If you are feeling more than a little weighed down and confused by digital marketing, you’re certainly not the only carpet cleaning business owner who is.
My recent survey of carpet cleaning business owners showed that many are feeling overwhelmed and aren’t achieving the results they would like from their efforts.
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For small carpet cleaning businesses, digital marketing can quickly start to become overwhelming. There are so many tactics out there for you to explore:
- Google Ads
- SEO
- Yellow pages
- Letterbox drops
- Google reviews
Just which digital marketing tactics should you be using?
And how do you go about implementing them successfully?
If you are trying to run digital marketing tactics for your carpet cleaning business and it’s not going as well as you’d like or you want to grow more, then this article can help you with your process.
The Main Problem: Tactics Without Strategy
If you are like a lot of business owners, you will get at least 2-3 cold calls from salespeople offering tactics….
“We can get you to the top of Google with our super-duper SEO strategies”
“We guarantee you top 3 positions on Google for 10 keywords”
“We can do your Facebook posts for you for just $$$ a month”
All these are tactics that may or may not work.
How do you know if the would be useful or not? You need to clearly define two things first before you start on media.
Market: Pick A Niche To Focus On (for now)
Who your real market is. You can’t be and don’t want to be everything to everybody. There’s a big difference in serving the $39 a room market vs the cleaning expensive Italian sofas vs doing flood and water remediation. Make a decision of what market you want to go after for now.
Choosing a market does not mean you can’t serve other markets…it just helps you focus.
Message: Work Out What Messages You Want To Convey
Having decided who your market is, what message(s) do they need to hear to see your carpet cleaning business as the both:
- the expert in your field and
- better and different to the others in the market
Once you know this, you have the keys to deciding what media you want to use to reach your target market with your messages.
This video by Steammaster, is a good example of how to get your messages right when you are dealing with a service oriented market. You need to work this stuff out ahead of time as part of your messaging.
Learn the Basics of Digital Marketing
In order to prevent overwhelm, it is important to familiarise yourself with the basics of digital marketing. Otherwise members of the WWW (wicked wild west) pull the wool over your eyes to make themselves money at your expense.
Read up on the subject and then put together a plan of action that can be realistically achieved in your current schedule.
Here’s some links to basics you can learn for free (except for your time):
- How to choose an SEO company
- How to learn Local SEO.
- How to choose a PPC Agency
- Learn Google Ads (AdWords)
- Learn Facebook marketing
If you don’t want to learn it or you just don't have time, find someone you can trust via a local networking group. Just make sure you are working with people who have delivered in the past.
Focus On One Tactic At A Time
It’s also certainly worth mentioning that many carpet cleaning business owners make the mistake of trying to carry out several digital marketing methods at the same time without perfecting the first one. If you are doing this you will be much better off focusing on getting one tactic to work well and then moving on to the next.
Take the time to get your basics right – track everything, eliminate what does not work and keep doing what is, before you move on to the next tactic.
For example, if you are running Google Ads, make sure you have covered many of the points I raised in this post. For sure you will find a segment of search terms, ads and landing pages that produce profitable customers for you.
Eliminating Digital Overwhelm is Easy
Solving digital overwhelm is relatively easy, you just need to decide on your market and message before you embark on pushing messages into a specific media.
That’s why the first part of our 5R Marketing System is called Right Stuff so we straight away your foundation is focused on the right market, message, tracking and reporting to build profitable marketing systems for your carpet cleaning business.
