Clean Show, Day Two – Marketing, Part Two

By Bob Nieman | Jun 07, 2011

Day Two of Clean 2011 in Las Vegas started, appropriately, with the second straight day of in-depth marketing discussions. Dovetailing nicely with Day One’s popular panel discussion, CLA Director of Marketing Kim Fenolio kicked off the two-hour morning discussion with a “Complete Guide to Laundry Marketing.”

Unlike business websites of the past, where owners followed the build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy, Fenolio offered a twist on the old cliché: “If you build it, you’d better be prepared to work for it.”

But for that hard work, she promised a payoff.

“Seventy-seven percent of all customers do research online before they walk through your door,” Fenolio said.

Surprisingly, 46 percent of small-business owners don’t have websites. And, unfortunately, 82 percent of laundry owners have neglected to build their own sites, she explained.

“Laundry owners need to lead the pack and get that business before the competition does,” Fenolio said.

The educational session covered all of the bases, regarding today’s most-discussed marketing methods, including search engine optimization, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, e-mail marketing, Google Adwords, GPS services and QR codes.

Howe ver, some of the more traditional ways to capture customers’ attention also were covered.

“Eighty percent of adults listen to the radio in their cars, and a quarter of the population listens at work,” Fenolio said.

So, the advantages of radio advertising, as well as cable TV and newspaper ads, were not neglected.

“Our goal is to empower you,” said CLA President and CEO Brian Wallace, at the end of the morning’s session. “We’re all learning this together. Our main job is to help all of you make more money. We will only progress if all of us do more business, and the single missing ingredient has been advertising and marketing.

“Today, laundry owners need to go beyond relying on just their locations and exterior signage,” he added. “To those who say that new competitors make the ‘slices of the pie’ smaller for everyone, I say we need to bake a bigger pie.”