however you’ve you know whatever’s ranking well that they’ve found they’re going to go to that page but you know so then they’re going to click on a call to action button or they’re going to call you because call tracking should be on every single website then you know they’re going to click the about us page because they want to know who are these guys can I trust them in my home or they’re going to leave your site altogether by and large number three is the largest crowd 90 to 95 of your web traffic go check your Google Analytics 99 95 of your web traffic never ever ever did anything they came and they left so we’re going to talk about retargeting are you chasing them around right but is there something that you can do that influences them to not leave to take another action to become a lead to request more information anything like that and there is I want to build your website for for SEO and for visitors there is an exact framework To Build The Better website so we did an entire training just on this one topic we will do trainings in the future again um on this this very specific topic but the point is that you want to have your website set up that when somebody arrives there it fits into what the what the conversation that’s already going on in their head that’s the that’s the definition of great marketing is to tap into a conversation that’s already going on in somebody’s head who are these guys can I trust them what do they do what do they guarantee these are the conversations are you going how do I get a hold of them I don’t feel like picking up the phone and calling how else can I get a hold of them things like that right so how much do they charge all of that kind of stuff right so what we have found is that the quest there are more questions unrelated to pricing than there are about pricing so having you know they land on your page and all your whole house for

99 dollars you just you just told the entire world the type of client you want is a cheap discount buyer period right if it’s all about pricing then you’re teaching the customer you’re teaching the visitor that you’re all about pricing right so you’re you’re just about being the cheap the cheapest guy if it’s all about quality and healthful you know healthy home great for their family great for their pets and and all of the services and the longevity of their carpet and saving them money over the long run um and and being their trusted resource for all home cleaning and Healthy Home needs then you’re speaking to a different crowd your ideal customer is the customer you want to attract to that website and now you’re giving them the message they want to hear right they live in nicer homes they have nicer belongings they’re not looking for the low-cost cleaner they didn’t park their motorcycle in the middle of their living room they’re not they didn’t just have a keg party in the in the rec room or the the family room none these are this is this is ideal proper clients that can refer other ideal proper clients so you build a website that that speaks to that but also has enough words on it has enough keyword density has enough pages on it so you want to have a page for everyone whose Services you want to have a page for every one of the Cities you target you want to have a page for every one of the neighborhoods we’ll talk about that in the content section but that’s all part of building a website for that converts well that is for SEO and for visitors and that ties it all together very well

so moving on and again I understand there’s a lot of information here um this will be available on replay just kind of take bullet point notes this is the things that have changed that you really need to get a whole grasp of to become omnipresent so that everywhere anybody looks you are the best known cleaner in your Marketplace which doubles and triples your business and allows you to sell it for many times more when you’re ready to sell and and move on it’s many times more the multiples of any other cleaning company most cleaning companies sell for the price of their equipment you shouldn’t your equipment is disposable like every five years you should be replacing or at least paying to replace your truck mounts your Vans your you know your Portables your your air movers all of that stuff right that that is all sort of you know it’s it’s it’s a temper you buy it it has a useful life you’re fixing it if it lasts beyond that yeah you got a you know a few gravy years out of it but that’s not what you sell your business for you sell your business for the database you built for the name recognition for the rankings for that that what you mean to the marketplace and how important because that is what’s driving the volume of your businesses so you know that in your Marketplace there is probably a stereo shop there’s probably a plumber there’s probably you know a home a custom home builder you name it that is the one that everybody knows right if you’re in a big big town maybe there’s a couple different areas of town but you know that they’re the ones with the Billboards and back of buses and online everywhere you go people are talking about it you see them they’re following you around if you went to their website if you ever needed them they’re top of mind you have them in your mind so that you don’t end up going when you need that service they’re the first ones you think of you might go and Google their um their website not their category you don’t just go oh carpet cleaner near me you go James carpet cleaning right you know Mighty house carpet cleaning right whatever and you follow them right so anyways let’s talk about galleries galleries used to be these things that sat on your website in today’s day and age galleries on social media platforms so on your Facebook your Instagram even Pinterest things like that you’re the new Gallery is there and you want to have pictures here’s some examples of really good ones you want to have pictures of the team your actual team you don’t want to have stock photos you want to have pictures of your team you want to have videos on some of these of before and afters that we talked about you want to you know if you did a charity event all that kind of stuff you want Happy customer pictures anything you do if you do a contest you want to have the winner um smiling face and a big check all of that kind of stuff you want to know when people come here that Gallery is influencing them you know oh some you know here’s an actual rug in the middle of cleaning and I can see this part’s clean and this part’s dirty not just some sort of arbitrary before and after like example here somebody actually cleaning the area rug and then showing parts of it and things like that so you want to have all of that kind of stuff this the second middle example here um we we see the people cleaning we don’t actually see any faces the first example is much much better the second one at least is showing your gallery on social media and we practice what we preach this is um you know carpet cleaner marketing Masters if you go and check out our Instagram we’ve got videos

we’ve got um Snippets of of longer trainings we’ve got um links and helpful hints and all of that kind of stuff because that’s what we do right so we’re providing that value as well same same idea for your customers so if you could you know you could have how-to tips how to video um an image you know about a red wine stain and here’s how to take it out and then the check the description and then the description of some of that information so anyways use social media as as your galleries use Google my business as a gallery as well don’t just use one place make sure that you’re you’re interacting with all of those because people are going to different places um to see so then that way when you’re talking to a customer and they say well you know is there anywhere I can see the work you do or your testimonials or anything like that you can say yeah just go check out our um you know check us out on Instagram check us out on Facebook because even your Google reviews are turned into images and placed on those in the mix as well so you’ve got a mixture of everything right so that’s really really helpful moving on we can talk about Google Maps so Google Maps has become the Yellow Pages so people don’t use yellow page anymore that kind of died 2008 910 during the last recession um Yellow Pages kind of went down and uh 2007’s when the iPhone was released so all of a sudden consumer products iPhones and tablets and all that kind of stuff that two three years after that during the recession and then next thing you know everybody’s on a digital device everybody’s using the internet a lot more even grandma and grandpas and stuff like that and now there’s there’s no need to go to a directory because the new directory is online and the the maps algorithm really really helped people find their local florist their local butcher their local you know beer store and their local carpet cleaner and things like that so Google Maps is really really important and um you you want to rank prominently and well and there’s a bunch of things that that help you in that regard so Google Maps rankings is all about relevance to start with so if somebody’s looking for a plumber they should not find a carpet cleaner listing it’s always looking for a carpet cleaner they should not find necessarily a maid service they’re not going to find a janitorial service those don’t they’re they’re separate categories they sound really close but they’re separate they’re not really going to find you know a wood floor refinisher if they’re looking for a carpet cleaner relevance is the most is one of the most important things what categories do you have list listed as the categories in your Google Maps listing of the things that you do the services you provide and are they relevant to each other because if there’s an outlier that is totally strange like hey we do carpet cleaning upholster cleaning area cleaning and dog walking you’re never going to show up for dog walking because that’s not relevant to your service category so you want to be very very careful on what it is that you talk about the distance to the person searching or the area that they cert they’re searching into so if they say hey I’m I’m over here in you know New York but I’m looking for my mom I’m trying to find a carpet cleaner in Albuquerque New Mexico so I’m going to type in carpet cleaning near Albuquerque Albuquerque New Mexico Google’s smart enough to go okay well this guy’s over here his IP address is proximity Is way over way over here but he wants to to find somebody here because he put those those terms so it’s going to find either by their proximity of their device the their IP address of their Maps listing or any of those kinds of things or buy what they typed in it’s going to find a proximity and there’s a distance marker so on an example you might have seen one of these grids before but for example this business would be um right in this area here somewhere so if you’re standing within a mile these are all miles if you’re standing within a mile of this business good chance are they’re going to show up in the maps listing because of distance as long as they’ve got their relevance right and then and then we’ll talk about the prominence as well but um if they’ve got a couple things right you’re close enough to them that they’re going to be in the top as soon as you start moving away there’s going to be other businesses that are closer more relevant or more prominent and Google Maps goes nope this guy’s ahead of you oh now you’re down there’s only three Maps listings that show up your number four you’re number five your number six now people don’t find you as easily and and you can see how that can really scatter out usually about five to seven miles if you influence it well with good prominence markers and you’ve got the relevance right you’ve got you know all of that and the distance you can go about five to seven miles out in most most marketplaces that you can influence to be seen on the Google Maps so what does that mean think about it this way are is your pin drop so even if you are a service area business and hide your address Google still knows where they sent the postcard they know your ZIP code they know where your business is located that becomes your Hub they do not show you everywhere you talk about they show you from from a source out it’s still considered a map driving direction

service at its core so that is how the algorithms all work so are you within three to five miles of your ideal customers go back to that first thing we talked about setting goals knowing your ideal customer are you within three to five miles of them if you’re not then your Maps listing is going to have a very hard time generating quality leads for your business quality phone calls from Google Maps because of how far away you are and it might be valuable because a Google Maps listing done properly prominence talks about things like you’re getting your reviews right getting your citations and your Authority online right having your website right that connects it all we’ll talk a little bit about some of this these things but you get all of that right and you’re within that that five mile area of your ideal customer and you have a you know an office or a your location Center then that generates 10 20 30 50 phone calls per month of people finding you and going yeah I’d like I’d like to know about your services from Google Maps alone that is just one of the many omnipresence then you’re getting calls from all of the other marketing you’re doing as well so that you’re you’re building a massive amount of leads but one of the sources would be and one of the the higher level sources would be the maps listing anywhere you can’t rank in the maps because it’s too far away it’s a town over um it’s Two Towns over whatever but you still want you’ve got a lot of customers there that’s where your organic SEO and website rankings not maps rankings but website rankings and your paid ads come in on a Google conversation and then your Facebook ads and all that other marketing can be influencing people in those marketplaces as well but Google Maps is one of the the big daddies and needs to be considered so some people physically move their offices they open up second offices there’s conversations we can have around that that we’ve helped businesses open two three and four other satellite offices no different than a lawyer or a you know site you know psychiatrist or a you know whatever account sir would do they might be a couple different offices and satellite offices as long as they meet people there or they run a business out of there there’s ways to deal with that as well so think about that so let’s talk about a little bit more of those prominence markers so one of the ways that that gives Google that Authority that understanding that you’re an authority in the marketplace is that you have your name your address your phone number all of that exactly accurate and right all around the web Google checks all of that and if you’re on all of these other listings you’ve got reviews and you’ve got interactions on these listings and you have these listings there’s there’s two benefits to that one there are some people that just use the Better Business Bureau just use Angie’s List there are yelpers that only go to Yelp right so there’s people that you know on Facebook look around for stuff you know ask somebody in a buy and sell group or a mommy blog group and then you know come over to your your Facebook page and never went to Google at all Google gets about 60 to 70 percent of searches the other 40 to 30 30 to 40 percent of searches never went to Google for our category so so you want it you don’t want to just limit yourself to oh I’m only worried about Google no let’s let’s think about it all one of the things to think about is these um these other directories they add um they add a bunch of authority to your Google Maps listing they also um are also places where people can find you so you want to make sure that you’ve got your all of the the directories that your competitors have you want to make sure you’ve got review velocity that your competitors have we’ll talk about reviews later but all of that helps with your Google Maps rankings you want to make sure that you’ve got your website set up to connect to your Map listing properly and create those connections and citations schema code it’s called things like that you want to really connect the dots for Google so that you move up in the maps listing around your your service area properly

