good evening everybody my name is robbie harris and i am the president of the cfi and tonight i want to welcome you back to success wisdom we have some great panelists but before we introduce you to our panelists i want to introduce you to my guest host steve marcy say hi steve hey roby thank you very much for inviting me to be here i'm i'm not sure i can fill the role of jessica that's a pretty tough challenge to have but i really enjoy uh your webinars that you've been doing and it's a pleasure to be here i look forward to talking to the guests tonight great thank you steve now a little bit more about steve steve's been in the industry he's been an industry leader and instructor for over 45 years been in the business uh he's been a senior he's a carpet inspector master textile cleaner and founder of be competition free that's what i started off with and also uh single truck success wrote in clean facts magazine uh for the past 12 years and um he uh wrote the article single truck success in uh clean facts magazine so our first guest i want to welcome is chauncey say hey chauncey how's it going good to see you chauncey and also a good friend of mine and my printer jim peterson of walker printing say hello jim good evening thanks for having me great great thanks for stopping by so chauncey um chancey is uh the owner of masters of search and uh marx excuse me monsters of search uh can't read my own stinking writing here so chauncey has been a you know god sent to us he's been the uh webmaster for cfi built to cfi webpage uh puts us out there gets us all the uh things we need to stay in touch with everybody um and jyn jen has uh i've known jim for the past three years jim peterson is uh works for walker printing she's also the vice president of our bni chapter and i've known jim for the past three years she does all our printing and uh one thing you need to watch out about jen is not only is she a for photographer but she is a sharpshooter yeah she likes to shoot guns so you don't want to mess with gently all right so steve we're going to hand it over to you and i want you to give a little introduction on how we're going to do things tonight all right well we're going to be covering the topic is marketing and we're going to actually see how the two types of marketing the print marketing and the digital marketing actually work together to create a big impact to build businesses and groom a clientele and so i i think we our guests really represent those two very well and so as i'm going to start off asking a couple of questions about chauncey to kind of just lay a groundwork for uh the digital marketing part of it and then uh roby's going to have a few questions for jen and then we're going to sort of open it up between all of us and have a conversation and then go in and discuss branding and how that's really important for companies to really come across with the right image and then we'll look into how each of those the digital and the print can be used to stay in touch with customers uh because that's you know you give all this work pay all this money to get customers once you do them and do a great job you want to make sure you're the one that they call next time so this is a most important part of marketing so that's that's where we're going to be going and so i'm going to start uh john c with you kind of looking at the basics uh first of all like what goes into making a good website for a home service company such as a carpet cleaner what what are the things that should be included in that um you know that the term you know i'll throw out technical terms so we sound all fancy you know a lot of it is seo to get you there but really when you get there it's conversion optimization and so what really needs to be there is whatever the client needs in order to get in touch with you to get you to come over do your job and get their money so a lot of the time you'll look at websites and they don't have the phone number front and center in the top they don't have the name of the business the name of the location that they're in you know you need to you need to represent where you are especially in the case of a brick and mortar business like carpet cleaning although carpet cleaning is not brick and mortar always a service area business you know non-national business a localized business you want to have uh everything that you need to convert right there as easily as possible for the person so i would say uh it's not very much unlike um a lot of the things that jen does it's naps name address phone number website you know you need to have all of that stuff right at the top but i would say the number one thing is to have the phone number up in the right hand corner where people expect to see it now of course there's lots of other things as well you need to have it represent you represent your band brand represent the type of clients that you hope to get and uh load quickly you know the the quicker loads the in digital marketing there's a lot of drop-off points where if it takes too long to load they drop off if they can't find something they drop off so your conversion goes from 100 which it's never at but then it exponentially gets lower and lower the more amount of times that you make it difficult for the person on your website i'm not sure did that answer there's a lot of words hopefully it was in there somewhere steve yeah i think again this is just to kind of get us going normally a website if somebody was saying i'm starting my business and i want to uh you know develop those get those clients and grab them how many pages what kind of what number are we talking one page we talking 14 what what i would say worst case scenario or beginning scenario not worst case but i don't know if this is an industry term but this is a term that i use and that's a brochure website basically around six pages just like a fold-out brochure with the home page and about page a contact page and let's say a landing page for each of