[Aquakleen Restoration Services]

Hi all,

The amount per month I spend on marketing and advertising is not much to be honest but after 5 years of being in this business gets me in a half decent living.

However I now want to take the business up to the next level and would like to make £1000-£1500 per week on a regular basis and maybe even take on a staff member.

I currently use a local guy for my leaflets who brings in most of my new business but it is not regular as some weeks he is not able to deliver for various reasons. As this is the case I am thinking of using Amaro or another national firm to deliver my leaflets on a much more regular basis (but keeping him to do some as well as he is much cheaper)!!

For all of you who make this kind of money how much do you spend on marketing and advertising per week/month?

Many thanks

John.

[davep]

You want to make £1500 a week, why the paycut John? 

[clinton]

Hi john

Was just asking how much do you pay your leaflet guy please as i have some to be dropped off and was thinking of geting my gfriends brother to do them as he has been laid of from work and did not want to take advantage

Same here i dont spend much on advertising at all and rely on regulars :

Cheers clinton

[Ken Wainwright]

John I'm at the lower end of your target. My normal advertising budget is £360 per annum. £138 is the only proper advertising I do (YP Corporate Advert with NCCA in two directories). The rest is community advertising which I do expecting no return. I've never had a response from the local football club programme in over 10 years!. Being a member of the NCCA, I receive considerably more work from their website and office referal system than the cost of my annual fees. I don't cost this as paid advertising, just a benefit of membership.

This year I also got involved with a local theatre production to the tune of £300, again expecting nil return. So you could say that my advertising has gone up this year from about £7 per week to <£13 per week Advertising/direct marketing is a choice rather than a necessity.

I'm blessed with an established business whereby I don't need to be involved with direct marketing. I have to ask myself if I want to spend a few £k's do generate a few £k's more or use my time for other things.

There are however, no/low cost ways to market your business. The first is best explained in a phrase I coined many years ago. Kitchen Sink Marketing. This is where you spend more time with your customer rather than a quick in/out so you can fit more jobs in a day. Obviously you will need to be towards the premium end of pricing, but you also need to give more. Apart from the social aspect of "kissing the cat and kicking the kids" talk through good housekeeping procedures. Such as how to vac, how to care for the machine, how to treat spillages, spotting techniques and products, walking off detergent residues from kitchen floors etc. etc.  If, like me, you are the sort of person who receives greater pleasure from working this way rather than a salesmans pleasure from just making the sale, then this is an avenue to be explored.  It's what works for me and also valued colleagues such as the Bolton Brothers and others whose names you may not be too familiar with. I also have a good working, and personal, relationship with quality local carpet retailers and a local radio consumers affairs broadcaster.

Unfortunately, you may need to market yourself aggressively to reach this stage of comfort.

Safe and happy cleaning
Ken

[Mike Osbourne]

John

i'd ask myself....

I have a reasonable web page, how many see it, what percentage contact me and how can I improve it?

What referral schemes do I have in place?

How often do Iget in touch with customers?

What's my quote to job ratio?

When was the last time I just put my prices up and why not now?

Do  I ofer protector on every appropriate job?

Do I always ask for more work while I'm there?

You can go on all day with questions like this, note most cost nothing to implement if yu are not doing them.

Hope this helps

Mike

[clinton]

Mike

Yes its true what you said 

[Doctor Carpet (Ret'd)]

John

I notice you forgot to actually mention what you are spending at present! :

Like Ken I do do a little bit of advertising from which I don't expect to get a return (although sometimes I am surprised). Also like Mike I would like to think I am good at the unpaid/uncosted forms of advertising which does seem to bring in a lot of work.

Like Ken the business has been going for a long time (maybe not so long as ken ) and this I would assume does have a bearing on how much advertising has to be spent to establish a business as opposed to re-assuring the public that you are still in business.

But to answer directly the question you asked, my only advertising is Yellow Pages. Cost c£2600 p.a. so say about £50 per week equivalent. It brings in about £5k of new business a year. However I see the real value in that it is a place that many people will turn to to find my contact details once I have been recommended to them, or want to use me again but have lost all other contact details. In other words it confirms my presence.

I must say you raising the question was particularly pertinent as I had been thinking about it for some time and I wondered how much you guys who do a lot of leafleting spend per month.

[clinton]

Hi roger

I did see some of your cards in the nail and beauty shop were my mum goes

Its next to the moor top

[Mike Halliday]

you have to be careful what you take notice of on this forum regarding marketing and income, Ken says he spends very little on marketing but doesn't say how much he earns or if he is actively trying to grow his business, this is'nt a criticism of Ken its just an observation, Ken runs a business that suits  him, but his business might not suit you.

you need to only take notice of people who have a business that you want to emulate.

