How to market a Carpet Cleaning Business?
How do you ensure the success of your small-scale carpet cleaning business? How will it fair with its competitors? Under the premise of taking all things as equals, what is the slightest edge that will tilt victory in your favor?
Carpet cleaning has evolved from one of those homemakers’ tales of housekeeping woes to a billion dollar enterprise. Competition is keen – some carpet cleaning companies will shoot up and fizzle just as fast. Others take forever to grow while a few seem undaunted by the challenge –they do not only succeed, they linger on top.
Most business feasibility studies revealed that marketing has defined the staying power or longevity of any business undertaking. As various resources form the foundation of your business, such as equipments, labor, capital and raw materials, marketing sets up “wings” that fly your business from obscurity to fame.
But how will you start the ball rolling?
Through the potent force of marketing, which includes selling, your business will flourish. No business has withstood time and competition without the tested principles of getting the message across, that a typeof product or service is available, to address a want or a need. Failure to convey this message effectivelywill reduce the chance of any business to stay on the fickle line of survival.
But marketing can be costly. Indeed, it is. The medium through which your marketing efforts will flow, dictates the cost of marketing that you will bear, with the results not in direct proportion to the cost, sometimes.
Here are a few marketing strategies you may observe, to blast your carpet cleaning business – at minimum budget.
Sell yourself. Before you can convince others to patronize your product or service, you have to convince them to trust you. Selling yourself is more difficult actually, than selling a product or service, but oncesubdued, all other selling challenges become halfway won.
Learn everything you can about selling your ideas. Keep abreast with the latest selling techniques that work. You are your company’s first and foremost sales agent. Your success as a sales person will guarantee the success of your carpet cleaning service.
Identify your niche and build your business upon it. Who are your customers? Of course, everyone who has a carpet! Yet, at the initial stage of your business, you cannot be “all things to all people”. You need to identify your market, or find your niche. Concentrating your efforts to building up your business upon the needs of your niche market does not only save time, money and effort, it is also a good marketingapproach. Later, when you have built a certain expertise in the kind of carpet cleaning service that yourniche market needs, you can capture other markets. Your track record is already established, thus, it is easier to find referrals or acquire written testimonials. On the other hand, if you attempt to serve different markets at once, you will only end up frustrated. Know the story of a lizard who tried to embrace abig post? It fell dead!
Get Noticed. You can set up a low-cost advertising campaign by printing out flyers and distribute these inthe neighborhood, if that’s where you want to start, or deliver them personally to offices, if you wantto create a niche there. The bottomline is simple: make everyone in your market know that your type of service exists!
Your business or calling card should be available at all times. It is unprofessional to scribble telephone or cell phone numbers on pieces of paper, each time a client asks where he could reach you. Put your business on the breast pocket of every customer you can find – invest on calling cards.