your services that's what you absolutely need to get started is you need a home page and a carpet cleaner might not think that they have multiple services but i mean you obviously do you have tile and grout you have all the other things that you possibly do you need a page for each of your services to drive your efforts towards and to effectively work in search engine optimization so even if you're using pay-per-click search engine optimization social media marketing you want to be able to send people to the page that represents whichever service you're talking about now i get it seems like almost on a daily basis these emails of people telling me first of all they'll criticize my website saying oh i'm failing on all these things and then they'll tell me then promise me that i will be show up on the first page of google search uh yeah you can't promise that well they seem to well we don't we don't own google so therefore we can't promise a success on something that we don't actually have control of uh if they promise you you can call them up and say okay well then i'm not going to pay you unless i'm there and i'm sure that they'll end the conversation at that point and i think a lot of us know that it's not hard to collect a big amount of emails to blast these things out it's not hard to find websites in an industry and then reach out to them and basically say hey your website sucks for this then the other reason and there is no such thing as a perfect website so i could go into any website and critique it and somebody's always going to be able to do that you know um i would not have a huge amount of confidence i think it's just like any other marketing um you know check their reputation check the people that you know uh work just like you would with any other business but just because somebody reaches out to you over the phone or email uh i don't know i i don't see why that's a selling point for for a marketing company so if they i would say if somebody's asking me i'd go go use chauncey yeah well i hope so what sort of what sort of questions what would be the concerns that i would be looking for because i've heard stories that sometimes you can let somebody take over your website and you can end up in real trouble uh they may be reliable they can blackmail you and kind of hold it hostage is is that a real concern it is it it absolutely is uh i have worked with a lot of companies and actually quit uh one job that was a good job for me and my family um because they wanted me to go in and damage a site of a client that was leaving us and you know i here's the way i look at it you pay me to do the work i do the work now it's yours just like if i came over to your house and and did garden or cleaned your carpets and let's say you decided to go with another carpet cleaner i mean what am i going to come into your house and huck dirt all over the carpets for something that i was already paid for for my time and my efforts so a big part of what i do is make sure that the hosting the domain name is all in the client's name that way i don't have control of it and that way you know if nothing else a year later if they drop me and a year later they call me up and say something went wrong i say i i couldn't even get in there if i wanted to i gave you all the stuff and i got rid of it you know so yes that is a concern uh of course anybody who you ask if they're going to do that i don't think it's going to give you a straightforward answer i mean obviously they're shady to begin with so you know what's the right question to ask there i i don't really know how to trick somebody into giving you the honest answer if you would uh take a minute and describe you mentioned it and i know is a key part of the success of a website especially when you're trying to build your clientele is what is seo that's this always seems to be kind of a mysterious uh concept to people and you know i'll let you describe what what is that how does that work and why is that so powerful well uh you know i'll start by saying i refer to myself as an seo which stands for search engine optimization but most website marketers like myself we do everything you know i do adwords i do social media i do email marketing i build websites and most of us do we just all have a spearhead uh that we use in order to get clients and mine is seo you know has been the most successful spearhead for me but you'll find that a lot of marketers do cover a lot of these things now seo is basically trying to provide a website that fulfills the criteria of what both google and the searching person on google want so google has a set of criteria they say okay we need this stuff to be fulfilled so that you can show up in our search but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to show up at number one when you show up people have to like what they see and therefore we've got to feel more confident to show you more often because google is in the google frankly is in the business of collecting your data but secondarily the way they do that is by providing you the search results that you want so that is fifty percent of the battle fifty percent of the battle is giving google what they want and the other fifty percent is giving the visitor what they want so that they click it because the more often somebody clicks your result in google the more google says hey people trust and like this so i'm going to show this more often because obviously this is making me look good as google so an seo really just um fine-tunes a website so that it uh does competition um you know one way i like to look at it is like a colander and pouring water into a colander you got two colanders two sieves and you're pouring water into them and you can either turn up the hose or you can patch holes this is you this is your competitor so you need to either turn up the hose or patch more holes than your competitor in order to be higher up in in google and uh that's basically what i do well i just want