now we talked about we talked about a little bit earlier we’re talking about content so why is content even important what do you mean content John why I’m a carpet cleaner I’m a maid service why do I need content well content marketing as it says is you know for the next level wins well what that basically means is 50 of web searchers even looking for services still move past in Google alone if they’re just searching they’re looking for information and they go into the organic listings where the websites are also in those organic listings below the maps is uh the you know the the home advisors and the thumb tax and the uh Yelps and all of those as well the directories kind of in there and there’s there’s a few websites to answer those questions that people are asking so there’s a couple different types of content you need to be thinking about that really help you show up and generate traffic to your website that then become visitors that you can convert into customers you can convert into estimate requests you can convert into followers you can start following them around and retarget you can

create a lot of content so there’s a difference there’s called top of funnel content and bottom of funnel content content you need both so we really suggest that in most average marketplaces that you’re putting out at least a blog post a week a press release a month to generate a lot of these signals in heavily competitive markets you need way more than that to help you rank for different keywords there is a thousands of keywords about 3 000 keywords that you could you should be ranking for what they call long tail so people type in a longer I need to get red wine out of my carpet so red wine out of carpet red wide you know you know carpet stain removal things like that those are long tail they have a lot of words in it is the search term there’s you know carpet cleaner near me that’s a short term that’s the harder one that everybody goes after that one but there is there is might be five or ten people searching for the longer tail one every month every quarter well if you’re ranking for hundreds if not thousands of those because you’ve got enough content and enough things on your website that attract that attention Google is oh I’ve got somebody who can answer that question in this area you know because your website has been crawled you’ve done it well content marketing and and that content marketing is a huge part of SEO now you’re influencing that Omni presence again you’re being found every time somebody searches for anything related to your category oh my God there’s those guys again there’s those guys again oh my God there’s an ad for those guys they came to your website they left oh my God there’s those guys again you know I’m on the Weather Network and I see them because you’ve become omnipresents so top of funnel is is more like um supporting content so these are not people that are ready to buy right now they’re just in research mode they’re looking to solve a problem they’re looking for information uh even some good top of funnel content can even include Geo content because you want it like if you’re if you’re trying to say that hey you know we’re over here but we actually we’re we’re one of the top cleaning companies for um you know this this community over here this retirement community this um you know Golf Course area whatever well then you want to have content you know say some of the um High income areas around Atlanta right if you had that type of content on your website and it it gets found and that that content you know talking about the high income areas and the fact that you know weaved into that content we happen to be a carpet cleaner in the area that services this area but here’s what we like about the area here’s what we you know here’s what people like about the um the amenities of the area so it’s not really trying to sell them carpet cleaning it’s it’s literally showing up and telling Google that you are in that area that’s the people you serve you link that to the city pages that you have and the service pages that you have and then you’re creating this top of funnel content that really helps your your website rank bottle of bottom of funnel content that is the content that is transactional people are ready to to buy they need to be solving a problem and they’re they’re at the bottom of the funnel they’re ready ready to buy and you need both levels of content because that really creates more omnipresence and it really can transform your business we’ve seen people that just with a really good SEO plan alone you know a lot of people going I just I want I want you to I want to buy leads I want to buy leads I want to buy leads it’s like get your SEO right it takes a little bit longer because it’s an asset it’s building the foundation before you build the home um but you you get your SEO right and it it is the number one organic traffic to your website and your online properties organic traffic is the number one driver of most well-established carpet cleaning and home cleaning service businesses done properly you get your content marketing right and your paid ads are just sort of that added little the bit it might be the thing that all you could live on and and and you know make rent on and feed your family with at the beginning you need paid ads before the asset builds up now paid ads is just that gravy that keeps the trucks busy and running your organic traffic is the number one driver of new customers to your business repeats referrals organic and then paid and it becomes this beautiful mix that just keeps your company growing from 300 000 to 500 000 from five hundred thousand to three quarters a million three quarters a million to a million and you just keep growing because you’ve got all of this omnipresence and uh and and and and this this organic base so really really important and the type of content you need like service content and Geo content we talked about that so about the services you provide and you need content about the areas that you service it really helps tie things together in Google’s mind so then we’ve got um we’re looking at you know why reviews matter more than ever so we knew we’ve known that reviews mattered for about a decade now right so again I talked a little story about coming out of the recession prior to the recession my business used to have you know in all of our yellow page ads because I’m not old we used to run yellow page ads like crazy five to seven thousand dollars a month

where the yellow page ads because they generated a lot a lot a lot of leads and we were really good at converting leads on the phone so the more Yellow Pages ads we could the busier we were as well and then we did a whole bunch of other marketing as well and and and that kind of thing so that building the business that way but what we realized was we used to run hey don’t call any carpet cleaner until you listen to this free consumer awareness consumer information message how to shop in this category you know what questions to ask what things to avoid how to how to not be ripped off all of that kind of stuff and obviously that that 12 minute message on a voice machine um you know would would lead people they could press one at any time to call our office and we influenced them that we were the obvious trusted expert why did so many people call that consumer line 20 to 40 people a day would call from our yellow page ads not directly to us that was available but they’d call the consumer number first and we would see them that light up on on our system and we could have three or four people listening at the same time and then um all of a sudden the phone would ring and because they’d be pressing one and ringing through those most of them would listen to at least eight to ten minutes of our 12 minute message what does that tell you as well well they’re looking to figure out who to trust and they didn’t know enough to do that come enough about the industry enough about the service come out of the recession everybody’s using these these these cell phones they’ve all got these consumer Internet connected devices on their hip and now they you know we had less and less calls to that uh part of it the recession things slowed down we had different marketing we went after our our referral partners and stuff like that we you know to keep the business running and growing we dodged and changed things a little bit come back out of it go back to doing some of the investing heavily in that other marketing in calls the calls right there to the consumer line so it’s like oh just put the consumer information on the website that’ll be fine they’ll find it there nope never went there either what did they start doing they started using reviews reviews became popular at that point Amazon and places like that taught people to read the reviews before buying the next cell phone case the next pair of shoes the next golf clubs whatever it is so reviews became important there they became important every year people started realizing I can Outsource my trust to somebody else who’s ever used them and now 10 years hence um 10 12 years hence we’re now saying that it’s not just the volume of reviews it’s the recency of reviews 87 of consumers read online reviews before taking action with a local business 48 percent of consumers would consider a business with fewer than four stars would not consider doing business with them negative reviews can have a significant impact on a consumer’s Behavior so if the very if the most recent review you have on your listing is a negative review and you haven’t responded to it and you haven’t done everything you can to continue to get more reviews to bury it that negative listing that negative review sitting there is there’s a really good chance it’s turning away one two three five potential phone calls a day that just go no this guy’s got you know is better you might have a 4.7 star rating you never want a perfect 5.0 rating that that looks cheesy it looks manufactured nobody is perfect all the time you want to you want to have the odd well it was pretty good they didn’t get the one stain out but they told me about that and they gave me the money back on that so that’s pretty good I’m giving them a you know 4.9 4.8 star rating that is totally fine to have that mix of stuff um and every review should have an answer from the owner every view good bad or ugly should have a should have a response in there that speaks to the person who’s reading the review and what you what you said about it right so just think of that as well and 79 of consumers say they Trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation from their friends or family so reviews are critically important they help in rankings but they also help in conversions and reviews should never just sit static on the place that the review came in so they shouldn’t all just be Google there’s actually a golden ratio um of where to get reviews but they should you should also take them off of those places and move them you know dynamically Syndicate them it’s called take pictures of them um take the words and put them in posts and then grab pictures as well and just every single review you get you should be actively seeking reviews you should have a good decent review velocity and so that you have a lot of recent reviews constantly coming in at a decent pace and then you should be taking all of those and marketing them around all of your other web properties so that you’re you’re creating that you know that that many people Trust reviews show it to them everywhere they look omnipresence about your greatness as well so we like to say that 70 of your review should be on Google because again 70 of the traffic goes to Google 20 should be on the Better Business Bureau people still go there but you can also tell people go check

