What a life… the world sucks all around you, you hate your boss, so you decide to start your own carpet cleaning company. Good for YOU! Go out on the limb – that’s where God put the fruit. You look into what it costs for the equipment, chemicals, pricing, insurance and all those things that will be the foundation of your new carpet cleaning company. You start by cleaning those jobs of the people that you know, collect a little money and go get a beer. Sweet – You’re in Business!
Know your Audiences Day!
All of the sudden you get this gut wrenching feeling in your stomach as you ponder how you are going to feed the kids – Damn I forgot to Market! Marketing is just as vital as the hose that sucks the water from your potential client’s carpet. I would argue more important. You don’t need the hose if there is NO ONE to hose. You’re the only one getting hosed – and it doesn’t feel good.
There are many forms of marketing for the small service provider today. Learn the Art and Science of Referrals, coupon books, direct mail, and boat loads more. Oh yeah – and then there is the Internet. Everyone says that it is the future, but man is it hard to figure out. You don’t have the time, energy or maybe even skills to learn what you need to know about making this medium work for you. Here’s a thought – Make the time or find the money to pay someone to do it. Having a website is worthless if you don’t tell people. You might as well take a piece of paper and write down what you do, and tape it to your friends computer screen. It’s like a brochure if you don’t make it interactive. We live in a Me Now, You later, On My time World. Marketing must be available when people want it and how they want it, and more and more it must be in real-time. People don’t want to play communications tag with you; they have lives to get back to. In their eyes – if you aren’t there, someone will be! Don’t kid yourself experienced reader of carpet cleaning – TIME TRUMPS LOYALTY.
The best advice that this blogger can give you is to have a marketing strategy that leads with the online market. People are going there in droves looking for local providers. Be There – Be Prominent – Be Available. Streamline the process of communicating with prospects if you expect to make them clients.
Remember that you aren’t really in business if you have nowhere to go or aren’t profitable. You have to market, market, market, market, market… you get the idea. Remember “failure is not an option – it’s usually a result” – of forgetting to market.
Whew – I’m done. To see what we at BusinessBridge have done to help you differentiate yourself with your competition by building you a real-time online scheduling tool so you can market 24/7, click the link below and let us know if we can help.
Steve Mastio
President
BusinessBridge – maker of “FittleBug”
Dallas Caldwell of Environmental Management located in Tucson Arizona recently became a FittleBug Real-Time Scheduling client of BusinessBridge. I had an opportunity to fly out of the cold Chicagoland snow to the Tucson area, so guess what I did? In the words of the actress Sissy Spacek in the movie “Coal Miners Daughter” – I may be stupid, but I ain’t ignorant! I took that flight.