to i've worked with seancey on with a number of clients and there was one in particular that had been in business for ages but he died he didn't show up on any search results at all you know almost i think if you typed in his web address you would find it but other than that and do you want to explain what that was that was going wrong and it was all seo at that that was that problem what sort of problems was it that that guy had if you know who i'm talking about yeah well you have to be sure to submit your stuff to google google will find you even if you don't submit it but you do have to make sure that your stuff is searchable there's there's a tag that can be on your website that'll tell google hey if you find my website ignore it and a lot of people when they have a website built the person building the website uh has the website blocked you know because as i'm building a website i don't want google to index it uh and then a lot of the time they launch the website and they forget to uh turn it on remove that tag and so people will sit there for a long time with a website that's uh just not searched another problem would be that uh your website just does not represent what you do at all and then the third problem would be that you accidentally represent the wrong subset of your industry an example i use a lot with carpet cleaners is carpet cleaner so let's say we're talking about san jose and i i search for carpet cleaner in san jose am i looking for someone to clean my carpet or a machine that i can use to clean my own carpet so carpet cleaner is a difficult term in order to specify and so you do have to chase other terms to help google understand that you are this is the intention so as google figures out somebody's intention as they're searching they deliver your results and then my my final question which is going to be complicated so just to kind of give an overview is is google maps significant that he's trying to get on how does pay per click is that a worthwhile thing to experiment with to see if i can get that to work for me and then the final part of that is what about landing pages does that help me get more customers uh okay well first off google maps is absolutely necessary like if you have an online store it might not be necessary because you don't have a service area or a brick and mortar business but in the case of a service area in order for google to use your location they need to know where your location is and they need to be confident that you're there just think of all the businesses that have started in any of your areas that went out of business immediately google didn't just hop on them and all of a sudden say okay well we're gonna trust this forever you know so a big part of being in google maps is representing your business naps name address phone number uh consistently so that google trusts that you're ranking there and also google maps is good for anybody who's searching from the car or anything like that you know anybody searching from a mobile device um ends up using very very location-based search now your computer also uses location-based search but it's a little looser about it the the uh the mobile device is very specific to your location um basically it works off of cell data so the way a cell phone works is you have cells just like a beehive and you know they're going to target you with something called a centroid to the location of each of those cells and the closer you are to your potential client that's going to weigh in as a factor now it's not the only factor somebody could be right next door to your client and you could rank higher than them because you're more trusted you know you've been there longer you've represented yourself better people like what they see when they come to you so there's definitely a way to outrank people who are closer to potential clients but maps is a big part of it now adwords um it really depends on the money that people have in their pocket you know adwords will cost money and most people don't spend less than 500 dollars you know and that's that's in the low park you know but you really have to figure out what you consider to be a good price for a lukewarm lead because that's really what pay-per-click is it's a lukewarm lead when somebody clicks that link you know they're interested in the service but they're not necessarily interested in you they're shopping at that point so when they click that lead let's say for a carpet cleaning advertisement on the average i i think we've discovered that it's around five or six bucks let's say uh in a great world you convert every three so uh you just paid fifteen dollars for a new client you know that might be a great price for you you know especially if you're starting out you have no other representation and you want to start right now and you have the equity to do it you got the money to do it because you know you got to pay for that stuff now seo over time uh will cost you less in leads because as you move up the organic ranks you're still paying a flat amount of money and your organic ranks are getting you those leads so um adwords absolutely i mean should people do it absolutely but ultimately it depends on people's budgets and what they're comfortable paying for a lead and then uh i forget what the final question final one quickly and we'll turn it back over to roby here is uh those landing pages first of all really quickly what is a landing page and how can that help um well landing page is a gray term um the term landing page means that i have a channel of marketing or a link and it links to this that's what they're going to land after they click that link um what we've all taken landing page to mean is um it's a sales page that converts now does that help absolutely because let's say i have people coming from social media and i have people coming from adwords now normally we have them come to one page but let's say i've done this long enough with with my clients to know that i'm