If you’re considering opening a laundromat, top of your list of considerations should be your marketing strategy. A solid marketing plan is essential for success within the laundry industry - without it how will potential customers find your business? And while marketing may not be your strong point, with the rise of social media and the vast array of tools provided by the internet, you don't need a dedicated marketing team to build a successful laundry business, what you need is a comprehensive marketing plan, a marketing budget, and a willingness to try new ideas. In this post, we’ll explore digital marketing strategies and offline tactics to help you stand out and better attract potential customers.
1. Get involved in Your Community
Utilize Local Partnerships
You can start thinking about how you’ll find new customers, even before you open your laundromat or dry cleaners. If your new business is in a residential neighbourhood or small town, play to your advantage and focus on building up partnerships and relationships with other local business owners. This might include offering discounts to local businesses and running cross promotional advertising - for example you could pop an advert in your window for a local barber, and they could reciprocate in kind with an offer for customers. This kind of activity isn’t limited to business owners in small towns, if you’re in a larger city, you can take the same approach with local business owners on your block. Building up these strategic partnerships is a key way to distinguish yourself from larger industry players, such as Laundryheap, and to build up a loyal customer base. In fact, research from the Small Business Administration has found that local businesses that collaborate often see increased customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and community support.
Google Business Profile
In today’s digital environment, you need more than just a physical store. You need an online presence. Ensuring that your laundromat business is listed on local directories can significantly enhance your visibility and help you get in front of your target audience. Platforms like Yelp and Google Business are crucial for local SEO and can help drive more traffic to your business. Our blog Clean Up Online: Why Every Laundromat Needs a Google Business Page provides a detailed overview on the benefits of a Google Business Profile. In a nutshell it can help you increase your visibility, build credibility and, most importantly, it helps you get an all important listing on Google maps. If you're not sure how to set up your Google Business profile, there are plenty of online resources to help you. Hootsuite has a quick and easy guide: How to Set Up and Optimize Google My Business in 5 Minutes which gives a thorough overview of the benefits along with tips to make the most of your profile.
Being listed is one thing, but to really grow your reputation and get found online you need to have positive reviews. Having positive customer feedback on local review sites like Google Reviews and Yelp will really help to build credibility and attract new customers. Worried about your online reputation? While you may not be able to 100% avoid negative reviews, there are steps you can take to reduce them. For more information, check out our blog on how to clean up negative reviews.
Community Publications
While ensuring you have a visible online presence is of course important, they’re not the only channels which can help you find new loyal customers. Offline channels are also critical to building your brand and reaching a wider audience in today’s competitive market. If you haven't thought through an advertising plan for your laundry service, now might be the time to do so. Advertising in local magazines and publications, such as school magazines or town journals, can effectively target your customer base. If you offer a pickup and delivery service, use these platforms to promote your app and website, making it easy for customers to book your services. And while traditionally advertising campaigns ran in print media, many of these publications now have an online advertising component which can help you reach an even larger audience.
2. Send Direct Mailers
As we've looked at, a digital presence is important, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for traditional, offline marketing tactics, such as direct mailers. While it might not be the most innovative marketing strategy, contrary to what many people think, direct mail isn’t dead. In fact it is a powerful tool and can yield strong results particularly when coupled with a local marketing approach. Here’s why direct mailers make sense as part of your dry cleaning and laundry business marketing strategy:
Targeted to Local Audiences
Direct mailers allow business owners to target specific geographic areas and demographics. By focusing on neighborhoods and communities within a certain radius of your business, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are reaching the most relevant audience—those who are likely to need laundromat services.
Customized Offers
With direct mailers, you can tailor your marketing messages and offers to different customer segments. This is important because you may have several ideal customer profiles for your business. For example, you can send special promotions to new residents in the area, offer discounts to families, or provide exclusive deals for college students. This level of customization can significantly increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.
Tangible and Personal Connection
In a world dominated by digital marketing communications, receiving a physical piece of mail can create a memorable impression and lead to a better customer experience. Direct mailers give potential customers something tangible to hold onto, making your business stand out from the flood of digital ads they encounter daily.
Personal Touch
Direct mailers can be personalized with the recipient’s name and tailored messages, adding a personal touch that can make recipients feel valued. According to a study by Epsilon, 59% of US respondents said they were pleased to be receiving mail from brands about new and exciting products. It is perhaps not surprising then to hear that recipients then go on to spend 28% more money with a brand than those who didn’t receive a direct mailer, making them a potentially very cost effective channel for small business owners.
Encouraging Action
Direct mailers can drive immediate action by including clear calls-to-action (CTAs), such as “Visit our store for a special discount,” “Sign up for our pickup and delivery service,” or “First time customers receive a discount with this coupon.” Including a time-sensitive offer or a scannable QR code can further incentivize recipients to act quickly.
Complementary to Digital Marketing
Direct mailers can complement your digital marketing efforts by reinforcing your brand message across multiple channels. For instance, you can follow up a direct mail campaign with targeted social media posts or ads and email reminders, creating a cohesive and comprehensive marketing strategy. According to Canada Post, paid 39 per cent more attention to integrated campaigns than to pure digital campaigns.
Cost-Effective Marketing
Advancements in printing technology have made it more affordable to produce high-quality direct mailers in smaller quantities. You can also take advantage of bulk mailing rates offered by postal services, making it a cost-effective way to reach a large audience.
Measurable Results
The final reason for including Direct mail campaigns as part of your laundromat marketing strategy is that they are highly measurable. You can track response rates and conversion rates by including unique promo codes, trackable phone numbers, or specific landing pages. Analyzing these metrics helps you assess the effectiveness of your campaign and refine your strategies for future mailers.
