Marketing Cheat Sheets 5 - The Carpet Cleaning College

Work on your branding – does all your promotional items look and feel the same? Do they all carry the same colours and message? Get all your marketing material, incl website, looking and feeling the same, carrying the same message and with the same “feel.”
Salespeople – do you want to look at employing commission based sales people? If you decide this may be for you, just ensure the marketing message is consistent with your values as a company. Write the sales scripts yourself, or at least vet them to ensure your salespeople are on message with your brand.
Competitions / Surveys – find out what your customers really think of you and see what more you can do to help them / sell more to them.
Strategic Alliances (strongly recommended to develop quickly!) – which other businesses target the same market as you? Who could you join with to promote each other? Networking events are great to meet other business owners and form friendships.
Fetes and Shows – get involved in your local community activities
Fundraising / charity campaigns – why not adopt a “charity of the year” and do work for low price for that charity for a year. Whilst on the job you will have a lot of people around you who are very grateful for your support and you will likely get a shed load of work from the employees and their friends and family too.
Talk to suppliers to see what add ons you can sell – your suppliers and training providers are a gold mine to find out advances in carpet cleaning and other goods or services you can offer.
Trade Longer / Different Hours – if you are happy to work weekends and evenings, advertise it. Tell everyone the hours you will work or they will assume you do just 9-5 like most people. Are you missing out on business just because of people’s assumptions?
Open franchises – is your business profitable? Have you got a good sales and marketing system going that ensure a steady flow of customers? Are your sales figures super hot? Then maybe you can replicate that success by taking on a franchisee.
Test and Measure advertising results – Do you test and measure the ROI from all your advertising spend? When was the last time you did this? Ensure every single penny, cent or dime you spend on marketing works hard for you. Don’t waste your valuable time or money advertising where it’s not working.
Provide Team Selling Incentives – Work out your costs and figure out what bonuses you can offer your selling staff for good results.
Referral Systems – put together a SOLID REFERRAL SYSTEM and promote it in every newsletter. Referrals offer the best ROI of any type of marketing, so get a great referrals system in place, implement it and stick to it.
Fax Sales – B2B – many businesses still use fax machine so may be worth a go?
Free products upgrades to gain more loyalty – to create raving fans from your best customers have a think about what more you can do to keep them sweet. If you run a level based pricing system could you automatically upgrade them to the next level, or maybe give them a years free stain removal priority service.
Loyalty schemes – Consider having a stamp card system and stamp the card every time they use you. Say pay for 5 cleans then get the 6th free. Work at making it different from the millions of other schemes out there as this is now quite over-used.