- Elite Window Cleaning
- November 27, 2020
- 3 Comments
The 51 Percent
Let’s look at some of the fundamental reasons why this 2020 season was a success for our marketing support team. Learn how this team works with our Franchise Owners here.
The first is that Elite Window Cleaning offers an incredible service, and it’s executed by an even better team. $98 Exterior Window Cleaning (this gets people in the door) and we 100% Guarantee our work. It’s a low-cost provider that simultaneously offers great service and guarantees the result. Very few businesses can say they offer the lowest price AND a quality guarantee. This is what we call “The 51 Percent.” It’s because 49 percent of what we do is clean windows, the rest is making sure our clients are delighted by our service.
Marketing Support and Sales Magic
Elite also has a sales team that is able to work magic. Part of that magic has comes from putting our marketing support team in the call centre for the past 2 and a half years. Our marketers hear the pulse of the company, sometimes whether or not they want to. It can feel overbearing at times, but there are also quiet spaces to work in the office if need be.
Further, the value in hearing what customers have to say at different points along their purchasing and servicing journey is an intangible asset. Many ideas are proven wrong just by listening to the other end of a client call. There are invaluable lessons hidden away in your clients, you just have to listen.
So our marketers are close to the action, and they keep their finger on the pulse of the company. The last piece of the puzzle is that our marketing support team members have worked as Elite Window Cleaners. They’ve done the work. They’ve seen the look in a client’s eyes when they look at a home of perfectly cleaned windows. Knowing what that is like, understanding the feelings going through a client in that moment – that’s the magic.
Spend Support Strategy
Now, where did the money get spent? Digital, mostly. Of that, mostly Google AdWords and Bing, bidding on specific keywords and trying out different programmatic ad strategies (which our head marketer now recommends against using). We also used Mailchimp, and spent about $2K on a small radio buy.
And one last quick note on using Bing. First, they let you import your campaigns from Google AdWords, which is just incredible. Second, there’s much less competition, so you can easily dominate results. Finally, the people that use Bing are older and less tech savvy, someone that uses Internet Explorer. They are more likely to click on ads and they are likely to be older. This was our target market, so it was a great fit. We don’t expect companies to sleep on Bing forever, but it’s a solid platform if you know what you’re doing. This is mostly because it mimics Google, but what’s new?
The keywords and campaigns that we use on Google and Bing have been refined over the past 2 and a half years. We have trimmed all the fat on them because from the get-go they needed to be self sustaining. We didn’t have a burn rate until after we didn’t need it anymore. The first year it was a tough conversation to get any money for advertising that didn’t immediately drive sales.
That last sentence is probably painful for any marketer to hear, because anybody worth anything in the marketing world knows that things take time. Just because you can have better ads or copy today, doesn’t mean that people will buy it immediately after you change it.
And yet you do need to make change happen, and the faster it happens, the better off you will be.
Content Support Strategy
The unpaid marketing activities that contributed to our 2020 success will be broken down in another post. However, here are some highlights: Calling back every single client from previous years, Follow-up client calls after every job, Charity cleanings and Internal content creation.
As far as we can tell, Elite Window Cleaning creates a significantly larger amount of content than any other window cleaning company on the planet. This means that there is a lot of material for the marketing support team to work with. It also means that we’ve found a way to harness creativity in our teams across a collective brand identity. That last point is critical, because it means that we will consistently be producing high volume AND high quality content. Both of these things bring us ahead of the curve, but it’s what we do next that solidifies it.
We engage with and post in localized groups and platforms in the areas that we operate in. Specifically, we use our Facebook organic presence, Facebook Groups and Google MyBusiness. We use these platforms first because they are the ones that we see consistent returns on.
Intentional Virality
We also post on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter and occasionally Snapchat, but the point is they don’t drive consistent revenue, so this is where I spend my spare time, not my priority time. I post on all of them, because each of them has the ability to go viral in some capacity. We recently had a Facebook video go viral 12 weeks after it had been initially posted (over 500,000 views now). It’s incredibly cool for a window cleaning video, but it also didn’t lead to any additional revenue yet. I expect that video to lead us to significant revenue in the future, the value of it just hasn’t been recognized yet.
The value that recognizes itself immediately is the spend that gets a client on the other end of the phone or filling out our quote calculator. When we try new strategies we scrape the bottom of the barrel with free posts and free email blasts to generate the revenue, then we can justify putting spend behind it.
That’s the same strategic mentality we use with paid channels of advertising.
“Lock down” revenues with proven methods, improve those methods consistently, then use that success to allow you to operate in unknown territory. Cover your bases so that you can have the freedom to express your creative ideas, without worrying about the security of your position.
Spend Numbers
Anyways, we’re almost at the juicy part of the post (the actual numbers). The marketing bookings for the first 4 weeks were all generated through free channels, SEO or email blasts. This is what I mean when I say “Lock Down Revenues with Proven Models”. Build on what naturally occurs (such as a huge influx of calls and searches in Spring) but also don’t try to fight fire with money.
| Week | Total Marketing Spend $ | Total Marketing Booking $ |
| May 3 | $0.00 | $9,496.00 |
| May 10 | $0.00 | $21,998.00 |
| May 17 | $0.00 | $12,772.00 |
| May 24 | $0.00 | $13,360.00 |
| May 31 | $259.46 | $5,406.00 |
| June 7 | $519.98 | $8,871.00 |
| June 14 | $685.71 | $8,956.00 |
| June 21 | $636.51 | $14,189.00 |
| June 28 | $620.11 | $2,616.00 |
| July 5 | $499.87 | $6,532.00 |
| July 12 | $1,111.92 | $7,719.00 |
| July 19 | $791.33 | $5,471.00 |
| July 26 | $974.70 | $5,693.00 |
| August 2 | $644.80 | $3,375.00 |
| August 9 | $861.45 | $5,438.00 |
| August 16 | $773.17 | $3,465.00 |
| August 23 | $607.91 | $13,247.00 |
| August 30 | $955.68 | $15,302.00 |
| September 6 | $670.69 | $8,403.00 |
| September 13 | $695.53 | $17,843.00 |
| September 20 | $841.37 | $14,826.00 |
| September 27 | $504.52 | $7,305.00 |
| October 4 | $379.70 | $7,105.00 |
| October 11 | $411.47 | $5,704.00 |
| October 18 | $374.22 | $4,310.00 |
| $13,820.10 | $229,402.00 |
Source: Elite Window Cleaning 2020
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