dealing with separate client bases i might want to send them to different pages and find that different pages convert better so absolutely so to start out you need a landing page for each of your services once you're to the point where you're chasing really sort of combative marketing uh you know landing pages for different marketing avenues is is actually somewhat practical but absolutely a landing page is something that you need at least for each one of your services all right thank you ruby over to you all right tim you're so uh my question is uh if there's a new cleaning company or even someone like myself been around for a long time what type of print marketing works well for getting new customers getting new customers obviously you've got the direct mail option but pairing that with your online marketing would be fantastic um you could look at trying if you're trying to attract somebody new first of all trying to define who you're wanting to target who you're looking for that'll kind of help differentiate what you need to do whether you need to do a direct mail piece or if you need to look at doing talking with shaun c some more and doing some more online marketing depends there's several different demographics that we'd have to look at um another way of marketing with print though is having a good business card having a brochure with you referral marketing obviously you and i roby we know referral marketing is wonderful um but what are you going to give that person to then be able to refer you to so having putting something in their hands that is a representation of your business who you are they can then take that and when they're out in the field talking to people and they come across someone that needs your service they have all your information right there they can pass it off obviously your um anything that you have printed should have your web address it's like it's almost like a printed version of your website and you want to direct them it's like guiding them through a process so you hand them a brochure what do you want them to do with that brochure once they have the information in hand do you want them to call you immediately do you want to send them to your website to fill out a contact form those are things to consider when looking at the printing another printed project that i personally love is um putting together booklets or pamphlets um i'm a big fan of that it just the presentation of it is just top notch that's that's excellent and when it comes to marketing i might be jumping ahead of myself can you talk you said something about targeting but can you like target hey i want to work in this neighborhood over here and i'm i'm done working with apartments i'm done working with property management and i'm i'm ready to move on and uh can i target just a whole neighborhood or can i target a street absolutely so you could do both um there are mainly two different options that we could look at for you and it depends on your needs so we can target a radius around an address so let's say you put in your business location and you want to target the neighborhoods that are around your location we can put in a radius around there we could also draw a polygon around the areas that you want to specifically target and then we could go in there and we could add in some other demographics so what does your client look like you know what age are they what's their annual household income do they have children present do they love dogs i mean we could get pretty specific on the demographics to target and narrow it down now keeping in mind um you know data isn't always free so when we do add in multi-levels of targeting to really narrow down um that data the pricing per record does go up so keeping that in mind but if budget is an issue here's another option the the post office has come out with a program called every door direct mail or what we call eddm and that is perfect if you kind of want to just blanket canvas or target a neighborhood that would be a good option for you especially if you are on a tight budget the postage for those are very very reasonable and you don't have to fork out the money to purchase a mailing list so with this program there's a map you go to eddm.usps.com it pulls up the map you type in the location where you want to start let's say it's a zip code or the address of your business it pulls it up and you can run your mouse around and it'll highlight all these carrier routes so you can zoom in on this map find that neighborhood that you're looking for that you want to target and click on there it'll show up in purple you click on that and that'll tell you exactly how many homes are on that specific carrier route and then from there we could print up a postcard deliver it to the post office and the post office will drop that postcard off at every single door on that carrier route so yeah it's amazing that program is awesome it definitely is utilized a lot [Music] what other printed marketing tools that uh companies should have besides you know what you said mentioned business cards and brochures is there anything specific that is a favorite to you the favorite to me would be having a a booklet that talks about your services so i know brochures are probably the most cost effective but that a lot of companies do that so i i like to think kind of outside of the box and doing something different than what the mainstream does and so coming up with this awesome saddle stitch magazine looking brochure type thing multi pages maybe there's 12 pages in there that has everything just laid out super clean and crisp it matches your website just the presentation of that just kind of sets you above like the mainstream of what everybody else does um so that ultimately is my favorite another way that you could use print to make an impression would be um having good presentation folders just those two pocket folders when you're showing up to um deliver an estimate or um you know you're