Multi-Unit Franchisee Magazine Issue III, 2012 | Page 61

Guerrilla
Marketing

station sharing cleaning tips on the air.
About a year ago, the family revamped
their marketing. “We started doing radio
with a local personality we enjoy listening to and who spoke to our clients, the
women we were trying to reach. She’s
almost a personal endorsement, like a
friend,” he says.
For someone so young, he seems to
have his fingers on all the right marketing
buttons. “You have to adapt your marketing to the local area and tie all your
marketing together,” he says. That currently includes Twitter, Facebook, radio,
ads, TV, and more.
Silva-Nash says he loves coming up
with marketing ideas and seeing their
effect on the growth of the business—
which has one location, employs about
40 people, and cleans an average of 50
to 60 homes per week. Here are some
of them.
• Text messaging, he says, is “a great
way to get to the customer’s pocket.” And
they’ve made it easy for people to sign
on. “You text a word to a number and
you’re enrolled. Then we send you a text
message with a special deal or reminder,”
he says. “With technology advancing so
much, the best way to get a customer is to
make them feel like you’re right next to
them, not like a distant corporate office.”
• E-marketing. Using Constant Contact, they send an email newsletter once
a quarter to customers who have opted
in. “We talk as little about housecleaning as possible,” he says. Instead, they

focus on local events, their community
participation, and simply keeping their
name in customers’ minds. They also
post tips on Facebook, such as how to
clean old headlights using toothpaste.
• Networking. For Silva-Nash, it’s all
about building relationships with people
in the community. They’ve teamed up
with a local television host, appearing
once a month to talk about cleaning.
“We don’t push, we just remind them
that we’re there,” he says.
• Internet. “It’s a growing place to be,
an important place to be. If you’re not on
it, you’re missing a lot of potential business,” he says. “Not many housecleaning
companies around here are doing Facebook and Twitter yet. Starting early gave
us a strong advantage.”
Google Adwords drives traffic to
their local website, and they’re building
relationships with “mommy bloggers.”
One such blogger, who has about 5,000
unique views per month, gets her house
cleaned once a month in exchange for
reviewing the service online. Gift certificates for Mother’s Day, he says, boosted
their SEO ranking, and corporate assists
in boosting it further by posting his TV
appearances on Youtube.
Their Facebook page is packed with
customer testimonials, housecleaning
tips, local news, links to corporate sites,
discount offers, tons of photos, and an
upbeat, fun-loving tone (e.g., the debate
about which way to hang toilet paper).
It’s worth a look.

They’ve also hired a company through
the corporate office to generate customer reviews of their services. He says
the reviews are short (about 2 minutes),
drive up their SEO results, and provide
local endorsements that build trust with
potential customers. If a negative review
comes in, he says, “We give them an immediate callback to see what happened.”
Then there’s the economy. “This is
a time when people are looking for the
best deal,” he says. And while they can’t
lower costs without cutting into profitability, they will offer a freebie once in
a while through contests on television,
Facebook, or Twitter on Valentine’s Day,
Mother’s Day, and at back-to-school
time, for example.
“We get them enrolled through incentives. Even if they don’t win, they
get updates, allowing us to ha fR6