Four Basic Steps to Marketing Your Full-Service Offerings
Wash-dry-fold services can be an incredible boon to your customers. You’re offering them a time-saving, hassle-free way to get their laundry done. You’re helping today’s customers stay on top of their busy schedules with little inconvenience, minimal wait times and a fair price tag.
When executed correctly, a wash-dry-fold service should allow you to increase customer satisfaction by providing clean clothes without much work from the customer’s point of view. In addition, industry estimates have shown that wash-dry-fold operations can increase a laundromat’s revenue by anywhere from 5 percent to 30 percent.
It’s a serious win-win.
However, excellent services don’t sell themselves, and competition can be fierce at times in this industry. Even the smallest towns likely have multiple laundromats, while large cities often feel like there’s a laundromat on every street corner.
Competing in any environment requires a particular set of tools alongside a thought-out process that reaches potential customers in an engaging way. I want to share the basics of how you can acquire the right tools and build a solid marketing funnel to grow both an existing business and a wash-dry-fold addition.
Step 1: Begin with an Updated Website
One of the fundamental pillars of digital marketing is your website. It’s the central hub where visitors can learn about your business, what you have to offer, where you’re located and more. Although the underlying messages may not vary much from one laundromat’s website to another, it’s still an essential aspect of your marketing. At the very least, you’re telling a potential customer that you can provide them the service they need – and an updated design goes a long way in that effort.
But the effects go deeper still. Your website is the best place to be found online simply because it’s yours. When someone is on your site, you’re not competing for attention with other social posts or ads, and you have that visitor’s total attention. A click to your website is a click toward your business, a vital engagement that displays interest in what you have to offer. No matter where that click comes from, it’s crucial to have the correct information on your website, coupled with a pleasant experience overall. When put together correctly, you stand a much better chance of pulling in a potential customer.
Boiled down: you need to set up your website to establish trust and credibility with new and returning visitors through effective design. From there, you can start to think a bit more about the audiences you want to reach.
Step 2: Develop Your Audience
Once your website is created and optimized (for both your previously existing services and any new additions), it’s time to start honing in on your audience. The idea behind audience-centered messages is to tailor what you’re saying so that it’s easy for the listeners. When preparing a message, marketers analyze their audience and adapt content or language usage accordingly.
Therefore, knowing your audience when approaching your wash-dry-fold marketing is an important step. You should know (with some degree of accuracy) your optimal customer’s age range, gender, education level, language, neighborhoods, budget and more before trying to create content that speaks to them. Knowing who you are talking to will make sure that they’ll be able to understand what you’re saying.
How do you get this information? By analyzing your current customer base. Start by talking to your current customers and find out what they like and dislike about your laundromat, its online presence and your current marketing. Ask them where they browse online and whether or not they’d like to see content that helps them with their laundry chore.
Believe it or not, people look for tips to help with stains, detergents, water temperature and hundreds of other laundry-centric topics. Finding out what interests your audience will help you find ways to connect with current customers and new prospects on a personal level – so, when you’re creating content, the end result will feel natural.
When done correctly, knowing your audience can help you stay ahead of your competition, find new ideas for inspiring and exciting content, and improve your ability to connect for any service. To drive it home even more fully, knowing your audience will help you gauge whether or not adding a wash-dry-fold service will stand a chance of success to begin with.
Step 3: Take on Search, Social and Email
By now, you have a solid website and an understanding of who your audience is and where they hang out online. Now it’s time to create the content that helps increase your marketing’s reach and enhance your new services’ visibility.
This is, in practice, simply an exercise in growing the size and strength of your audience. You can take to social media and attack search engine rankings to generate traffic to your website and turn that traffic into new leads. From there, you can continue to engage with those mediums, while adding on email marketing as a way to send personalized messages, offers and tips to your engaged audience members.
Which specific sites will work best for your business? It depends – and analyzing your audience is the key to this answer. Chances are, though, you’ll be taking a closer look at Facebook and Instagram, with a chance at TikTok or Snapchat. Do your due diligence before committing your time and resources to your chosen engagement platform.
Here’s the good news about these marketing efforts: they’re all cost-effective. Everyone has email these days, and social media accounts are free to start and use. If you’re paying for your website already, creating content in an effort to rank on search engines is a valuable use of your time. Even if you acquire tools to help with these (and it’s generally recommended that you use at least a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite), your costs will remain low, while the potential ROI is high.
Step 4: Develop a Way to Measure Marketing Success
The final crucial element when marketing is to understand how you define and measure success. Understanding conversion rates and traffic trends will allow for instant feedback on whether or not your campaign strategy is working, which can be vital in adjusting future efforts accordingly.
However, it can be challenging for small businesses to monitor and analyze their marketing efforts. Many laundromats can only guess how much business they get from online reviews or social media mentions. They don’t know which customers came because of a Facebook ad or an Instagram post, so they end up throwing everything against the wall in hopes something will stick.
This makes it difficult to determine which strategies are working best and how much of your budget should be allocated toward each type of marketing activity. What types of metrics are the most important and where can you start getting actionable insights?
- Email marketing efforts should track open rates, click-through rates and landing page conversions.
- Social media campaigns need to track engagement (likes and shares), as well as clicks and conversions.
- Paid ads need to pay close attention to cost-per-click metrics, cost per customer and retention rates.
- SEO focused efforts should track page ranks through a tool like Ahrefs or Moz and keep an eye on Google’s algorithm updates.
I can point to various solutions here – such as measuring your marketing efforts with Google Analytics or setting up promotions through a service like Hubspot to track redemptions and customer conversions. There are tons of software solutions out there. The key is to find one that works for the marketing campaigns you set up.
The marketing of a wash-dry-fold laundry service is not as straightforward as it may seem. There are several factors to consider, including the website, audience development, search engine optimization, social media strategy, email campaigns and tracking. But it’s not impossible and can be incredibly powerful. By following these steps and doing some additional research into what will work best for your company goals, you can take control of just how successful your laundry business can become online.