knocking on doors whatever have those have something presented in there and a presentation folder is a great way to do that another form of marketing that i just popped into my head is door hangers i know it's kind of an old school thing but if you that is a form of marketing that i that i know of companies that still do that they'll hire somebody at minimum wage to go hang a door hanger on every single door that is still an option so that's good that's kind of like the whole pipeline um direct direct mail mark give us a little bit on that and you know how effective is that so the the one of the statistics that i've heard that is still out there is if you get a three percent response from your direct mail that is considered to be successful i have had some clients where they've sent out a direct mail piece and they're they just already had this expectation to have their doors completely flooded that's kind of not the case a lot of times with a direct mail again it's getting your name out there and it's also timing as well like what if they may not need your service now maybe it's later and sometimes doing multi um mailings so doing like a three to four month campaign where you're sending something to them either every other week or once a month you're kind of hitting that window of time where they might need your service but sometimes they don't so i try to remind my clients three percent response rate is considered a very successful mailing it's more about brand awareness getting your name out there and and just kind of hitting them with it and what i love is when when you pair that with online marketing you kind of think of it like this let's say a person is on facebook and they see this ad pop up for twice as nice and they go oh okay that's cool and then they come home the next day and then all of a sudden they they go out and check their mail and they see this postcard twice as nice they're like whoa okay i just saw that so then it's a recognition piece especially if those pieces match and then um let's say you're in a store and you hear twice as nice on the radio that just like clinches it and so ultimately that is like the the dream marketing plan right there is having all those facets um and then literally when that person needs your service they're gonna they're gonna remember you because they've heard you they've seen your postcard and they've seen you online awesome so we're going to kind of go back and forth now we're going to have steve and i uh ask the both of you and we're going to talk about branding it's next on our list jane gets ahead of herself boy let me tell you so uh both of you guys uh go about jen's being a showboat [Laughter] that's because you like her glasses i do they got this cool retro cut to them i love them yeah yeah yeah all right yeah so so back to branding and like i said it's for both of you so um how would you uh define branding um jen you want to go first sure so for me branding first off is your logo so really putting your thought and planning into that logo but not just building this really cool logo though is also knowing that that logo is going to need to be on your website so chancey i'll let you talk about that and then potentially on your vehicles on your truck so that logo is kind of the first step in and getting it molded to where it works and all those facets what do you think shanti uh yeah no i i definitely agree um i mean uh if i had to say what branding was it would be consistency and i think that's pretty much what you're saying is that that uh to make the effort of the connections so like you were saying with the three percent conversion on the mailers it's like a lot of people look at that and they say oh well that's terrible because three percent is a terrible number but let's say you've paid a hundred to send out a hundred and you had three percent conversion i mean that's not a bad that's not a bad conversion price for some some clients and and so that branding that consistency is what creates that connection between your multiple marketing attempts you know a lot of people maybe don't even look at their carpets until they see your marketing and then they go okay well maybe i'm thinking about it now and then they do it again and you know i've done marketing for lawyers and plumbers and i take them as prime examples because they're the people that you don't want to think about unless you need one you know and uh you know that that's a prime example of that repeated marketing hey we're here for you we're here for you we're here for you and so that consistency definitely exponentially compounds the effectiveness of that i agree unfortunately i have had clients where i've seen them use a logo on a business card but their brochure looks completely different website completely different and that really shows and if you want to build credibility having everything consistent is just going to help you shine above everybody else i would say a lot of people take branding way too far you know and i'm probably overboard on it yeah yeah they they like put i was talking to steve about this the other day they put so much work into it because frankly it's kind of fun uh you know so it's easy for people to get lost in branding you know but what you're really doing is you're coming up with a consistency sheet and then you're working off of your sheet it's not fun it's not beautiful you just do the sheet now everything else is boring because you're copying what's on that sheet you know some people want what's my branded scent you know i don't know you know that's going a little too far what's my color yeah exactly well you know when in talking about branding what i found when i started work with clients helping them with their marketing is jen kind of like you're describing they're all over the place they had different color schemes they had different one company just had all sorts of different versions of what their logo was and sort of like you were saying when you see