us out on the Better Business Bureau and 10 should be Facebook they actually call them recommendations now but they’re that social media angle Facebook allows consumers to leave in you know positive sentiment get them to do it there so we don’t suggest you do it in one we say suggest you get customers to fill out a feedback survey invite them to leave reviews the ones that are willing to leave reviews will almost 60 to 80 of your customers will fill out a feedback survey if you ask them the right way about 10 to 20 will leave reviews and then you can say hey thanks for that great those great comments could you pick one or all of these places and leave great comments you give them those three Better Business Bureau Facebook and Google and they’ll pick one or all and you’re now getting reviews shared around as well so so we’re we’re wrapping up the last few items here in this omnipresence Marketing System so what you want to do is you want to make sure that um your you you know what you what you might be missing with Google ads you want to make sure that you’re running Google ads properly and that you’re not missing out on the big picture with Google ads sure the leads are expensive on Google ads that doesn’t mean you don’t you don’t take them what is your conversion rate and what is your Roi so if your average cost per click in in Google ads is ten dollars a click and it takes you three three to five clicks before you generate a phone call so now you’ve got you’ve generated a lead for 30 to 50 bucks right sounds like a lot and if you book only half of those you track your math you do you know you do your math you know that of Google ads you know you track you that’s a call tracking number a different ring a different phone line different different way of tracking that a different um when they fill out a text message form when it comes in it lets you know you can track how many people came through your Google ads and you know how many of them ended up booking if you book 50 you just paid 60 in this example to a hundred dollars per lead and that’s pretty average actually well we run hundreds of Google we ad campaigns and 60 to 100 to buy a customer from Google ads it’s pretty reasonable because and it’s pretty average because now you’ve bought an ideal customer that your goal is to lock them in for Life you’ve paid that once they’re if your average job is 300 or 400 you’ve made money but you’ve make money the second time

didn’t turn off my office phone you’ve made money the second time you’ve made money um on the repeats and the referrals and all of that kind of stuff the lifetime value of that customer should be somewhere between two and four thousand dollars are you willing to spend a hundred dollars to get two to four thousand dollars over the lifetime value of the client yeah all day long get as many of those as possible so lead cost isn’t everything you don’t want to say oh well I can get cheaper leads somewhere else you might get cheaper customers somewhere else too these people are at least looking specifically looking for your uh um your services so when they’re looking for you know carpet cleaners near me upholstery cleaners near me area rug cleaning um Studios things like that you want to know that you’re showing up there because that’s part of your omnipresence that’s part of you know making sure that you’re maximizing the opportunities and brand Impressions and that’s you know running branding ads for slippage what what slippage means is there’s a lot of people that go to paper you know the type into Google they’re looking for something at the top of the page they can see the pay-per-click they click on it they go to your landing page they go huh what if these guys are any good they back out of your landing page and they go look you up they go search you you’re You by name they end up on your website right that’s now slippage but because they came to your landing page now you can run branding ads to them to say Hey you know you’re looking for our services you know here you get a get a free estimate you know all that kind of stuff check out what we do our 29 point you know um safe and Healthy Home Cleaning Service you know system or whatever that kind of stuff you can start you know hear some great testimonials from our customers chase them around with that kind of stuff right so um Google ads isn’t just about that that one conversion there are there’s a slippage that still turns into customers that didn’t get tracked properly because they didn’t take action on the landing page but they came back around a different way but they came through you that way so you want to make sure that you’re running branding ads to them to bring them back in because they’re they’re still interested you just gotta you gotta be able to influence that and then artificial intelligence we know AI is everywhere doing everything now um and AI in in Google ads it really is a matter of telling Google it’s getting better and better and better at this over time letting Google know that that click turned into a inquiry that turned into a lead that turned into a customer and was worth 500 bucks if we keep telling AI the AIS that are building out

in the background all of that data they’re going oh you like these customers and these types of people let me show you more often to those because these other guys aren’t telling me that your competitors aren’t telling me that they’re not letting me know when they convert so maybe they don’t and maybe most people like you so it’s how Google search works is like more people end up on your website stay there for longer and seem to find Value in your content the more Google shows that website or that web page over anyone else same idea with ads so um AI is you know will win in in the coming years so keep that in mind Google local service ads um we did some trainings on that recently it’s you know get into this before it’s too late Google local service ads um those are the ads the Google guarantee some people call them they’re the ads that are at the top very very very top of the search results and they’re in almost every market now it was a sort of a trial years ago now it’s just rolled out and those are people you only pay when somebody actually physically calls you so you might have tried and go oh I used to get a lot of good leads out of that back in the day and now I’m getting really expensive or crappy leads they’re all Tire kickers there’s a reason for that part of that is not teaching the algorithm the Google The Google local service ads algorithm the ideal customer that you’re you’re wanting and getting part of that is there’s there’s other influence mechanisms that you can actually set up there’s demographic mechanisms there’s areas where you’re targeting there’s a lot of ways that you can really dial in your ideal customer and not just have it smattered everywhere so everybody just kind of threw up an ad in the in the early days and as there’s more and more and more cleaners realizing that this is a source of paper call leads then you know kind of like what Home Advisor was doing and thumbtack was doing stuff like that this is a source of paper call leads as soon as you get a call you have to pay for it it might have been 17 18 20 in the day it might now be 25 30 40 but again are you booking 50 of them that still might be that you know 60 to 100 customer you just bought and if it’s an ideal customer and you’ve influenced them properly you want to get in into Google local service ads so um with Google local service ads you know you want your ranking is is still all about ranking you only really see three at the top of the page before you have to scroll a little bit so you want to be ranked well so what does Google do for that ranking well the proximity to the potential customers location that is one of the ranking factors of your review score and the number of views reviews you’re receiving inside local service ads and in your Google Maps listing connected to your if you’ve got to connect those two and you connect that in the number of reviews you have but also your review velocity your responsiveness is huge so if you’re getting phone calls and you’ve got your ads on during office hours and have them turning off when there’s nobody in your office and you’re not responding to those calls you’re not getting back to those message leads that are coming in instantly in it like answering every single phone call and getting back to the message leads they say within 24 hours but this as fast as you possibly can then you’re getting demoted you’re you’re not showing up properly and your your results are going to be affected by that if you are very responsive and answering all of the calls getting back to everybody right away um that is a factor that’s going to put you up in front even more so your business hours become really important do not have hours set in local service ads where you cannot answer the phones and you know and whether or not um they receive uh serious or repeat complaints about your business is is another point so you want to make sure that you’re doing delivering a great service if you start if they getting complaints Google guarantee means that they Google guarantees the homeowner that if if they if they’re not happy if there’s a problem Google will pay them will pay them back right so uh you want to make sure that if they’re getting complaints they’re going to demote you as well so keep that in mind

social media next one on the list you want to be on social media so again I get this as a lot this is omnipresence but having a marketing system in place setting those goals and chipping away at this stuff so that you make it automated you do a couple this month a couple next month and you just keep locking it in and doing more and more and more because social media is for browsers not buyers so they didn’t come looking for you they didn’t type in oh I want to find a carpet cleaner on face Facebook that never happened they’re browsing and you’re you end up in front of them so what do you want to end up in front of them with to influence them because social media is a great place to get your omnipresence and your brand message out and create a bunch of those brand Impressions that start to build those those seven touches that they need so they know like and trust you have you top of mind when they’re ready to buy somebody in your account or use somebody in your category

so retargeting anybody that came to your website anybody that came to your landing page anybody that watched your videos those videos we talked about um anybody who watched any you know 75 of the videos all the build retargeting audiences and stay in front of those people that is your active audience branding ads and again videos work well in these as well so the before and after stories project stories that kind of stuff branding is about targeting homeowners your ideal demographic people that are look-alike audience to the ones that visited your website look-alike audience to your customer base things like that you want to you want to run branding ads to those so that they now start learning about your brand and then what you can do is you can take the people that learned about your brand watch say 75 percent of your video about your brand they seem to engaged a bit in your local Marketplace and then send leads leads to them lead generation has its place and can work sort of disruptively but if you’re building a you know sort of a hey here’s some here’s here’s who we are and what we do you know building that brand awareness to your ideal target market and then the ones that seem the most engaged are the ones you place the lead generation ad for the Facebook lead form click here to go to a landing page here’s this premium offer that we’re making available right get your whole home clean and get a couch and loveseat cleaned absolutely free 250 value with any whole home of carpet cleaning over 500 right things like that are over you know 600 square feet or whatever those kinds of things you can create premium offers that are lead gen based on on on that kind of stuff so uh that’s the crowd that you want to Target so the actions to take with Facebook ads are three to four videos um for each of the different those three different types of campaigns that we just talked about uh create your ads and custom audiences based on on what people watch so you can test tests like that which is the fourth one you want to build landing pages and messaging that matches what you’re talking about so you don’t want to be talking about upholstery cleaning or your area or a shop and then take the home page or website that’s all about carpet cleaning no you want to make sure you have landing pages and the and and and assets built out about what it is that you’re driving them towards that’s just that’s common sense right and you want to test everything so you want to find the ads that work the best you want to split test maybe a collage of that of images versus a video for whatever different ad copy and what you do is you you split test them that’s one of the great things about social media and and ads you can split test them against each other and you get rid of the losers and you scale the winners and then you just keep running those tests it’s content marketing is all about testing it’s math plus psychology so and then we roll into the same idea but YouTube this is this sort of um this next level area that is still sort of untapped it’s like what social media was five six seven years ago YouTube’s been around for a while but for local businesses so you got different types of ads you got true view ads pre-roll ads and Discovery ads

ultimately what you want to do pre-roll tends to work the best trueview can show up on on a network all over the place The Weather Network and stuff like that trivia can be everywhere and um Discovery ads are the ones that show up in the sidebar when you’re when somebody’s searching and looking at this here’s some other ones that it might be related what you know um the the best ads we feel are the pre-roll simply because you can actually find people Google owns YouTube they know who’s in the market for cleaning services they know what you’ve searched they they they know your search history you can take people that have searched for carpet cleaners near me and the next time they go into YouTube to look at a silly cat video or to you know watch you know you name it an update from Congress or whatever the you know whatever they do they’re you know people out you know four-wheeling and mudding it whatever their thing is um you can show them an ad before the uh before their video plays they and you can have again a video based ad sitting in there right so you can Target your competitors channels you can actually even Target your competitors URLs or interests that so say for example you load a list of all of your competitor websites and anybody that has visited click through Google and visited your competitor’s website will see an ad from you in Facebook or sorry in YouTube the next time they’re on there a pre-roll that no matter what video they’re going to watch they see you hey by the way you’re looking for quality carpet cleaner in the you know Tulsa Oklahoma area that does an amazing job guarantees our work 200 and you know as um you know been in business blah blah blah and delivers a healthy home cleaning service then come to us let me tell you all about it right and if they last begin that if they don’t skip off that ad in the first five seconds then you you pay for a view but you influence them because they’re interested

