2 Things To Make Your Carpet Cleaning Website Actually Bring In Cash

When I speak to my fellow carpet cleaners about creating a web page, often I’m met by lots of misconceptions and myths.  I’d like to go ahead and shatter some of those myths right now.

You should know that:

1)      Building a website doesn’t have to be expensive (and you can even do it FREE)

2)      There are some basic tips that will put you way ahead of your competition

Keep Your Website Goals In Mind

When building a website you need to keep in mind your goals.  Why are you actually building the website in the first place?

For most carpet cleaners, the answer should be “to collect leads.”  Yes, that my friends is the correct answer.  The internet can be a great source of clients, since more and more people are abandoning the yellow pages and instead hopping on their computer or smart phone to search for their local carpet cleaning services.  You want to make sure that when they land on your site, that they will either contact your or leave their details so that you can contact them back.

Building Websites is Easy

(Even For Carpet Cleaners!)

Contrary to what a lot of people think about building a website, if our aim is lead capture we really need a very simple website.  In fact, in most cases a SINGLE page will usually be enough. Yes, you head me right!

These single page sites are often called “landing pages” in the professional lingo.  These can be highly effective at converting customers since they funnel visitors to a particular goal.  There are many web apps that allow you to create a landing page literally within minutes (or even seconds).  For example, here is an example of a landing page I created in under 5 minutes for free.

The example here is probably a bit limited, because Kick Off Labs doesn’t allow user to collect other details such as name and phone number, but you should be able to get the idea.

Let’s look at a website as a case study to point out some of the basics in terms of reaching your goal, which is maximizing conversions. Here is a screen shot of the website Carpet CleaningParramatta:

 

2 Critical Points For Maximizing Conversions

Prominent phone number 

The website displays a phone number very clearly.  This is such an easy thing to do yet most people get this wrong.  The phone number should appear “above the fold”, which means in the section of the screen that users initially see when they load the page without having to scroll down.  The best place to put your phone number is somewhere in the header.  The top right of the screen is often a good place to put it.

Notice that the website also displays a call to action near the phone number.  This is really important since it acts as a prompt for people to call.  When designing the copy for your website you really need to spell out to users what they need to do.   Often it can help to have a small arrow point to the phone number in order to draw extra attention.

Prominent contact form

This is another really basic feature that people often leave off websites.  You can give people the option either to call you directly or to leave their details for you to call back (for example if they are browsing the web late at night).  This is the most basic aspect of lead generation. 

Again in this example, you can see how the Carpet Cleaning Parramatta website prompts visitors with a clear call to action, in this case “contact us now”.  There are obviously some technical issues with the form at the moment which should be fixed.

One thing which can be improved here is the button.  The button text ideally should be descriptive and refer to the benefit that the visitor will get by filling out the form.  In this example, the “Send” text is not really descriptive enough, nor is it prominent enough.

As a better example, have a look at the lead generation form on this site (go ahead, you can fill it in to get more great marketing tips for your carpet cleaning business!)

Here you can see that above the form is an instruction (“stick your name in my box”) followed by the benefit that users will get (“learn how to get more paying customers for your carpet cleaning business).

The button on this site is nice, big and the color contrasts with the rest of the site colors, making it stand out.  The text has a call to action, saying “sign up”.  This lead generation form could even be improved by adding risk reversal – for example something like “If we spam you, spam us back” or something of the sort.

There is quite a science to landing page optimization and lead generation, but these basics will set you well on your way to collecting leads that will bring money into your carpet cleaning business.  Make sure that your phone number is clearly displayed – you can ask a friend to fetch your phone number from the website and time how long it takes them to do it.  Also make sure you have a kick arse form to draw in leads.

If you need help with designing a great form or wording the copy, just sign up to our newsletter to get loads of free tips.  You can feel free to email us back with any questions and we’ll make sure to give it our best shot.  

Google PPC Advertising For Carpet Cleaning Businesses

An easy way to get started advertising your carpet cleaning business is through Google adwords.  Google has a self-service advertising platform called Adwords where anyone can set up an account and start promoting their website.

People in the carpet cleaning business have found online advertising to be very effective for their business.  You can target very specific and highly focussed traffic and keep an easy track of your advertising spending and your return on investment.

While Google advertising can be easy, it can also lead to unnecessary costs and wasted money if done ineffectively.

As with everything, there is a right way and there is a wrong way to do Google Ads.   This guide will teach you the basics you need to get up and started.