a print ad and then you go to the website those need to look like they relate to each other can you just expound on that a little bit more and again it seems to me you lose some of that power if they don't do that you do because then once they land there you know a client might look at it and go am i in the right place is this the right person and then as soon as you start feeling that uh you kind of take a step down on the credibility level and so really having everything just all cohesive if you want to change colors later on sure but do it all together all at once you know um and just making sure that you introduce those things so that way you you stay with your credibility and i would throw in that if you change your stuff so a lot of the time people change stuff because they're constantly changing designers their websites are growing and so on and so forth but if you change stuff i also i wanted to agree with jen earlier that you know start with your logo and work top down that'll give you your color scheme that'll give you all your stuff to start working with but um if you change stuff too much like if i hold up a card and it's red people go oh that's a red card if i hold up another card and it's a different color red immediately you're going to decide which one you like and which one you don't and so if i have a website and a mailer and they're different people are going to look at them and before they even think hey i need my carpets cleaned they're automatically going to be ticking in their head things they don't like about this one things they do like like about that one it's distracting it distracts them from the overall goal which is at the risk of being uncouth click the button and give us your money you know that is the goal of marketing you know we're going to give you a great service and you're going to give us some great money you know so you don't want to distract people from that by having them their brain ticking about something else because a lot of these thoughts we're throwing out there about what they think and what they do they're not actually thinking it at the forefront of their mind it's in the back of their mind it's in the back of all of our minds it's going on there whether we like it or not absolutely that's why we a lot of times in the print realm we like working off of what we call pms colors or pantone colors so once you actually have let's say you want a blue color this one specific blue there's actually like a color code for that and we use that on everything just so that way that's your blue and it's going to be that blue for everything right and there's ways to come up with it you know i mean for variations of that color uh for hues of that color in order to do all that stuff you know but um yes that color but each other right right i've i've had to do that stuff too because uh you know online i use a different i use either rgba or hexadecimal colors but uh you know i will have to convert pantone colors too to those colors in order to use them on the websites exactly awesome good job guys so uh our next question uh can service companies market to all customers profitably or should they target again would you like to go first gen just being polite i mean if you don't want to go first i'll go go ahead i'll let you go yeah i went first the last time good um you know a lot of the time so a lot of people like to define who their clients are before they even go into business they say oh this is going to be my clientele and blah blah blah that's what's going to happen uh your clientele are the people who come to you uh repeatedly and and give you money so a lot of the time in the beginning you are throwing out a bit of a net as you get results back as you get data back as you see who you're working with you can refine that net and refine that marketing and then yes definitely you can target exactly what you want outside of that but to go into it from the beginning with a very narrow view of who your client is going to be uh i think is probably pretty dangerous i completely agree with that starting out business maybe think about doing some blanketing some saturation type of things uh whether online or in print and then once those clients start coming in i i wholeheartedly agree then you could kind of start narrowing it down and then look at targeting and i think a good example for carpet cleaners would be if uh you know if if 60 percent of your people were coming in uh asking for tile and grout services you'd be a thailand grout service guy now wouldn't you because that's where the money's coming from i mean that's ultimately where the goal is you know so uh but unfortunately in order to have data you gotta throw the net out to get that data to sort of follow up what you've been talking about um there is a difference if you're like focusing for let's just say mid-range versus a higher you know upscale type of a clientele uh wouldn't the look differ i mean it's sort of like if you were to go buy a volkswagen and you go into the showroom of a volkswagen store versus a mercedes is are they going to look different if i were to blindfold a person and put them into one of those situations could they tell me very quickly which one they were at and so i sort of wondered do we need to do this with our print marketing also and then also some of the copy because the the needs of a more of a budget somebody looking for a budget is quick service because it's normally event motivated and low price because it's not very important to them and they're being forced to do it because mom's coming to visit or something right for the lowest price matter of fact the lowest price scares them so they're going to be looking for quality and what they're looking for then and then i'll kind of turn it over to you to see if you can build on this a little bit they're not looking for the low price but they're looking for quality and sort of peace of mind that is going to be done right the first time and