Customers who need clean clothes for work or special occasions find dry cleaners helpful. Generating dry cleaner leads for your business doesn’t have to be difficult if you know how to get in front of your target audience.
It’s clear how much you will need those leads since they can lead you to more businesses and hence, opportunities to grow. The key to getting them is knowing the solution you offer and how to catch their attention in comparison with your competitors.
Dry cleaners are usually located in high-traffic areas and near shopping centers. These factors will influence your approach to attracting customers to your business.
Dry cleaning advertising has seen a dramatic shift in its landscape in the past ten years. Consumer habits have changed. They no longer rely as heavily on dry cleaning, whether they are looking for business casual or “no-wrinkle fabrics.”
Although you cannot control what people wear to work each day, you can do advertising. Effective dry cleaning advertising can help your business stand out in a saturated market and get qualified sales leads.
Keep ahead of your competition. An effective marketing plan looks at your services and compares them with others in the region. You can plan to identify the best way to market your services to current and potential customers.
The United States has an estimated 30.000 dry cleaners. This means plenty of competition for this essential service provider in the local community.
Dry cleaners cannot rely solely on their location to stand out and generate leads. They must get the word out about why their service is better than others.
There are many marketing options available. You need to target your customers at a local level. It would be best to communicate the right message to stand out from your competition.
You may have wondered why your competitor has a more substantial brand presence than you despite offering a better service. The answer lies in their lead generation strategies. We will be discussing the top dry cleaners’ marketing strategy in 2022 and how you can start bringing more customers.
After the Covid-19 crisis, the world is moving toward digitalization. You do not want your customers to be left behind if you are not flexible with changes in dry cleaning marketing strategies.
Social Media Allows You to Connect with Prospects
Social media can be a powerful lead generation tool that can help you lose significant amounts of customers if it is not used in 2022. Dry cleaning and laundry businesses have the highest percentage of customers from the young and those with less time.
These customers spend a large percentage of their time online. What could be more effective than attracting them by increasing your social media visibility?
To get started with social media, you can create an account for your business on Google My Business to establish your online presence. You can then use the various social media platforms to your advantage by creating accounts for your dry cleaning business on each of them.
In 2022, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook were the most popular social media lead generation tools for dry cleaners. Once you create an account, start posting about your business and make sure that you just focus on those three platforms if you can’t handle it.
In addition to working with the whole process of social media marketing and how you need to maintain your presence online while also building it, you can rely on social media advertising.
This latter option is a lead generation strategy to reach prospects wherever they spend their time. The average user spends 28% of their time on the Internet per day, and these ads help you be there based on what they’re looking at.
To connect with the audience, you can use as many platforms as you like. After identifying the media that you wish to use, you will be able to see what kind of content you can post.
You will have different content formats depending on which platform you use, but all platforms allow you to upload photos and videos.
Make sure you share content on social media that is relevant and exciting to your potential customers. People will share, comment, and like your content.
Here are some best practices for dry cleaners that choose social media to market their business.
- Engage with your followers: This is one of the most significant social media benefits. Take time to reply to comments and engage in conversation with people who comment on your posts. You should also answer direct messages!
- Post frequently: You want people to see your posts on social media. To help you keep up with posting, see how cohesive your lead generation campaigns are, and identify content gaps, you can use a social calendar.
- Run ads: You can reach prospects looking for dry cleaning services but have not yet found the right one. These leads can be driven to your business by targeted ads.
- Be consistent: Post frequently or on alternate days. Consistent posting on social media is more effective in getting noticed by customers than other businesses.
- Focus on the customer: A wise man once stated, ‘The best way to sell a product is not to sell it. Your customers should be treated as friends. Help them identify their problems and offer solutions.’ This is the best company marketing strategy to ensure that your laundry or dry-cleaning business survives.
- One little bit of sarcasm can make a big difference: Sarcasm, although it is a standard business strategy, is not something that anyone talks about. Twitter gets many tweets each day, but only a handful are noticed. This is because people relate to the few that get seen. Engage with customers via social media to understand their preferences and offer personalized laundry and dry cleaning services.
- Inform them: Let your customers know about the latest offers and discounts you have via social media. To get customers to come in, create buzz about it on social media. It would help if you emphasized this on special occasions and festivals.