they watch the ad and now you’ve got your generating leads as well so and you can even Target keywords so there’s all kinds of targeting in in YouTube ads that are really really really important so the action steps for YouTube ads film your videos with with proper video ad framework the right sizes test a few different hooks to get you know get people to last beyond that first five seconds and then people to actually opt in at the end test a couple different hooks write down a list of all the audiences you could Target all your competitors all of the um websites that your ideal customer goes to all of that all the different channels on YouTube that they that are that that are related to your ideal customer that you can put ads in front of take that entire list write that all down set up your YouTube pre-roll ads um in the Google Google ads interface that’s where you do it you don’t do it in YouTube it’s back in Google ads Google owns YouTube It’s a Google ad product you know you can go up to you know I say minimum 50 a day budget to test you can test it a little bit lower than that you can test you know 20 or 30 bucks a day fifty dollars a day sounds like a lot but again you want to run some split tests and do a couple different things so if you know marketing is all about testing so you can start a little bit smaller than that and see where it goes but um just the whole idea is to put some money behind this because you can take people that searched on Google for carpet cleaning and be exclusively in front of them because your competitors aren’t doing this yet exclusively get a captive audience on YouTube the next time they go look there and we know the majority of people with cell phones and computers go to YouTube and you run them figure out the winners um and losers scale the winners so that’s our goal retargeting 80 of the people that that see you the first time do not do anything they don’t convert so what do we do with this crowd well we make sure that everywhere that they go to everywhere they land everywhere that they come across your brand impression online anywhere that a pixel a pixel can be put a way to put a little cookie on their website and or on their computer and it says hey I can now retarget you I can show you ads when you’re on on Weather Network I can show you ads when you’re on ESPN I can show your ads anywhere you go around the web I can show you ads on Facebook I can show you ads on LinkedIn I can show you ads if you search on Bing I can remarket you anywhere you go around the web you want to make sure you put a Facebook pixel Google pixel Bing pixel LinkedIn pixel uh you want so that you’re generating that entire pixel audience and you can now build this audience of people that have engaged with your brand come and found you didn’t take action you can say hey I noticed you came to our website but you didn’t fill out a form I noticed you came to our website and requested an estimate but you know you haven’t booked yet there’s weight you can break that audience down and send very very very targeted messages final step of what all of this is about is all about the follow-up right so proper lead follow-up is the process that creates those conversions so you can build all the leads in the world you can be the most omnipresent um business in the world but if you don’t follow up you don’t answer your phones use an answering service it rings once to click through through your phone to their phone they get three rings before they pick up excuse me can I put you on hold for a quick second click because it’s a you know answer server and then they finally come back you know 20 30 seconds a minute later that is a really really bad experience for the consumer compared to they you know they they call hey it’s a great day here at ABC Carpet Cleaning how can I make yours have a great day too totally different experience they allow oh that’s funny anyways yeah so I’m looking to get some cleaning done oh great that’s what we do so tell me a little you know off you go right so if you respond right away 78 of consumers buy from the first person who responds and that’s you know um study by lead connect and big players in the industry 78 from the first person that that you respond they’ve done a bunch of their homework they know who they want to call and if you didn’t answer they’re calling the next guy you’re not the only one on their list right so first person who responds after five minutes the odds of qualifying a lead drops by 80 and in today’s day and age a phone call a text message a messenger message a e an email a form fill on your website all of those are the phone ringing the big red phone ringing in the corner the bat phone every one of them is five minutes or less one minute or less we actually have systems in place where if anybody fills out a form on our client’s website their phone rings they press one they’re talking to the customer right away why because it’s that important to convert we are all about high conversions and that’s one of those elements so you don’t want to automate the phone answering system you can have a you can have a phone should be answered live during business hours text messages should be hey thanks so much we’re here to solve that question got a few more questions for you you can automate a few little questions at the beginning make it feel

like it’s real jump a real person in try and get them on the phone if you can if not finish the conversation by selling by text cell by text emails same idea a little bit of back and forth try and get them on the phone if not selling by email or selling by message is really important sharing some videos letting them know why you’re different as you’re delivering the answers to their questions but you wanna you know whether it’s a lead form follow-up or any of that kind of stuff you want to set the appointment no matter what so set the appointment for the estimate set the appointment you can even set the appointment Hey when’s the best time for us to give you a call back um you know if there’s nobody available right now kind of idea um the you can set the appointment for the cleaning service obviously even if you don’t have your calendar in front of you even if the person who’s taking the call set the appointment for four or five days out hey does uh next you know just Thursday between you know one and three work best okay great let’s put you down for that right if you have to call them back and change the appointment I’m so sorry I double booked you um I wasn’t looking at the right calendar can I move you around or something like that you know you’ve got a much better chance of of keeping that appointment if you set the appointment no matter what no calling back unequivocal you’re just you’re setting the appointment because then in their mind they’ve solved that problem they’ve moved on you can adjust but they’re not calling your competitors so having a sort of that lead management system that’s all part of your conversions as well follow-up means that that 80 of the crowd that did nothing saw your stuff did or did not interact you’re able to follow up with and then you can create that you know even if they did email or opt-in they chose not to choose you this time they chose not to do the cleaning right now you want to have a long-term nurture process to follow up with them for months and years till they’re ready to buy from you until they unsubscribe we always stay till they buy or die until they unsubscribe or or buy from you you want to have a constant drip campaign going out as well to do all of that so so there we go that is an omnipresence Marketing System for a home cleaning service carpet cleaning maid service business that will take your business and two and three extra results guaranteed we’ve seen it happen over and over and over again there’s ways to do a lot of learn that and do do some of that yourself there’s ways to use you know Automation and services and tools to help make that happen as well so let me know what are the three takeaways top three takeaways to becoming the best known cleaner what are you going to do right now don’t leave a training like this with yeah that was all good oh I got so many things in my head no write three down if you don’t write three down there’s an act of taking pen to paper that locks through your brain you have to think of how to write again you have to see it it creates an entire neural pathway that’s why journaling works well for you know for life skills and and being a better entrepreneur and a better person writing things down makes them cement in your brain and gives you a much better chance of actually taking action on that so what three things um three goals do you have out of this training is what can you do better are you going to improve your conversions on your website are you going to start looking at local service ads again pay-per-click ads are you gonna you know are you going to uh um look at content marketing so that you can actually be answering questions that people are asking and show up more what are you going to do to become more omnipresent what is the stages what are the three things you can do right away within the next day or week get that solved and what can you do to make this a big big push in your business so that you can take your business by Leaps and Bounds forward and you can make yourself the best known cleaner in your Marketplace so write that down the whole idea is obviously having yourself um being seen by your ideal Prospect everywhere that they’re looking being followed around just becoming oh my gosh those guys are everywhere they’re the guys I need to go to they have the best message they have the best Market they’ve got tons of testimonials they’ve they’re sharing before and afters they’ve got happy clients left right and Center you call them yeah you know that makes sense that you’re a little more expensive than the rest of them that’s totally fine now you’re not price competitive you’re not worrying about your competitors what they’re you know what they’re charging what they’re doing because you’re you’re on an island of your own because you’re the best known so that is the ultimate goal if you need any help with this you can always hop on a call with us so carpet cleaner marketingmasters.com schedule you can you can hop on a call with us we can talk about take a look at where you are where you want to go what how to connect the dots you know is there any services that you might need us to help you with that’s fine if there’s any services that you know you you need elsewhere that has nothing to do with us that’s fine we help in all directions we do these trainings for that same reason as well so if

there’s any help that you need becoming omnipresent if you want to be the dominant cleaning service this time next year this time two years from now in five or ten years you want to sell your business for half a million three quarters a million a million two million dollars and retire whatever that is if that’s you if you’re ready to take your business to that next step there’s a proven framework we just walked through it we talk about each one of these individually and in depth every single month this is the overarching framework of becoming the best known cleaner and becoming omnipresent and it is a mapped out framework it works repeatedly over and over and over again regardless of how technology is changing what AI is doing to us what the internet’s doing well on you know whether it’s online or offline omnipresence has a very specific path forward it’s very easy to model it’s easy to put in place one step at a time so if that’s something that you think you’re you’re interested in hit us up go to the schedule you’ll book a a time slot hopefully you found value in this training really look forward to seeing you guys next time thank you

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Carpet Cleaning Leads: Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies

Carpet Cleaning Leads: Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies

Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters

Carpet Cleaning Leads: Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies

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Inbound marketing aims to sow the seeds of trust and reputation among your target audience. By employing effective inbound marketing strategies, you can attract high-quality carpet cleaning leads and over time, reduce your reliance on advertising expenses.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to generate new business without spending a single penny on advertisements? Here’s how you can achieve that:

inbound marketing strategies for carpet cleaners

Understanding Inbound Marketing Strategies for Carpet Cleaning Services

Inbound marketing is a practical and organic approach to drive traffic and potential customers to your carpet cleaning business. While many marketing strategies aspire to achieve this goal, conventional outbound marketing relies on direct advertising to sell products or services.

In contrast, inbound marketing focuses on creating valuable content and messaging that builds trust with your audience. This trust encourages them to seek your services when they are ready to hire a carpet cleaning provider. Inbound marketing is often referred to as passive marketing or brand building, and it encompasses various channels such as websites and social media platforms. Here are some of the latest stats on why inbound marketing can be so effective.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing for Carpet Cleaning Lead Generation

Inbound marketing offers several advantages over outbound marketing:

  1. Cost-effectiveness: Inbound marketing is more affordable compared to traditional outbound marketing methods.
  2. Trust and authority: By consistently delivering valuable content, you can build trust and establish your carpet cleaning business as an authority in the industry.
  3. High-quality leads: Inbound marketing attracts leads who are genuinely interested in your carpet cleaning services, resulting in higher conversion rates.

Implementing inbound marketing strategies will help you generate repaint leads and foster long-term business growth and reputation in your local market. Think of inbound marketing as the “word-of-mouth” strategy on steroids. It’s recommended to utilize multiple inbound strategies, as discussed below, to maximize results.