you know they don't so can can you think of examples of graphics are you know what sort of photos are being used and and other things that how that page looks for let's just say one of two of those you know those of those two markets gotcha yeah so definitely looking into something like that you might want to consider running two different campaigns so to speak um if you're going after the person that is doesn't need the lowest budget looking for quality uh you might consider making sure your imagery is very um comes across very high-end like like the whole ferrari type look and feel um and going that route you might be wanting to target these higher income neighborhoods that sort of thing so that's where we kind of do start narrowing down it's not a blanket saturation piece you're kind of going to have to target and narrow down just a tiny bit to kind of really hone in on that thing the same goes if you are um looking for to attract those customers that are they just want the lowest price they want something quick that definitely is going to look different than the other one um and if though if you want both of those clients you definitely could do those but i would kind of have them separate to speak to those people and i'll let chancy chime in on the online part of aspect of that as well yeah yeah this is where multiple landing pages would come into consideration um but you know when we're saying throw that blanket out there you know i don't know if other people are as nerdy when it comes to movies as i am but uh you want that frank capra that capra ask sort of deal you want to deliver the dream of the client that you want and the client that your client wants to be so you know think about the area around you and the area that you're targeting and make your stuff that nice if not a little bit nicer because you know nobody's looking for true reality you know so uh yes you you definitely want a nice house so in the case of carpet cleaning you want a nice house you want a nice shirt you want a nice person at the door uh and you want it to look like somebody could either say that's me or that could be me if i got my carpet cleaned by that guy you know um you want to convey the it's not you want to convey the dream i don't know if that's that's a too abstract a term to use but yes you definitely want to show the clients that you want now as you get your data back you might say okay well i live in an area that's like this so on and so forth and i want to cater myself to the area that i'm in with the data that came back in but i mean i wouldn't go out of the gate searching for the lowest common denominator either i mean you know come out of the gate looking for the life that you want to lead and the clients that you want to have but collect the data as you're doing it and be realistic about the data you receive okay so we have that was great so we have one question from from a from a guest and this you both can answer this so maybe off subject how do you guys like press releases i'll let you go first chauncey yeah this is something that's really more used in an online situation and um so press releases used to be uh a part of seo that was sort of like article submission sites and they were ways for you to get backlinks to your website nowadays a press release can be um very effective if you have something worthy of releasing to the press which you probably don't um so the whole press release deal on a national level or on because a lot of the i'm i'm not entirely sure what they're saying like if you're talking about like reaching out to your local newspapers and and and media outlets and basically saying hey i got a new business and i just wanted people to know especially i'm the first one of my kind in this area uh green carpet cleaning blah you know maybe something special you would but in most cases um at least in the world of seo and online marketing press release is an outdated way of getting backlinks to your website and for the print realm i mean we could print that and mail that out but um i i haven't had any clients do anything like that all right so we're good and short on time here so last last question for the both of you how digital print marketing help helps you stay in touch with customers um why don't you go first okay i got to come up with an answer okay a couple ways that you could stay in touch let's say you get several clients you have all their data you've got their phone number you have their email address you have their um mailing address so obviously what you could do then is especially if you want to start like let's say i don't know roby how often should somebody have their carpets cleaned for me it always depends on the client but due to uh industry you need 12 every 12 to 18 months okay so you could have create your database and choose to either do a mailed reminder postcard to them hey just reminding you it's time to have your carpets cleaned again give me a call kind of thing if you have their email address you could do that via email and shaunty could i'm sure set that up um you know so that's one way another way to keep them connected to you is by doing newsletters so if you have a bunch of news um like latest home cleaning tips and things like that you could look at doing a quarterly newsletter or whatever and mail those to your existing clients just to keep that personal touch to so they don't forget about you kind of thing so that's that's what i would recommend seancy what about you from uh oh yeah the the newsletter you know i'm every month and i'm surprised at how excited my wife gets to read the fearless flyer from trader joe's so it's definitely uh you know a reminder of how effective these newsletters can be especially if they're done well um also you know you have drip campaigns you know so uh email's not gonna be much different than mail in the way that it's sent out so let's say you have your uh your people and you put them in your drip campaign and basically you