- Social Media Strategy: To avoid random posts and maximize the use of social media, it is vital to develop a solid social media lead generation strategy. It would help if you had a social media strategy for dry cleaning businesses, such as Mondays for Informatory Posts and Tuesdays for Quick Polls.
Content Marketing Allows You to Share Knowledge with Others
Content marketing is another critical strategy for Internet marketing dry cleaners for generating leads. This strategy will enable you to share your expertise with others and establish yourself as an authority on your subject.
How do you start with this lead generation strategy?
Learn about the various content formats. There are many content types you can create.
- Blog posts.
- Video.
- Infographics.
- eBooks.
- Guides.
- Podcasts.
You want to write industry-relevant content. Your audience will actively search for information on these topics as they want to always learn more.
If you offer dry cleaning for wedding dresses, you might create a blog post about how to clean them. It is possible to write content about how much it costs for a wedding gown to be dry-cleaned and if it is worth it.
If you want to make your strategy work, create content frequently. You show that you are active in your industry and keep abreast of the latest information by putting everything together for your prospects. It also makes new ways that people can find your dry-cleaning company.
It would help if you used a content calendar to stay organized when creating content frequently. A content calendar can help you plan when to create, edit, or publish your content. This ensures that you have constant content flowing to your website.
PPC Advertising Allows You to Reach More Marketing Qualified Leads
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a massive way to drive qualified leads to your dry-cleaning business. This strategy will enable you to place ads at the search engine results top to generate qualified leads.
- PPC ads can help you go beyond your competitors and bring more qualified leads to dry-cleaning businesses. You can be sure that you are driving marketing qualified leads through this strategy, as ad clickers have a 50% higher conversion rate than organic visitors.
- Long-tail keywords are essential for SEO. Because they are specific, these keywords will bring in more qualified leads. Because they are distinct, there is less competition. This leads to lower bids which will stretch your budget even further.
After choosing your keywords, you can begin to create your ad content. These are the best practices to develop dry-cleaning ads that work.
- Ad extensions: You can use these extensions to give your audience more information when you write your ad copy. Many options help your audience learn more about your business, from structured snippets and callout extensions.
You can create a landing page that is unique to your PPC ads. This keeps your audience focused on what they are looking for. For example, if someone has an in learning more about your laundry services, their custom landing page can be focused on that information.
Your ad copy needs to match your landing page. Your landing page should check your ad content if you advertise wedding gown cleaning services. Your audience will stay engaged for longer if you provide a consistent experience, from view to click.
To Attract Local Leads, Claim Your Google My Business Listing
Optimize your local search presence when you market dry-cleaning online.
People search for dry cleaners in their area as they won’t be traveling for hours to reach the perfect place. You miss an opportunity to drive direct traffic to your dry-cleaning company by not optimizing these search results.
Users can conduct local searches, and it will cause a local three-pack that contains listings from local businesses. This is prime real estate to drive local traffic towards your dry cleaner.
Claim your Google My Business listing. After you have claimed it, verify that your name and address are correct.
After verifying your details, you can improve your Google My Business listing with additional information such as:
- Your email address.
- Hours of operation.
- Photos of your staff and business.
- A brief description of your company.
- Add your business category.
You can provide more information to your customers, encouraging them to visit your dry cleaning business.
Create a Website That Is Beautiful and Keeps People Engaged
People will always return to your dry-cleaning website no matter what lead generation process you choose, as they will need to go to the commonplace where they can find all the information they need.
Your website is the center of your lead generation campaign. It is vital that you make an excellent first impression.
A modern and clean website is the best way to get dry cleaner leads online. The design should reflect your business, from the color choices to stylistic elements. A style guide will ensure that your website has a consistent look throughout.
The style guide can give you guidance about things such as:
- Choose from a variety of designer colors.
- Image style.
- Style and Color of the Call to Action (CTA) button.
- Graphic style.
- Font size, font style, and color.
Your site is more than just good-looking. It must function properly and provide a positive user experience.
You can do these things to keep your visitors interested in your website:
- A seamless navigation bar: This is how visitors find pages on your website. Please make sure you use broad headings and then organize the subcategories under each title to make it possible for your clientele to find information quickly.
- Your site should load quickly. Users do not like to wait for pages that take too long to load. To ensure a pleasant user experience, you need to make sure your page loads quickly. Google PageSpeed Insights can help you see the current loading time of your site and give you helpful tips to improve it.