Why PPC ads are great

PPC (pay per click) ads are great because they allow you to get started quickly and get your ad in front of customers eye balls.  If you want to perform search engine optimization (SEO) in order to rank highly in Google, this can take a lot of money and certainly it will take a long time until you see any meaningful results. 

With PPC advertising you can have your ad set up and ready to go literally within minutes.  Of course, there is a cost involved.  You will pay each time someone clicks on your ad.  In the end you will need to run a test and see if the costs are justified.

Start off by figuring out the keywords you want to target

Google ads PPC (pay per click) ads are triggered when someone types a search term you want to advertise for.  For example, if you had a carpet cleaning business in Parramatta you might want to target people searching for terms like “carpet cleaning Parramatta” or “Parramatta carpet cleaning”.

The first step is to go to the Google Keywords Tool and find out exactly what are the popular and relevant search terms (you can go to the Google Keywords tool by clicking here… go on, I’m waiting).

Now, start off by typing in a search term you think might be popular.  Again, let’s stick with the Carpet Cleaning Parramatta example.  Since Parramatta is a city in Australia, you’ll want to set the target country to Australia and make sure that the search language is checked as English.  Change the “Match type” to “Exact” (more about this later…).

After you’ve started the search, press on the Keywords ideas tab.  This is a great tool since it will show a list of related searches around the subject that you typed in the box at the top.  This is the way to find out which keywords you should be targeting and how much you can expect to pay for each click.

For this example, you can see that “Carpet Cleaning Parramatta” is indeed the most popular search term with 590 local (Australian) searches per month.  You can also see that the CPC (cost per click) is $11.96.

Work out roughly whether PPC advertising is right for you

Let’s take a look at the above figures and work out whether PPC advertising offers us good value.  Since in this example each click will cost $11.96, let’s say that 20% of customers landing on our site will end up making contact with us and of those 1/3 will end up becoming paying customers.  You’ll also need to consider your average revenue per client, which in this case we’ll estimate as $90.

So, for 100 people who come to the site, using our estimates 20 will end up leaving their details or calling us.  Of these 20 customers, approximately 7 will end up using our services.  Since the average revenue per customer is $90, this will lead to revenues of $630.  On the other side of the books, 100 clicks will cost us around $1200.  So from this rough calculation, things are looking pretty gloomy.

The only way to know for sure is to test

While the estimate above may or may not be correct, the only way to know for sure is to actually start a campaign and test it out – that’s the beauty of Google ads.  You can easily set your own budget, but make sure that the test is large enough to give you a statistically significant result (you can use this sample size calculator http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html)

The key drivers

The key factors which determine whether the advertising campaign will be effective are your “sign up rate” and your “conversion rate”.  The sign up rate is the percentage of people who leave their details or contact you after landing on your website.  The conversion rate is the percentage of people who actually end up paying for your service.

There are lots of tricks available to increase your sign up rate (which we’ll go into later).  Whatever tactic or tactics you use, a great tip is to aim to capture as many leads as possible.  Instead of letting people just click and browse on your site, you want to try and capture some sort of detail such as an email or phone number.  One way to do this is to offer a special promotion which people can redeem by leaving their details.

The conversion rate is affected by your salesmanship.  One factor that has been shown to increase conversion is how quickly you contact your customers.  People expect instant gratification these days, so the quicker you contact the customer, the more likely you are to get a sale.  Get in there ahead of your competitors!

Take home message

Go out and run a test campaign to see if Google PPC advertising might work for you.  Keep track of your costs and the revenues generated from the carpet cleaning jobs.  We’ll go into more detail about how to fine tune your Adwords campaign in order to keep costs down (a trick that most people don’t know and ends up costing them a lot of money) and how to maximise your sign up rates and conversions.

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4 Winning Carpet Cleaning Advertising Ideas

Carpet cleaning can be quite a competitive industry and if you don’t get out there and market your carpet cleaning business no one will know about you.  It doesn’t matter how great your service is or how beautifuly you’ve designed your van, you need potential clients to know about you.  Advertising can be done correctly or incorrectly and can become a real money sink. 

Measuring you advertising efforts

Before we go into the specific advertising ideas, you need to make sure that your advertising budget is working for you.  Don’t throw away money at useless advertising efforts, because very quickly advertising costs can balloon out.