know that a year from now we're going to send them an email to remind them if they don't open it we're going to send them this if they don't open that we're going to send them that and then we're going to leave them be also keeping in touch with them i would just throw in because everything jen said was right and totally applies to online as well one thing that applies to online also maybe is that um keeping in touch with them means getting reviews from them so after that service you want to reach out to them you want to thank them you want to ask them how you did you want to follow up and you want to try to get them to give you a nice review online and if they're not happy you want to use that as an advantage to to to make that relationship better um so i would say that was a a very big part of keeping in communications with them and frankly it shouldn't be hard to do because it's very selfish reasons you want that review that review will get you more more clients uh coming to you without you really doing anything so the more of those you can chase down the better i have a question as far as print versus digital is the mail a good form still to contact people generally your homeowners are going to be 40 years and older because the younger generation coming up a lot of the carpet cleaners are younger they're all digital they never do anything with the mail but is that still effective because you know when i had my business a few years back i did a lot we sent holiday cards we stayed in touch with reminder cards and newsletters were mailed out is that still an effective mean of means of staying in touch with people do people look forward to getting something that's actually personal because you know others aren't using the mail well i know i do but i'm also particular i like seeing things that are different in the mail so i recommend thinking outside of the box um having something adding a personalized touch to a mail piece is going to stop people from just tossing it out like it's junk mail and doing whatever you can to add that personal touch to where they get it and they go oh my gosh i got a note card in the mail handwritten notes are amazing so i know me i'm in my 30s and i still like getting handwritten notes in the mail so and uh you know sorry to use my wife as an example so much but i'm a bit of a hermit you know it kind of comes with the job uh you know she'll come in and be all oh carl sent us a letter about uh maybe getting our carpets cleaned and i'm just all who the hell's carl and she's just all he's our carpet cleaner and i'm he's been he's been with us for like 10 years and i'm all uh okay you know it's like she is very involved with this stuff and the more personalized it is especially if she got to know the person face to face when she gets something in the mail or in the email she sort of enjoys it because she sort of says oh this is that person you know and and i like this you know so so yeah personalizing them uh slapping your little face on there doing whatever you can uh to to make it personalized and friendly i think a lot of people um i can guess would be uncomfortable or maybe trying to stay too much out of people's way but um i i think being very friendly when you're somebody that comes into somebody's home and basically works from their home you know they start to associate your face and so the the more friendly you can be the better i agree before we uh have to wrap up here uh can i get both of you to give your contact information so if somebody would like to use your services how can they get a hold of you jen is there best is by email and my email is jen j e n at walker litho that's w-a-l-k-e-r-l-i-t-h-o dot-com that would be the best way and mine is monsters of search dot com and uh there's a phone number up there five three zero two five five four four two zero and uh i'm that's where i reside i reside online i'm purely fictitious business person i live in ashland oregon by the way so i'm further away from you guys but uh yeah monsters of search dot com and um just give me a call and uh it doesn't cost anything to pick my brain and uh obviously i like talking about this stuff so if you have any questions feel free to do that outstanding all right so we're gonna wrap everything up here i thank you both john c appreciate you i met you at a little hole in the wall uh jen i see you every tuesday same format i appreciate you taking the time to do this for us i'm gonna reach out to all you guys and ladies out there listening and we're going to need your help we're coming up with the ronald mcdonald house check the website uh we're going to be cleaning uh looks like april the 24th so we're going to need you guys to come out and volunteer your time thanks guys thanks for having me appreciate it well one thing i just want to do sorry is a little self-promotion is um i am going to be the guest speaker for meet the experts on uh the third wednesday of this month that's the 17th and uh what we're going to be talking about there is a little bit about my history and my story of how i ended up being able to move my business up into the very high end clientele so we're going to talk a lot about how you groom a clientele and how you take it from that lower end and make the adjustments so that you can keep raising your prices and your clientele is going to change slightly you'll be intentionally dropping off people and we're going to talk about that and then some other basic principles about how you succeed in business in general and those are really important because if you don't know those surviving in business is going to be a lot tougher so it should be a good a good call so that's my my little plug so that's march 17th let's meet the experts for these webinars and i've been loving all these webinars and so now we'll turn it over and let charlene uh wrap it up and describe those a little bit more thank you roby for having me absolutely thanks guys thank you thank you everybody [Music]