- Mobile-friendly design: Many people will search for dry-cleaning businesses on their mobile phones. You want your website to look great on these devices.
Responsive design will allow the site to adapt to all devices, delivering the best experience.
You Can Use Search Engines to Increase Traffic
Search engine optimization is a solid component of any strategy you use to market dry cleaners online. SEO refers to improving your website’s rank in search results. This will help you attract qualified traffic.
Search engines are the popular way for people to find dry cleaners in their locality, with 94% of all online searches starting with search engines. You will lose valuable traffic if you do not optimize your website to rank in relevant search results.
Optimizing your pages for key terms can help your site rank higher. Keyword research tools will help you find the right ones you can integrate into your website.
Long-tail keywords are those that contain at least three words. They are more specific and drive the highest quality traffic to your website.
These best practices will help you get the best results out of your efforts.
- Optimizing your meta description and title tag: When your site appears in search results, your audience will first see your meta description and title tag. These keywords should be integrated into the labels and made compelling enough to encourage people to click.
- Earn backlinks: These are links to your website from trusted sites. These links can help you build trust and authority for your site and increase your rankings. You can earn these links by sharing high-quality content with industry leaders.
- Link internally: Internal linking refers to linking to other pages on your website. This is an excellent way for leads to stay on your page longer and helps Google crawl and index pages on the site. Any page can be linked internally, but make sure the anchor text is appropriate to the link!
Word-of-Mouth Promotion
We always check out the reviews of previous buyers before we purchase a new product online or decide to hire a service from a company. If a friend recommends a product, we always make sure we go through it once. We often buy the product from the recommendation or if the business has a good reputation.
You must be doing the same. Humans believe in the power of interpersonal relationships and listening to our peers. Word-of-mouth promotion covers all aspects of customer preferences.
There are many ways to promote word-of-mouth.
When possible, engage with customers to learn their needs and provide solutions. Keep in mind how your barber will see your hair type and recommend products and services that can improve it. It is exactly like that!
The customers would not know anything else about your specials on dry cleaning or laundry services.
Get to know them and offer a discount to each customer who brings in a new one. This is one of our most solid lead generation strategies for dry cleaners.
Ask your customers to leave reviews about your services on social media. Remember, we read reviews before purchasing a product, and the same happens with the rest and other people.
Promotional SMS and Emails
It is difficult to tell customers about promotions after you have decided what advertisements you will offer them. Customers can be informed about a promotion whenever they come into your store. But what happens if the customer does not visit your store for a while?
This is where SMSs and emails come in handy. To inform your clients about the latest offers, send them a message.
These offers should be based on previous laundry or dry cleaning services. If a customer sees a personal recommendation, there is a high likelihood that they will return for your service.
Through our in-built lead generation tools, all of our clients can send SMSs and emails to their customers. This tool allows you to view the customer’s previous purchases, choose a package and notify them via email and SMS.
Pre-Paid Packages and Promotional Discounts
Have you ever shopped for a shirt and seen a deal that said “Buy Two, Get One Free” and decided to buy two shirts instead of one? It happens to everyone, regardless of whether or not they see a sale.
Our psychology encourages us to think about the benefits we will receive from this deal rather than deciding how much money we would like to spend on that product.
All industries have the same human psychology. Try offering a package that includes five clothes dry-cleaning for four to your customer next time you visit. See how they react. Pre-paid packages are an integral part of our client’s business strategy.
They will continue to be a key component in their long-term growth. Pre-Paid plans significantly impact dry cleaning businesses and are one of the best ways for customer retention and lead generation.
Trying Other Options
You can also market your business by advertising directly to customers instead of local ads. You can do this by increasing brand visibility and offering discounts.
Networking is the best and most efficient way to reach customers directly. Refer your customers to your friends and family. People respond well to recommendations from their friends. This will result in a high response rate.
The best way to market is to incentivize your current customers to sign up for their accounts with credit or discounts.
Like Uber giving credit to you and your friend for signing up, you can also grow your business by doing the same.
Brand visibility is another crucial tool to direct marketing efforts to customers. Your logo and information should be visible in as many places as possible so that customers are more likely to use your company.
If you run a pickup-and-delivery service, this can include branding your vans or packaging to give back clothes to customers. A combination of marketing strategies will produce better results.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Dry Cleaner Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Dry Cleaner Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Dry Cleaner Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.