Putting Inbound Marketing into Action

To better grasp the concept of inbound marketing, let’s draw an example from another industry:

Imagine you’re in the market for a new car. You extensively search the internet, looking for the perfect make, model, and year that align with your needs and budget. Amidst the flood of ads from various auto companies, none truly resonate with your requirements. However, while browsing your favorite environmental blog, you stumble upon an article discussing BMW’s new model, highlighting sustainable technology. Intrigued, you visit BMW’s website and ultimately make a purchase decision based on the information you found.

This hypothetical scenario exemplifies the power of public relations in an inbound marketing strategy. Instead of demanding your prospect’s attention through flashy ads, focus on creating valuable content that addresses their pain points.

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing for Carpet Cleaning

Outbound marketing relies on direct engagement to pitch products or services, such as online ads, cold calling, or direct mail marketing. While outbound marketing can be useful for new carpet cleaning companies or filling gaps in your schedule, there are more effective approaches for building a reliable, long-term lead generation strategy.

In contrast, inbound marketing caters to your prospects’ wants and needs by delivering content that directly or indirectly solves their problems. This very blog post you’re reading is an example of inbound marketing in action.

Now, let’s delve into the best inbound repaint lead generation strategies for your carpet cleaning business.

Inbound Marketing: Lead Generation Strategies for Carpet Cleaners

Developing a high-quality, well-optimized website for your carpet cleaning company is the most valuable investment you can make to enhance your inbound repaint lead generation. Creating a website that converts isn’t solely about the visual appeal but also involves optimizing for conversions and search engine visibility.

To ensure your carpet cleaning website is performing optimally, consider the following steps:

  1. Perform a thorough website scan: Identify and resolve any issues affecting your website’s organic rankings on search engines like Google.
  2. Utilize free tools: Take advantage of the free tools available to assist you in optimizing your website for search engines and conversions.

Organic Social Media Engagement

Social media platforms are valuable tools for inbound marketing and acquiring new carpet-cleaning leads. With billions of active users in the US and Canada alone, social networks provide an opportunity to build trust and credibility among those researching your business.

While organic social media posts (those that don’t require advertising) may have a limited reach, they can still contribute significantly to building trust with your audience. Each social media platform requires a different organic strategy, but the underlying goal remains the same—establishing trust and authority.

The best part is that developing an effective social media marketing strategy doesn’t require excessive effort. Consistent weekly or monthly posts on your social profiles can significantly impact you.

To develop a solid social media inbound marketing strategy specifically for your carpet cleaning business, check out the following training: The Ultimate Blueprint for Social Media Success for Carpet Cleaners

 

Online Reviews and Customer Testimonials

Before investing excessive time and energy in acquiring new customers, leverage the ones you have already served. Online reviews are vital in Google Local Search rankings and influence decision-making. Potential customers will likely obtain multiple estimates from your competitors, making positive reviews a competitive advantage.

Harness the power of social proof by encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews and testimonials for your carpet cleaning services. This can significantly enhance your reputation and attract new leads.

Guerrilla Marketing with Vehicle Graphics, Yard Signs, and More

Guerrilla marketing is a creative inbound marketing strategy that many carpet cleaning contractors often overlook due to a lack of confidence in its results. However, understanding how to implement these strategies and their underlying principles can yield a substantial return on investment.

A guerrilla marketing strategy can be as simple as placing a yard sign in front of the house you’re currently cleaning. This cost-effective approach can lead to significant wins with minimal effort.

To explore more than a DOZEN low-cost marketing strategies for generating new carpet cleaning leads, check out our comprehensive masterclass: Low-Cost Marketing Strategies For Carpet Cleaners

 

Focus on Inbound Marketing Strategies That Deliver Results

Whether you operate a small carpet cleaning business or a multimillion-dollar franchise, efficient scaling relies on data analysis. You need the right tools to track your inbound marketing campaigns to make informed decisions. Invest in software that monitors calls, tracks clicks and determines which campaigns yield the most closed jobs for your carpet cleaning business.

Access to this information will enable you to allocate your time and resources effectively.

Don’t Have Time to Develop an Inbound Marketing Strategy?

At Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters, we understand your challenges as a carpet cleaning business owner. That’s why we handle the heavy lifting so you can focus on what matters—growing your business.

With over 30 years of experience both operating multiple cleaning service businesses ourselves and working with cleaning businesses, we possess the expertise to secure your return on investment FAST. Unlike other agencies, we serve only cleaning companies, and know exactly how to ensure maximum results. Contact us today and discover how we can help scale your carpet cleaning business.

About the Author: As a business owner in the carpet cleaning and cleaning service industry for over 30 years as well as a marketing consultant and author, with well-over a decade of lead generation experience managing a results-driven marketing agency for Professional Carpet Cleaning and Residential Cleaning Companies, John Clendenning is wildly known as a leading Marketing Expert within the Professional Cleaning Industry.

More Carpet Cleaning Marketing Resources

Marketing for Carpet Cleaners: 7 Website Tips for 2023

Marketing for Carpet Cleaners: 7 Website Tips for 2023

Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters

Marketing for Carpet Cleaners: 7 Website Tips for 2023

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Is your carpet cleaning website ranking well on Google? Are you getting traffic but struggling to generate quality leads? It’s possible that your website is lacking essential components or not providing a great user experience, which can hinder lead generation in the competitive home cleaning service industry.

In this article, we will explore 7 crucial website elements your carpet cleaning business needs to convert online traffic into paying customers in 2023.

Let’s dive in!

Carpet Cleaning Website essentials

1. Assess Your Website Traffic

“Technical Warning: If marketing jargon confuses you, feel free to skip to our second recommendation.”

Before we delve into the elements necessary to convert traffic into high-quality leads, it’s important to understand your website’s target audience. It’s possible that your website is ranking well and attracting consistent traffic, but it might not be for the right search terms. To evaluate this, we will focus on two key performance indicators (KPIs): Traffic Source and Engagement Rate (formerly known as Bounce Rate).

Traffic Source

Why is it crucial to know which search terms are driving traffic to your carpet cleaning website?

Consider this scenario: Your website’s content is geared towards residential carpet cleaning services, but you might be ranking for a less competitive term, like commercial carpet cleaning. This means that most of your traffic is sourced from search terms that might not align with your target market.

So, how can you identify the source of your website traffic?

Google offers a free tool called Google Search Console, which provides insights into your organic search performance. For example, under the “Performance” tab, you can discover the search terms your website is ranking for (impressions) and which terms are driving the most traffic (clicks).

Note that this tool doesn’t provide historical data, so you can only analyze future traffic and search actions. Therefore, after setting up your domain in the search console, it’s recommended to wait at least 3 months to gather enough data for informed decision-making.

Engagement Rate

Now that we’ve identified the source of your organic traffic, it’s important to determine why these visitors aren’t converting into leads. The primary purpose of your website is to generate carpet cleaning leads, which usually involve a contact form or appointment booking application. If visitors aren’t engaging with these on-site elements, it can result in a low engagement rate.

First, ensure that you have Google Analytics installed on your website. Similar to Google Search Console, this tool reports on future traffic, so it might take a few months to gather sufficient data for actionable insights.

To find your engagement rate, expand the Acquisition tab and click on User Acquisition.

 

A healthy Engagement Rate in the carpet cleaning industry is 60% or above.

A low Engagement Rate could indicate that you’re targeting the wrong traffic or that your website has a poor user experience.

To identify which pages on your website contribute to a lower Engagement Rate, navigate to the Pages and Screens tab located under Engagement. Next, sort the Views column to display the page with the most views at the top of the list. Finally, filter the Event Count column by “user_engagement.” Since this metric is relative, compare the performance of your most visited page to the rest of your website.

If the most viewed page on your site has minimal engagement, continue reading for more actionable insights.

2. Include a Contact Form CTA on Every Page

To convert website visitors into carpet cleaning leads, it’s crucial to make it as easy as possible for customers to reach out. However, any friction in the process can lead to visitors bouncing off your website. Ideally, you should have a contact form in the sidebar or footer of every page on your website, but implementing this may require some technical skills.

As a simpler alternative, you can add a “Book a Free Quote” button at the bottom of every page. Make sure to color it in a vibrant and attention-grabbing hue, such as red, and link it to your contact page. This provides clear direction to your visitors and increases the likelihood of capturing their information.

Highlight Your Phone Number

3. Highlight Your Phone Number

Just as visitors may prefer contacting you online, some may prefer to pick up the phone and speak with you directly. Make it easy for them by prominently featuring your phone number in the header and footer of your website. Increase the font size and make it bold to ensure it catches their attention.

4. Implement a Live Chat Application

Expanding your points of contact is an effective way to convert website visitors into new carpet-cleaning leads. Live Chat features, such as Tawk, allow you to offer immediate assistance the moment someone lands on your website. Consider implementing a free chat application that enables you to monitor and respond to website visitors.

However, it’s important to note that you should ONLY utilize this feature if you or someone on your team can actively monitor the mobile app for new messages. A delayed response is one of the primary reasons potential carpet cleaning leads fail to convert into paying customers.

What we actually recommend is for businesses to utilize a Chat2TEXT feature that is integrated into a Lead Nurture and Messaging Automation CRM. This way when a lead starts a chat conversation on your website or landing pages, they instantly get an SMS message on their phone and your team gets alerted to hop into the conversation as soon as they can, but in the meantime, the lead is receiving warming messages and questions to keep them engaged and move them along the estimate and booking flow.
 

To learn more about Chat2TEXT and all the other amazing features in the most effective Lead Nurture CRM built for carpet cleaners and home cleaning services, check out CARPET CLEANER LEAD PRO – HERE

 

5. Consider Online Appointment Booking Applications

While some customers still prefer phone calls, it’s important to realize that the younger generations are learning to prefer contactless booking methods. Implementing a simple appointment booking application with automated reminders can make it easier for visitors to schedule a free “quote” and/or a convenient time for you to call them back to provide an estimate, directly while on your website without needing a call, message, or email.

Online booking apps can be highly effective in converting website visitors into carpet-cleaning leads if you understand their strengths and limitations. An example of a reliable application is Calendly, which integrates with your existing calendar to prevent double booking. It can be embedded directly on your website and automatically sends out appointment reminders, reducing cancellations.

