Below is a sample marketing campaign for commercial carpet & tile cleaning contractors that wanted to sell more restaurants. What I did is put all the leads on a map to build a door to door sales route. Came out to be around 500 prospects to reach door to door 4x year. The whole point of marketing is to create a routine where you are reaching the same people 3-4 times a year directly and then some follow up couple times a year through direct mail/email.
You can start with a description of all restaurants in geographic area in this case Pittsburgh. The objective is brief 15 minute estimate, collect information and qualify prospect. Put each in a category of open we don’t know, qualified have contact info and some interest or unqualified not a good fit for us.
In this case we set a geographic target by zip code and decided to target every independent restaurant that fits in the radius.
Sample Marketing Campaign Template
- Description: All restaurants in the town of City, State
- Objective: A. Brief 15-20 minute estimate B. Collect information and qualify interest level C. Put in category and create follow up campaign
- Budget: $$$ Year
- Geography: City State Zip codes
- Size: any size
- Industry: restaurants
- Contact Person: General manager, assistant manager, kitchen manager
- Services offered: Tile and grout, restroom steam.
- Packages: 2x year, 4x and 6x – Min every 6 months
- Value Proposition: Sanitize restrooms, steam clean tile, RESEALING grout
- Total Businesses: 247
- Frequency: Door to Door canvassing 4x year – Mail postcard 2x – Email campaign 4x when available
- Door To Door :988 total visits – Shift of 4 hours/ average 20 visits per shift – 50 Days – 1 Shift per week early morning before lunch rush
- Costs: Door to Door 50 days x 4 hours day= 200 labor hours 200 hours x $15 hour = $3000 – Postcards- 494 x .70 cents each = $345 – Email- set up time 2 hours at $15 hour= $30 – Total campaign cost= $3,375
- ROI Goal– 1:10 over a year – $35k revenue – Average $1200 year per customer
Description
When building a marketing campaign, the first step is writing out a description of the campaign. In this example we want to target all of the restaurants in Pittsburgh, PA.
Objective
The second step is creating our objectives and we want more than 1, I know the primary is to get an estimate but we also want to have a couple secondary objectives to “plant the seed” for the future.
In this example we came up with 3 objectives
- Give an estimate – this is of course the main goal, to give an estimate right then
- Collect information and qualify interest level – BUT, its equally important if unable to get an estimate on the spot to collect information and qualify how much interest they really have in changing.
- Put in a category and create a follow up routine- After we qualify interest we then can put them in a category Open/Qualified/Unqualified.
Open = we don’t really know so its an open question still
Qualified = this prospect meets our criteria and we want to follow up heavily
Unqualified = we don’t want to spend any more time or money on this business. Scratch them off the list
Industry
Next we further define “restaurants”. Does this mean full service restaurants only or smaller coffee shop, pizza shops, corporate cafeterias, etc.
Geography
How will we define the geography? A town, county, city or radius. Maybe you just want to focus on a specific town and join professional associations in that town, dominate that town. But some cleaners don’t care and use radius instead and will go based on how far they are willing to travel from the city center or office/home. Example 5/10/15 miles
Employee Size or Sales Volume
Employee size or sales volume is just another way to filter the kind of restaurants you want to target. A simple way to think of this is Small/Medium/Large, by using employee size generally can give you an idea how big the company is.
In our example we used ALL, we don’t care and want to service all sizes.
Prospects
Another way to filter this down is independent versus franchises or chains. Or high end dinner service versus 24/7 type operators. We can focus on just high end establishments. Often people think of restaurants as a whole category but you can just focus on the high end if you choose.
Leads and Decision Makers
Who are the “people” often making these decisions? What is their title? Some are General Manager, Assistant Manager, in a nursing home kitchen manager, corporate facilities often use food service director.
Services
What services will you offer? This is something cleaning services don’t often think about but the secondary services can be more important or equal to the primary service.
Do you have a big ticket to offer?
For
example you service a carpet/tile cleaning account monthly and then power
washing 1x year or equipment cleaning, heavy duty cleaning service once every
other year. Restaurants can pay $4-5k dollars for a heavy duty clean down of
the equipment, ceilings, walls, etc.
This can have a huge impact on an account over a 5 year period.
Cleaning Packages
What packages to offer, 2x year, 4x, monthly, 1x service. What profit margins for each, obviously we want a bigger margin on a 1x job over monthly.
Value Proposition
What are the messages to use in our marketing material and sales pitch. Some of the categories are name drop, green, belong to an association, price, unique method, fast service, quality, years in the industry.
Total Businesses
In our search we came up with 494 total restaurants that fit our above criteria.
Frequency and Reach
After setting on a defined target we can start to do some math and figure out frequency and reach. Best case is we reach the same target at least monthly but it doesn’t have to be the same way.
An example would be Door to Door sales 4x year/ Direct Mail 2x/ Email 6x
Door to Door Sales Route
494 businesses X 4 visits per year = 1976 visits per year
/ Divided by 20 visits per hour = 99 hours
99 hours X $20 hour = $1980
Direct Mail
494 x 2x year = 988
988 X $1 each for a letter/envelope/postage = $988
Main cost is content for 4 pieces
4 pieces x $50 each = $200
Total Cost
Door to Door Sales- $1980
Direct Mail- $988
Email- $200
Total Cost = $3,168
Return On Investment Goal 1:10
If our ROI is 1 out of 10 then we need $31,680 in revenue
At an average of $1200 per program
We need to sell 27 programs
At a 75% closing rate we need 36 Estimates