You need to work out your return on investment (ROI).  Sometimes this can be a bit difficult to work out exactly, but you’ll need to make your best effort to get this under your belt.  For example, if you place an ad in the local paper, in order to measure your ROI you’ll need to ask people where they heard about you from.  You’ll also need to keep track of how much each of these clients bring in for you.  In the end to work out the ROI you’ll need to divide the total revenue generated by the advertising spend.  Remember, this is taking into account revenue and not profits, but it will give you a good idea if your advertising effort is effective.

The 4 Winning Carpet Cleaning Advertising Ideas

1.        Google PPC advertising

Google is a great way to get targeted traffic.  For example, if you have a carpet cleaning business in Denver, you can advertise for people who are specifically searching for “carpet cleaning Denver.”  This is highly targeted traffic as these searches indicate consumers who are looking to make a purchase.

Google PPC ads for "carpet cleaning denver"...can be effective but need to keep close eye on costs.

While the traffic is highly targeted, Google Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has become more and more expensive overtime.  In our example of “carpet cleaning Denver”, to advertise this term will cost approximately $8.35 per click.  Of course, not all “clicks” will end up in a sale, so the cost to acquire one client will be significantly higher than $8.35.  For example, if it takes 10 clicks until you close a sale, your approximate client acquisition cost will be around $83.50.  (Hint:  you should be keeping close track of this metric).

2.        Google Places Listing

Over the last few years Google has launched a new search product called Google Places.  These are special listing which list local businesses with a physical address.  Google is constantly tinkering with how these results appear, but often the Places Listings will appear as part of the normal search results.  Google Places will appear when someone search for a search term & a local city.  So in the previous example, if someone searches for “carpet cleaning Denver” then the places results will be displayed along with the regular organic listings.

Google Places Results...For "Carpet Cleaning Denver" the Places results come before all other results.

There are some special tips and tricks in order to get listed in Google Places.  Carpet cleaners who have successfully optimized their places listing find that they get an amazing ROI for this form of advertisement.  This is really powerful stuff and it allows you to “jump ahead of the queue” in the Google listings.

3.       Advertising in the Local Newspaper

Local rags can make a great advertising source.  While more and more people are using online advertising, especially for the older population offline advertising can be effective.  The ROI can vary greatly and there are many factors specific to your local area.

It’s really important in this case to measure the return on investment.  For offline advertising, measuring ROI can be a lot harder, but it’s critical in order to work out if this form of advertising is effective for you.

As a tip, make sure that you find out the readership size and demographics and of course the advertising costs for various ad sizes.  You can often get the media kit (the information regarding the advertising costs and readership) sent via email.

You can also tinker and optimize the ad copy (the wording of the ad) and the ad size to see which works best for you.  Make sure that you have a “call to action” in the ad body, such as “Call Us Now to Secure Your Discount”.  Calls to action are proven to increase the response to ads.

4.       Distribute Flyers (Plus a secret tip)

While it might seem out-dated, flyers can often be quite effective forms of advertising.  Often flyers can be designed, printed and distributed fairly cheaply.  Some communities have very good responses to flyers, whilst in others they are viewed as more “spammy”.  You should also consider investing a little more to create fridge magnets, which people often keep for their own use of for their children.  Whereas flyers are often thrown out, fridge magnets may be kept around for a long time.  Finally when the client will look for someone to clean their carpets, all they’ll need to do is to look to their fridge in order to find you.

5.       Bonus Tip!

The last tip is a bonus (I know we said “4 great carpet cleaning advertising ideas”) for having come so far.  This last point is to get your customers to do your advertising for you.  This may seem obvious, but few carpet cleaning businesses put this into use effectively.

The right way to this is to turn your customers into “raving fans”.  The only way to do this is to do such a good job that your clients will not be able to help themselves but talk about you and recommend your services to their friends.  This means that your whole package has to be professional and customer orientated, but there are some extra ideas that you can throw into the mix.  

For example, consider sending out postcards for events like birthdays or holidays, especially if you take the time to write a hand written note.  You can also throw in a small “bonus” with the completion of a job, such as a professional can of stain removal spray or perhaps a box of chocolates or bottle of wine.

You to learn more about how to create these "raving fans" you can pick up the book Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service for some light holiday reading.  (This is an Amazon affiliate link, I get a small commission if you purchase the book, but I included it because it is a highly recommended book and well worth the small investment).

You want to create more of these...

Lastly, you need to also actively ask for referrals.  For example, you could send a survey following the completion of a job.  A few days later you should contact those customers who gave you highly favourable reviews and ask them for recommendations of neighbours or friends who may want the service.  You can then actively go about contact them and acquiring new customers.