There are also online book tools that can help a visitor directly book their cleaning appointment directly into your schedule. While this does sound very attractive and it would appear that this would cut down the need for customer service reps to take calls and book appointments, there are a few things to really consider before trying to fully automate this step of your sales and conversion funnel.

Oftentimes, unless you are positioned as one of the lower-priced, discount service providers in your local marketplace, being able to explain the type of service you provide, the guarantees you offer, and how your company differentiates itself from the low-priced, bait-n-switch providers, is critical to being able to convert more of your inbound leads into booked jobs. While your repeat clients who already know about your services and pricing may find it a convenience to grab a spot in your schedule by themselves, a new lead could easily decide they can get what they perceive as “the same services” elsewhere for cheaper, without having the right context to make an informed decision.

Another common issue with self-booking tools to consider is that you may end up with jobs scheduled on your routes that are at opposite ends of your service area, whereas with the help of a live customer service rep, the customer could have been ok in taking a different day and time that would allow you to maximize your routes.

6. Integrate Website Forms with Email Marketing

Automation can significantly reduce your workload while ensuring consistent communication with potential customers. Leverage a free email marketing provider like MailChimp to create contact forms directly within the platform and embed them on your website. Whenever a visitor submits the form, you will receive a notification, and they will be automatically added to your mailing list. The great thing about MailChimp is that it integrates with appointment booking apps like Calendly, allowing you to capture new appointments as well.

For optimal results, consider creating two email lists:

  • Leads: Add anyone who submits a form, books an appointment, or leaves their email address to this list. Nurture these leads with monthly promotions and relevant content.
  • Customers: Utilize your past customers as a referral source by offering incentives like a monetary reward for each referral or a discount on their next service. Use these emails to request reviews by including a link to your Google Business Profile.

Showcase Your Testimonials

7. Showcase Testimonials and Social Proof on Your Website

Building your online reputation is crucial for attracting potential customers. Therefore, your carpet cleaning website should feature real testimonials and social proof. Testimonials, especially those accompanied by photos of satisfied customers, create a strong connection between the services you provide and your ability to deliver exceptional results. Authentic testimonials and reviews with real stories about how your carpet cleaning services have made a positive impact will establish trust and credibility with potential customers.

 

Testimonials and Reviews

Most customers will leave reviews on your Google Business Profile or on social media platforms. However, if you receive positive feedback over the phone or through email, consider showcasing those testimonials on your homepage or in the footer of your website. Including before/after images with the testimonials can further enhance trust and credibility.

 

Social Proof

For the majority of customers who leave reviews on Google or social media, you can leverage free review embedding tools or plugins to display those reviews directly on your website. One effective plugin for WordPress is “Widget for Google Reviews.” It allows you to showcase your Google reviews and ratings, providing social proof to visitors on your website.

 

Conclusion

By implementing these 7 website tips for your carpet cleaning business, you can optimize your online presence, increase lead generation, and convert more visitors into paying customers. Remember to regularly monitor your website’s performance using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to make data-driven decisions and continuously improve your website’s effectiveness.

In summary, the key website elements to focus on for marketing your carpet cleaning business in 2023 include reviewing your website traffic sources, improving engagement rates, incorporating contact forms or “Book a Free Quote” buttons on every page, prominently featuring your phone number, implementing a chat application, utilizing an online quote and estimate booking system, integrating website forms with email marketing, and showcasing testimonials and social proof. Following these tips can enhance your website’s conversion potential and drive more business for your carpet cleaning services.

About the Author: As a business owner in the carpet cleaning and cleaning service industry for over 30 years as well as a marketing consultant and author, with well-over a decade of lead generation experience managing a results-driven marketing agency for Professional Carpet Cleaning and Residential Cleaning Companies, John Clendenning is wildly known as a leading Marketing Expert within the Professional Cleaning Industry.

More Carpet Cleaning Marketing Resources

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads for Carpet Cleaners: Generating Quality Leads

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads for Carpet Cleaners: Generating Quality Leads

Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters

The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads for Carpet Cleaners: Generating Quality Leads

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Unlock the Power of Facebook Ads for Your Carpet Cleaning Business

Every successful carpet cleaning business owner understands the importance of attracting new leads and generating new business. Paid advertising, particularly on social media platforms like Facebook, offers a fantastic opportunity to reach potential customers quickly and effectively.

However, what do you do when your ads, which were once generating a steady stream of carpet cleaning leads, suddenly stop producing results? If you rely on these lead channels, it can be stressful and concerning when the flow of leads dries up.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll reveal the secrets to leveraging Facebook Ads specifically for carpet cleaners. We’ll show you how to create a high-volume lead generation system tailored to the carpet cleaning industry using social media advertising.

So, let’s dive in and explore the world of Facebook Ads for carpet cleaners!

 

Can Facebook Ads Generate Leads for Carpet Cleaners?

Instagram and Facebook Ads For Carpet Cleaners

Absolutely! However, achieving success with Facebook Ads for carpet cleaners requires a strategic approach and a solid understanding of the platform. The types of ads you choose, the content you create, and the visuals you use will significantly impact the performance of your campaigns on social media.

Now, let’s delve deeper into the realm of social media marketing and explore the fundamentals of Facebook Ads for carpet cleaners.

 

Understanding Facebook Ads for Carpet Cleaners

According to Statista, Facebook remains the leading social media network with approximately 2.93 billion active users every month. It’s a platform that attracts users of all ages, making it an excellent choice for reaching homeowners in need of carpet cleaning services.

While Facebook caters to a wide age range from 18 to 65+, Instagram, which is also owned by Meta (formerly Facebook), primarily appeals to users aged 18 to 34. Both platforms offer opportunities to target homeowners, with Instagram being particularly effective in reaching first-time home buyers.

As a carpet cleaning service provider, you hopefully have a clear understanding of your ideal customer profile (ICP). It’s crucial to identify the characteristics shared by your most valuable customers and create a persona around these demographics

Let’s explore how this knowledge can be put into action.

 

Harnessing the Power of Facebook Ads for Carpet Cleaners

Since the majority of Facebook and Instagram users are not actively seeking carpet cleaning services, it’s essential to employ creative strategies to capture buyer intent effectively.

“Buyer Intent (or Purchase Intent): The probability of how close a consumer is to completing a purchase of a product or service.”

Unlike paid search ads on platforms like Google Ads, where users actively search for specific services, Facebook Ads rely on user data to target potential customers. Facebook’s algorithm leverages this data and social interactions to serve relevant ads, making it an incredibly powerful tool for generating residential carpet cleaning leads on a budget.

However, it’s important to note that commercial carpet cleaning leads are better acquired through platforms like Google Ads.

 

Determining the Cost of Carpet Cleaning Leads on Social Media

The cost of carpet cleaning leads on social media can vary, but a good target range is between $15 to $30 per lead. To achieve optimal results, we recommend setting a daily budget between $25 to $40, which amounts to approximately $750 to $1200 per month.

The cost-per-click (CPC) is a critical factor that influences your cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Several factors can impact your CPC, including:

  • Target Audience Size: The larger your target service area, the more cost-effective your leads are likely to be.
  • Competition: Saturated markets generally have higher CPC rates.
  • Targeted Services: Specialized services such as deep stain removal may have a lower conversion rate compared to standard carpet cleaning projects.

 

Comparing Facebook Ads and Google Ads for Carpet Cleaners

As a carpet cleaning business owner, you may wonder whether to focus your advertising budget on Facebook Ads or Google Ads. Both platforms have their advantages and considerations. Let’s explore the pros and cons of each:

 

Facebook Ads: Pros and Cons

Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, provide excellent platforms for generating residential carpet cleaning leads at a low cost. The average CPC for a carpet cleaning lead on social media can be as low as $1, compared to $12 on Google Ads, making it an attractive option for exclusive leads at a lower cost.

One drawback of Facebook Ads is the time required to convert a lead. Unlike Google Ads, which directs traffic to a landing page for immediate conversions, it’s best to keep users within the Meta platform to maintain a low cost per lead (CPL). Currently, there is no direct way to book an appointment or estimate on Facebook or Instagram, so outreach is necessary to convert leads generated through these platforms.

Moreover, since there are no specific search queries to target on social media, you’ll need to build custom audiences over time, which can take approximately 30-60 days.

Given the lower buyer intent on social media, a healthy close ratio for carpet cleaning leads on Facebook Ads typically range between 20-45% …but we do have some clients crushing it consistently at a +60% closing rate!

 

Google Ads: Pros and Cons

On the other hand, Google Ads, particularly with a well-optimized landing page, offers high-quality leads but at a higher price point. The cost per booked a cleaning visit using Google Ads can range between $70 to $120. However, since you can skip the outreach step required by social ads, the higher cost may be worth it, considering the value of your time.

Google Ads also excels in generating commercial carpet cleaning leads as business-to-business (B2B) leads are generally harder to acquire through social media.

With targeted search queries, Google Ads demonstrate higher buyer intent, resulting in a healthy close ratio that can range between 40-60%.

 

Building a Successful Facebook Ads Campaign for Carpet Cleaners

Now that we’ve covered why and how social media ads work, let’s discuss the steps to build a successful campaign to attract new carpet-cleaning leads through Facebook and Instagram.

 

1. Create and Optimize Your Business Profiles

If you haven’t done so already, create Facebook and Instagram profiles for your carpet cleaning business.

  • Ensure consistency by using the same name for your Facebook Page and Instagram username.
  • Fill in all relevant information, including service areas, website, and contact details, to provide a comprehensive profile.
  • Link your Instagram account to your Facebook Page. This will ensure that anytime you post to Instagram your Facebook Page will be updated as well (two birds, one stone).

 

2. Set Up Business Manager and Ads Manager Accounts

To start advertising on Meta platforms, you’ll need to create two additional accounts:

  • Business Manager Account: This should be linked to your Facebook Page and Instagram accounts.
  • Ads Manager Account: Connect this account to your Business Manager account.

 

3. Create Engaging Facebook and Instagram Ads

With the foundational accounts in place, it’s time to focus on creating compelling ads. Meta offers various ad types, but it’s best to keep users within the platform to maximize results.