I spend Approx £200 a week on advertising which is £10k a year, this will sound like a fortune to some people but you need to realise  how much money this brings in to see its true value.

[Mike Osbourne]

Apology

Sorry John I do this a lot. I don't answer the question and replace it with one I think you should have asked.

I average about £350 a month, that includes all web stuff, stationary, homegrown RISO leaflets, averaged out cost of softare and training material.

Mike

ps if anybody can get A4 80gm coloured paper for less than £2.80 a ream please let me know.

cheapest white paper Morrisons £1.75

[Mike Halliday]

just to add all that money is spent on leafleting, I only spent £118 on Y/Ps

[Mike Osbourne]

Mike

When you say advertising, are you not including writing to your customer base etc, which of course would be extra cost?

[Jim_77]

Advertising, leaflets, direct mail... they're all disciplines of marketing.

Maybe everyone doesn't mean the same thing when they say "advertising" !

[markpowell]

I spend about £150.00 a week, mosty on leaflets the rest on yellow pages .
I take about a £1000 average per week.
Most work comes from repeat customers and people passing our details on.
I am on with getting a website built now, so hopefully i can bring down the leaflet cost in due course.
Mark

[Aquakleen Restoration Services]

davep
I usually make £2500 per week but Ie decided to take it easy for a while  

Clinton
My leafleter on average delivers 5000 per week though sometimes he doesn’t deliver any for a variety of reasons. He only charges me £10 per 1000 but delivers others at the same time as mine. I am looking in to using Amaro who I could probably get a good deal from for about £20+Vat per 1000. I guess I spend about £100 per month on leaflet delivery and spend £175 for 20,000 on print costs.

I just feel I need more regularity with them like Mr Halliday does.

Mike Osbourne
Some very good points there! I do not have any referral scheme in place. What do you do and what response rate do you get? I send postcards out to all my customers every 3 months and have some going out end of November for the xmas rush.

Doctor Carpet
As I said above I usually spend £150 per month (on average for printing and delivery).

Mike Halliday
I think you and I think along the same wavelengths. I would happily spend £200 per week if it were to bring me in £1000+ per week!

Thanks so far for all the positive comments guys
John

[clinton]

John

Am going to let my g friends brother do some for me while he is not working so maybe he could do 5000 in a week for me john how long does it take him to do a 1000

[Mike Osbourne]

John

My referral thingy for customers is a salesy thing I do at the end of a job and isn't really going to work for you. I know JK has mentioned a card based system he used to use and this ideal cos you just give them the card.

Naturally when we think of referrals we think of customers referring friends etc, where in reality the easiest and biggest return is with other companies letting you tap in to their clients.

On a general note. Say you are doing 750 a week and you want to do 1000. You KNOW what to do already, you just don't do it.

If I'm honest I have loads of ideas and it's easy to talk about them and it's not much more effort to do them, but do I? Well sometimes.

So really the thing that's really going to make a difference is deciding why you want 1k a week and whether you are prepared to do it no matter what it takes.

[Mike Halliday]

Mike

When you say advertising, are you not including writing to your customer base etc, which of course would be extra cost?

Mike are you asking me this question? I'll answer it as if you are

I bleat on about working in a small area, My leaflet goes to the same houses every month and has done for the last 6-8yrs so all my existing customers get my leaflet every month (as do the general public) so i don't send out reminder cards as my leaflet acts as a reminder to my existing customers.

[Mike Osbourne]

Mike H

Yes I did mean you

I had never thought about it like that, I suppose you do cover everyone and the beauty of it is it's just one task and it's all done.

If anything I've gone the other way, being very targetted and personalised and is quite a logistical effort which is why I needed a good database set up.

I just wish all my custies where on email, where I live the average age has to be in the 60s 

[Doctor Carpet (Ret'd)]

....and just to complicate things again.

So far we have talked about financial spending. We should also consider "time" spending as this obviously needs to go in the mix.

As I've said, my only printed advertising is YP and I tend to simply repeat the advert each year so little time spent on it. (Some time spent analysing the results I get.)

I'm sure a lot of us spend time advertising when we are in front of the client, but maybe that is just considered part of the job.

I spend perhaps 1.5 to 2 hours a month, phoning and emailing clients.

Mike, you're right! You need to take notice of whom says what, but it can be interesting to go back through people's old posts as this can allow you to build up a picture of somebody. So a lot of the points we are discussing now can also be found, but made from a different point of discussion on a different subject elsewhere on the forum.