Local Offline Advertising?

[Dan44]

Hello everyone. What are some of the most effective offline local marketing techniques? I am particularly interested in acquired customers for a house cleaning business. Appreciate any insight on this topic. Has anyone tried shopping cart ads for their business?

 

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[Boo Blizzi]

Flyers in a mid to high income area will be the fastest and most direct way to reach your target audience. After that, once you get the biz up and running, you can do every door direct mail from the USPS and select the zipcodes you want to target.

 

[GeoffP]

Hello everyone. What are some of the most effective offline local marketing techniques? I am particularly interested in acquired customers for a house cleaning business. Appreciate any insight on this topic. Has anyone tried shopping cart ads for their business?

Some things to keep in mind:
What type of clients do you want and where are they hanging out? Is there already an existing client base to build off?

 

[HoneyBadger]

I second the every door direct mail from USPS - I did this as part of an internship years back and was surprised how easy it truly was. The gentleman I did it for owned a shoe shop that catered to higher income folks so I picked the neighborhoods (yes the online tool lets you get that granular) in our city that had an average income that matched his current clients. I sent out a postcard with a coupon on the back so it was very easy to see the conversion rate.

Another thing you can look into - buses. You could pay the city to wrap their bus with an ad for your business - usually very low cost and not a lot of people do it. Half the time they leave the wrap on longer than you paid for (have to take the bus out of service, pay wrapping fees, etc. so they just wait til next ad is paid for).

 

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[Dan44]

Thanks everyone. I think EDDM will be my next attempt. Does anyone know the difference between EDDM through USPS.com and everydoordirectmail.com on this website the prices are 3x more money for the same route?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Thanks everyone. I think EDDM will be my next attempt. Does anyone know the difference between EDDM through USPS.com and everydoordirectmail.com on this website the prices are 3x more money for the same route?

I used the USPS website. What you are probably seeing is one of the many businesses that launched up around EDDM - what they do is handle printing, postcard design, organizing them they way the post office wants them and dropping them off at the post office (or some combination of the above). Really unless you are doing multiple cities you are most likely fine doing it yourself. I think total time invested it took me 3 hours.

 

[Scot]

I second the every door direct mail from USPS - I did this as part of an internship years back and was surprised how easy it truly was. The gentleman I did it for owned a shoe shop that catered to higher income folks so I picked the neighborhoods (yes the online tool lets you get that granular) in our city that had an average income that matched his current clients. I sent out a postcard with a coupon on the back so it was very easy to see the conversion rate.

Another thing you can look into - buses. You could pay the city to wrap their bus with an ad for your business - usually very low cost and not a lot of people do it. Half the time they leave the wrap on longer than you paid for (have to take the bus out of service, pay wrapping fees, etc. so they just wait til next ad is paid for).

Great post! This is something I think we are going to utilize once we start selling to back up our early door to door sales.

 

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[Dan44]

So I am not going to have time to learn copy before I try EDDM. Where do you guy suggest is my best bet to get the copy and design work done for it?

 

[Scot]

So I am not going to have time to learn copy before I try EDDM. Where do you guy suggest is my best bet to get the copy and design work done for it?

Put out feelers on Upwork or Fiverr.

 

[Random_0]

Customer referrals/satisfaction are valuable once you do get the chance to serve some customers. It's not an answer to your question but it's effective 'offline' marketing

edit: b2b outreach makes alot of sense - call, email or mail.

 

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[Justin Gesso]

Hello everyone. What are some of the most effective offline local marketing techniques? I am particularly interested in acquired customers for a house cleaning business. Appreciate any insight on this topic. Has anyone tried shopping cart ads for their business?

Applying scientific marketing principles to offline marketing can be tough.

With advertising, you want to test everything. Test copy, test images, test layout, test audiences, test format (postcard, mailer, bus advertisement, whatever).

To pull this off, you need to run ad variations concurrently and separate results. This could be achieved by having different inbound phones numbers, email addresses, landing pages, coupons, etc... That gets expense and complex to manage.

This is why it is much harder to advertise (and optimize) offline effectively.

Why are you going offline? Have you tired Homeadvisor.com and similar websites? Much easier to hold your advertising dollars accountable.