Consider using the following ad types:

  • Lead Ads: Collect user information directly on Facebook and Instagram using custom forms. Capture essential details such as name, phone number, address, and services of interest.
  • Messenger Ads: These ads trigger a new message request on Facebook, allowing for direct communication. This format is effective for job recruiting as well.

Pro Tip: Ads featuring images of human faces tend to have higher conversion rates compared to images of objects.”

 

4. Build Custom Audiences

During the ad creation process, you’ll be prompted to define your target audience. Building custom audiences is a crucial step in creating a successful advertising campaign that can be refined over time. Consider the following audience types on Meta platforms:

  • Demographics: Target specific information such as location, age, and gender.
  • Custom Audience: Create an audience based on user interactions with your website or business.
  • Lookalike Audience: Build an audience similar to those who have engaged with your business in the past.

For Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences, consider targeting the following sources:

  • Website: Add a pixel to your website to retarget website visitors on Facebook and Instagram.
  • Customer list: Create an audience from a list of your past customers.
  • Video: Run a “Video View” campaign to build an audience of users who have watched your videos.
  • Lead form: Generate an audience from users who have submitted lead generation forms.
  • Instagram account: Target users who have liked and interacted with your Instagram profile.
  • Facebook page: Target users who have liked and engaged with your Facebook Business Page.

When it comes to demographics, the following targeting options often yield good results:

  • Location: Target your service areas within a 20-mile radius.
  • Age: Focus on the age range of 25-65+.
  • Gender: Consider targeting women, as they tend to engage more with social media ads.

 

5. Monitor and Optimize Your Campaigns

While anyone can create and manage a social media advertising campaign with enough time and resources, successful campaigns often come from experience and continuous optimization. If you’re new to advertising, closely monitor your campaigns, especially during the initial 30 days or 30 conversions.

Once your ads are optimized, check in at least once a week to ensure that your cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-lead (CPL) align with your budget and desired margins. Make adjustments as needed to improve performance.

 

Consider Hiring a Professional

Implementing the strategies outlined in this guide can yield positive results for your carpet cleaning business. However, it’s important to acknowledge that these tasks require time, energy, and expertise.

If you find yourself lacking the resources or knowledge to manage a successful social media advertising campaign, consider hiring a professional digital marketing agency that specializes in working with carpet cleaning businesses. Agencies like Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters can help set up and optimize your social ads, allowing you to focus on your core business activities.

In conclusion, Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads offer cost-effective ways to generate residential carpet cleaning leads. By understanding the platforms, creating engaging ads, targeting the right audience, and continuously optimizing your campaigns, you can attract new customers and grow your carpet cleaning business effectively.

About the Author: As a business owner in the carpet cleaning and cleaning service industry for over 30 years as well as a marketing consultant and author, with well-over a decade of lead generation experience managing a results-driven marketing agency for Professional Carpet Cleaning and Residential Cleaning Companies, John Clendenning is wildly known as a leading Marketing Expert within the Professional Cleaning Industry.

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Our Ads Stopped Generating Carpet Cleaning Leads, Now What?

Our Ads Stopped Generating Carpet Cleaning Leads, Now What?

Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters

Our Ads Stopped Generating Carpet Cleaning Leads, Now What?

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Oh Crap! Our Carpet Cleaning Ads Are No Longer Bringing in Leads

Every savvy Carpet Cleaning Business owner understands the power of paid ads in attracting new leads and driving business growth, all without the long wait associated with traditional marketing strategies.

After all, who wouldn’t want to be at the right place, at the right time, with the right message?

Paid ads can be a game-changer when they work seamlessly… but what if the ads that used to generate a steady stream of carpet cleaning leads suddenly hit a roadblock?

If you’ve been advertising your carpet cleaning business online for some time, chances are you’ve encountered this situation. And if your lead generation heavily relies on these channels, the sudden halt in lead flow can be quite nerve-wracking.

So where do we start?

 

We do not live in a static world…

Whether you’re advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or some other platform, the only real constant is that things rarely stay the same.

“Algorithms, policies, and best practices are guaranteed to change, so what worked yesterday may not work today.”

Digital advertising leaves you at the mercy of the platform to a certain extent, but there are factors you can control that may give you clues as to why your ads have stopped producing carpet cleaning leads.

Let’s dive into some key questions you need to ask to help narrow down the reasons why your ads have stopped producing leads like they used to.

 

Have you made any changes to your ad campaigns?

It’s common to want to change up the wording in your ads, even if they’ve been producing quality leads. After all, marketing is all about testing and tweaking to help improve your margins, and one of the easiest things to change is the wording in your ads.

“Ad campaign changes generally require at least a month to acquire enough data to determine if that change was positive or negative.”

 

Why does it take so long?

Because we’re relying on an algorithm to determine where your ads fit within their platform.

If you’ve made a change and it’s been less than a month, it’s best to wait a full 30 days to get a clearer picture of the effect your change has had on your ad’s performance.

 

Is it recommended that you make changes at all?

If you do decide to make changes to your ads, it’s best to run an A/B Test (also known as a “split test”) rather than changing what worked in the past.

Why?

Because there could be other underlying issues at play, and having a backup to test against provides you with the ability to revert if needed.

 

What changes should you test?

Your ads should be as engaging as possible and speak directly to your target audience. For best results, test your ad campaigns using the following components:

  • Headings
  • Ad Copy
  • Ad Creative/Images
  • Target Keywords
  • Target Audience

In most cases, those that see your ads are likely already looking for the carpet cleaning services you provide, so don’t over-complicate this. Your ads should be about them, and not about your business.

But what if you haven’t changed your ads but noticed a drop in carpet cleaning leads?

Keep reading…

 

Have impressions dropped?

Running ads online is simply a numbers game. If you show your message to a large targeted audience, it should produce results.

When the bottom of your marketing funnel (carpet cleaning leads) slows down, we should start by evaluating the top of your funnel (impressions).

 

Let’s break this down further…

In order to get a new carpet cleaning lead from online ads, you need a lot of impressions/eyes to see those ads.

If your ad impressions have noticeably dropped, it is likely impacting your lead flow.

So why would impressions drop?

We have ordered these potential issues from most likely to least likely:

  • New competition can impact your ability to reach the same number of eyes at your previous budget. If you notice your CPL (cost-per-lead) going up, that could be an indication that you have new competition online.
  • Seasonal changes can impact search volume and buyer intent. These changes tend to affect the carpet cleaning industry hardest between the spring and fall seasons.
  • Algorithm updates on advertising platforms occur EVERY DAY and they can directly impact campaign performance. These changes are typically posted as documentation in the platform’s release notes.
  • Platform or campaign bugs can occur without warning. We recommend contacting your advertising channel’s support to determine if this is an issue.
  • Market shifts such as high inflation or an economic downturn can impact buyer intent. Ask other carpet cleaning companies in your local market if they are experiencing the same downturn.

If others in your local market are not experiencing issues acquiring leads online, but your impressions have dropped, you may be the victim of an algorithm change on your advertising channel.

“Every platform offers several different ad types. Take Google as an example: They offer Search Ads, Display Ads, and Video Ads, just to name a few.”

To complicate things further, these advertising platforms constantly test and add new ad types all the time.

If this is the case, you may need to adjust your advertising strategy to fit a new ad type that the platform may be pushing without your knowledge.

But what if your impressions look consistent month-over-month?

It’s time to dive further down your marketing funnel…

 

Has your CTR (click-through rate) dropped?

When it comes to running ads online, clicks are the name of the game.

In comparison, impressions are just a vanity number as without clicks, you will have no conversions (leads).

 

How do we measure this?

We use a measurable KPI called click-through rate, otherwise known as CTR.

So if your impressions are consistent, what could impact your CTR?

These potential issues have been ordered from most likely to least likely:

  • Seasonal changes can impact search volume and buyer intent. These changes tend to affect the carpet cleaning industry hardest between the spring and fall seasons.
  • Algorithm updates on advertising platforms occur EVERY DAY and they can directly impact campaign performance. These changes are typically posted as documentation in the platform’s release notes.
  • Market shifts such as high inflation or an economic downturn can impact buyer intent. Ask other carpet cleaning companies in your local market if they are experiencing the same downturn.
  • Platform or campaign bugs can occur without warning. We recommend contacting your advertising channel’s support to determine if this is an issue.
  • New competition can impact your ability to reach the same number of eyes at your previous budget. If you notice your CPL (cost-per-lead) going up, that could be an indication that you have new competition online.

Ok, but what if your impressions and CTR appear to be consistent?

It’s time to investigate your cost-per-click…

 

Has your CPC (cost-per-click) gone up?

Let’s propose this scenario: Your impressions and CTR appear to be consistent, it’s early Spring, and no one else in your market is having issues acquiring new business… so now what?

We have one final KPI to evaluate — Your cost-per-click, otherwise known as CPC.

“Your CPC is impacted by supply (target audience size) and demand (competition).”

If you notice the amount you’re paying for clicks has suddenly gone up, new competition has likely entered your local market, or an algorithm change could be to blame.

If new carpet cleaning companies enter the marketplace with a higher bid strategy, your CPC for the same target audience will rise.

If this happens to you, you may want to consider raising your advertising budget or simply pivot your strategy to target a different segment of the market.

 

What is the Blue Ocean Strategy?

In terms of marketing, the Blue Ocean Strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing an uncontested market space, thereby making your competition irrelevant.

Source: https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-strategy/

 

How would you implement a Blue Ocean Strategy?

Instead of targeting the general “carpet cleaning” market, which every other carpet cleaning company is after, you may consider targeting a smaller niche or changing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) altogether.

“In other words, identify a less competitive market and allocate your advertising budget there.”

Seasonal changes can also impact your CPC, as your target audience size may shrink during certain times of the year.

We have ordered the most likely scenarios that can impact CPC below:

  • New competition can impact your ability to reach the same number of eyes at your previous budget. If you notice your CPL (cost-per-lead) going up, that could be an indication that you have new competition online.
  • Algorithm updates on advertising platforms occur EVERY DAY and they can directly impact campaign performance. These changes are typically posted as documentation in the platform’s release notes.
  • Seasonal changes can impact search volume and buyer intent. These changes tend to affect the carpet cleaning industry hardest between the spring and fall seasons.
  • Platform or campaign bugs can occur without warning. We recommend contacting your advertising channel’s support to determine if this is an issue.
  • Market shifts such as high inflation or an economic downturn can impact buyer intent. Ask other carpet cleaning companies in your local market if they are experiencing the same downturn.