3. Get Reviews and Referrals
Customer Testimonials and Referrals
As part of your marketing plan, consider how you can use your existing loyal customers to attract new ones. Encourage happy customers to refer new business through a loyalty program which rewards them with either credits or special discounts for each new customer they refer. You might think that your current customers are already doing this, but research shows that while 83% of customers are willing to refer after a positive experience, only 29% do. With a referral incentive that goes up. Referral marketing is incredibly effective as a marketing strategy - not only does it help with customer retention but it can be extremely effective. 8/10 people report that they trust recommendations from friends and family. Not only that but customer reviews are consistently marked as being important in the decision making process for first time customers, so if you're looking for a cost effective way to grow your business, you can't get much better than reviews and referrals.
4. Expand Your Online Marketing
We’ve already touched on some online marketing strategies that you can use such as Google Business. But there are many other channels which you should consider in order to build a solid marketing strategy.
Email Marketing
Email marketing isn’t new, but it’s without doubt an effective marketing strategy when it comes to communicating with customers. Due to increasingly strict GDPR rules, it can be difficult to use email to attract new customers, but it remains a powerful customer engagement tool, helping to boost customer retention and increase revenue. As part of your marketing plan you should take the time to build out an effective email marketing strategy which includes regularly emailing customers with updates about the laundry services you offer, sending incentives to encourage an order from customers who haven’t used your services in a while, promoting benefits like your customer referral programme and announcing any new additional services that you might offer.
There are many tools you can use to manage your emails with CRM systems like MailChimp widely available. However, to really get the benefit from your emails you should use a system that integrates with your POS to allow you to personalize your messages and tailor your offering. CleanCloud offers a robust CRM allowing you to set up specific rules which trigger automated messages when a customer takes a certain action, for instance you could set up a campaign which triggers a discount if a customer hasn’t placed an order for 90 days.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You’ve built your website, it’s fully branded and it looks great. But the customers aren’t coming - why? It’s possible that although your website looks great, it isn’t well optimized. Meaning that search engines like Google aren’t ranking it highly, which in turns means your customers won’t find you.
When we say something is SEO optimized, it simply means that search engines are able to read and rank your website so that when online searches are made, your dry cleaning and laundry business appears . This is achieved through a combination of having valuable content on your site and the authority that your site has. The content needs to tell search engines about your business and what services you offer, this then helps you to rank for keywords such as ‘laundry service in Miami’. It’s not enough to just pepper your site with these keywords though, search engines will look for ‘authority’ as well as ‘relevancy’ of keywords. This means there is no point in putting the keyword ‘laundry service in Miami’ if in fact you are not based in Miami.
The number of links back to your website also help boost your SEO - again this is where your local partnerships and networks can come into play with links and cross - promotions from other local websites helping to boost your business. CleanCloud customers who build a website with our website builder also benefit from a backlink from CleanCloud which can help to boost SEO.
Whatever size your business, it’s well worth investing in a long term SEO strategy to ensure sustainable growth. Not sure where to start? There are plenty of online guides and blog posts like this 5 SEO tips to grow a small business which can help.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
If expanding your reach and getting discovered by new customers is your goal then pay per click or PPC is a channel that can deliver results, fast. Not sure what PPC is? You may also know it as Google Ads or Google Adwords. The clue is in the name - you can boost your business to the top of Google search results by running Google Ads, but you’ll pay for each click that you link receives. It’s a tried and proven channel for small businesses, with as many as 65% of SMB’s using PPC to drive their growth.
However, Google Ads comes with challenges. While it can deliver fast results, and it’s measurable it does come with a learning curve and if not done correctly it can quickly become expensive. If you’re considering PPC it’s worth doing some upfront research and possibly even looking at getting a marketing professional to help you set up initial campaigns and tracking to ensure that you’re getting the most for your spend.
5. Social Media Marketing
The power of social media is not to be underestimated when it comes to attracting new customers. Social Media platforms attract huge followings, in the US alone Facebook has 175 million users - just over half the population of the US. TikTok ranks not far behind with an estimated 150 million users. When used correctly social media marketing represents a huge opportunity for laundromat business owners. Before deciding where to put your social media efforts, think about your target market and where they’re likely to be. If you’re in a college town, TikTok ads may make sense, whereas if your local customers tend to be families, Facebook ads may be more appropriate. It’s also worth considering how you will make the ads. With platforms like Facebook you can use static ads, whereas TikTok relies on video content. Whichever channels you choose, as part of your social media strategy be sure to tailor your ads and messages to your audience.
Make Data-Driven Decisions
Whatever channels you ultimately decide to use - it’s important that you pay attention to the data. Before you set out, set measurable goals and use data analytics to track the performance of all of your marketing efforts. You may find that it’s easier to do this for your online marketing strategies where tools like Google Analytics can provide insights into what strategies are working and where improvements are needed. But you can also start to track your offline marketing activity. Unique promo codes are a great way to see if activity is working - just be sure to put a different promo code on each channel. For example you may have one code for the adverts you run in the local paper, and another for the leaflets that you drop through local residents' doors.
Test and Learn
When it comes to implementing a market strategy for your laundry business, the reality is there is no silver bullet. You’ll need to test and learn what works for you - each business is different and different tactics work depending on your location, target customers etc. Don’t be afraid to experiment with a mix of digital marketing strategies and offline marketing activity to find what works best for your business. The key is to remain flexible and adapt to changing market conditions.
By following these strategies, you’ll find that even a small amount of marketing can significantly benefit your business. If you’d like to discuss any of these strategies or see how CleanCloud can help your business, start a free trial or book some time with one of our expert sales team who will be happy to answer any questions.