If you have evaluated all these possibilities and are still unsure about the reasons behind your drop in leads, it may be time to seek help from experts.

 

Contact Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters to Fix Your Ad Campaigns

If you notice a drop in carpet cleaning leads from your ad campaigns, it’s important not to panic. Solving these issues alone may not always produce the desired results. In such cases, we recommend scheduling a free strategy call with our ad campaign experts at Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters.

Our team has extensive experience in digital advertising and can help analyze your campaigns, identify the underlying issues, and provide effective solutions to get your lead generation back on track.

Don’t let a temporary setback discourage you. With the right expertise and strategies, you can regain the effectiveness of your ads and continue generating valuable leads for your carpet cleaning business.

Remember, advertising is a dynamic field, and staying informed and adapting to changes is key to success.

About the Author: As a business owner in the carpet cleaning and cleaning service industry for over 30 years as well as a marketing consultant and author, with well-over a decade of lead generation experience managing a results-driven marketing agency for Professional Carpet Cleaning and Residential Cleaning Companies, John Clendenning is wildly known as a leading Marketing Expert within the Professional Cleaning Industry.

More Carpet Cleaning Marketing Resources

Why Email Marketing is Important for Your Carpet Cleaning Business

Why Email Marketing is Important for Your Carpet Cleaning Business

Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters

Why Email Marketing is Important for Your Carpet Cleaning Business

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As a carpet cleaning service provider, email marketing might not be a priority in your mind, but it is important to understand that it has the highest ROI of all digital marketing mediums. With an average ROI of 42:1 (that’s 4200%), there is no reason why your carpet cleaning business shouldn’t invest time in this marketing strategy.
(Source: Litmus)

In this article, we will discuss the benefits of outbound email marketing, what kind of results you should expect as a carpet cleaning business owner, and the steps you need to take to set up your first email marketing campaign.

First, let’s start with a simple question…

 

How do carpet cleaning service providers get clients?

Carpet cleaning service providers primarily use two methods to get clients, inbound and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing refers to advertising and content marketing, anything that gets customers coming to you. Outbound marketing is any method of proactively reaching out to prospects, such as email marketing and cold calling.

Inbound marketing has its place, but it can be time-consuming and expensive. In comparison, outbound marketing is less sexy, but the return on investment can be huge.

 

Why email marketing?

Email marketing is a perfect way to reach out to your customers as it is less invasive than phone calls or text messages, it’s easy to set up and profitable.

 

 

What results does email marketing produce?

On average, we see a 2% conversion rate (closed jobs) for email marketing campaigns we run for other carpet cleaning service providers. For best results, we recommend a mailing list of at least 100 contacts.

Here’s what that looks like in the real world: Let’s say your primary lead source is a contact form on your website, and you receive around 50 submissions a month. In just two short months, you have built a sustainable mailing list. Most email marketing providers are free for the first 1000 monthly emails/contacts. So, to get started, you’re just looking at a time investment, a few hours at most.

Where do you start?

 

How to get started with email marketing

 

 

Before you can start sending emails, you need to build a mailing list. For those who want to DIY it, we recommend using MailChimp for its easy-to-use interface, and at the time of writing this article, they have a free plan that allows you to send 10,000 emails/month.

If you are looking for a more sophisticated lead nurture automation that combines everything from emails to text messages, voicemail, and live outreach reminders etc. then we suggest you check out our preferred tool, Carpet Cleaner Lead Pro

 

Start by building your email list

Most carpet cleaning service providers do not have an active emailing list. This makes sense given that email marketing is an underutilized channel in the industry. Fortunately capturing emails is easy, but it can take time.

Let’s review the two primary methods of capturing new contacts:

 

First-party contacts

Any contacts you capture yourself are considered a first-party contact. These are the best leads as they have established buyer intent by providing their contact information, they are familiar with your business, and they are exclusive to you.

The best way to obtain these leads is by utilizing the tools at your disposal — your website.

Whether you go with a service like MailChimp or a full lead automation solution, this step is pretty easy. Simply create a contact form on the platform and embed it on your website. The contact form will function as any other contact form would, but it will automatically add contacts to your new lead mailing list at the same time.

 

Third-party contacts

While we recommend against blatant “cold outreach”, the fact is you can use data aggregators to quickly build a mailing list. This option expedites the process, but you’re purchasing leads that others in your industry have likely tapped into as well. Also, since these contacts are cold, they’re completely unaware of your business so you can expect conversion rates to be a lot lower.

For residential leads, we have found success with services like Leads Please. Simply target new homeowners and define our relevant demographics, and typically for under $100 we can have a new list of 250+ qualified contacts, which is more than enough to get started on a new email campaign!

For commercial leads, we recommend Coldlytics. They have extremely targeted lists, fast turnaround times, and they even verify email addresses before delivery.

 

Create your email template

When it comes to email marketing in the carpet cleaning industry, it’s important to create an email template that reflects your brand’s logo, your Compelling Sales Proposition (i.e. slogan), and color scheme. Keeping it clean and simple is the key to success.

Your email template should consist of a header, body, and footer. The header and footer can remain the same for all your emails, while the body can be customized for each campaign you run. This way, you can save time and focus on the content of your message.

 

 

Personalize your emails using separate campaigns

For carpet cleaning service providers, it’s recommended to have at minimum, two separate email campaigns: one for leads/prospects and one for past customers.

Personalization is the key to effective email marketing. However, it can be difficult to personalize an email without knowing the recipient’s first name. To solve this, you can segment your contacts into categories and tailor your message according to their interests.

By segmenting your contacts, you can send targeted emails that will encourage opens and clicks. This will increase your chances of converting leads into customers and retaining your existing ones.

 

Bucket #1: Leads and prospects

This one is obvious, simply create a campaign that triggers each month with information on the uniqueness of your company, highlights of recent projects along with a promotion or incentive. Tailor your promotions to the season or current events, for example, you could offer a bundle and save discount on carpet and upholstery cleaning services during the spring cleaning season. Other examples include:

  • Introductory offers for specific services
  • Free in-home soil and wear assessment and quotation
  • Pet stain and odor consultation

 

Bucket #2: Past customers

Your past customers are your most valuable resource. These contacts have already experienced the quality of your work and are more likely to hire you again. A personalized email campaign targeting past customers is a great way to stay top-of-mind.

We recommend sending a personalized thank you email immediately after the job is complete. This email should contain a request for feedback in a survey along with a link to review your business on Google etc. The next day, follow up with another email asking the customer to refer you to friends and family. This sequence can be automated so you don’t have to worry about manually sending emails.

Other reasons to email include:

  • Happy Birthday emails are a great way to stay in touch
  • New service offerings — customers love being “in the know”
  • Project stories from other recent customers
  • Care tips for around the home
  • Complementary service offerings, such as a free XYZ with any project over $XXX dollars
  • Free spotting touch-up at 3 or 6 month

 

How to Ensure Your Carpet Cleaning Emails Don’t Land in the SPAM Folder

Email warmup is a crucial step in avoiding the dreaded SPAM folder when sending marketing emails to your carpet cleaning leads and customers. To achieve this, it’s recommended that you send your emails slowly at first to ensure they reach the recipient’s inbox and not their SPAM folder. There are several factors that contribute to inbox placement, including:

  • the age of your domain name,
  • the frequency of your emails,
  • and the quality of your mailing list.

If you’ve recently purchased a domain name, you may have trouble reaching inboxes at scale for the first 6-12 months. Most email providers, such as Gmail and Outlook, use domain age as a weighted factor when determining which emails are automatically marked as SPAM. Additionally, how often you send emails will determine how likely your emails will land in a junk mail folder. It’s recommended that you send no more than once a week, but at least once a month, especially in the beginning. Consistency is key!

Another factor that can contribute to your emails being marked as SPAM is the quality of your mailing list. You may have been provided a fake email or the address could have been mistyped. Sending to bad email addresses can result in the blacklisting of your domain.

To mitigate this, you can upload your email list to a service like NeverBounce. These types of services check to confirm which emails are valid and which are unreachable.

 

Send at the right time for best results

When it comes to the best time of day or the best day of the week to send emails for optimal engagement, there are several schools of thought. For carpet cleaning service providers, it’s best to avoid sending emails on busy days such as Monday mornings or Friday afternoons. For best results, send mid-week on Wednesday or Thursday first thing in the morning.

By following these best practices for email warm up, you can ensure your carpet cleaning emails reach your leads and customers’ inboxes and avoid being marked as SPAM.

 

Track your results

Once you’ve sent your first email campaigns, it’s important to track your results. Most mailing and list management tools have built-in analytics that provides valuable insights into your email campaign’s performance. Use this data to refine your campaigns and improve your results.

You measure the success of your email marketing efforts using the following metrics:

  • Delivery rates are a measure the quality of your domain (see How to avoid the dreaded SPAM folder above).
  • Bounce rates can be used to determine the quality of your mailing list.
  • Unsubscribe rates can be used to determine if you’re sending emails too often.
  • Open rates are a measure of your subject line. More opens = a captivating subject line.
  • Click-through rates are used to determine the effectiveness of your email content.
  • Conversions to determine the overall effectiveness of your campaigns or emails. This is typically measured in calls, email replies, and booked estimates.

 

Conclusion

Email marketing is a powerful tool for carpet cleaning service providers. It’s easy to set up, cost-effective, and has a high ROI. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can build a sustainable email list that generates new business each month. Remember to personalize your emails and track your results to refine your campaigns over time. With a little effort, you can take advantage of this underutilized marketing channel and grow your carpet cleaning business.

About the Author: As a business owner in the carpet cleaning and cleaning service industry for over 30 years as well as a marketing consultant and author, with well-over a decade of lead generation experience managing a results-driven marketing agency for Professional Carpet Cleaning and Residential Cleaning Companies, John Clendenning is wildly known as a leading Marketing Expert within the Professional Cleaning Industry.

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