How My Laundry Biz Flourished With Leaflet Marketing
It was way back 2011 when I decided to start my laundry service. I have been planning the business for quite a while, and with the retirement funds I had, I thought it was a good venture to at long last enact on my dream. After all, no one can resist a laundry service. We do for them what they should be doing for themselves, thus saving them time that they could use or spend on other essential chores in the house like taking care of the kids. Therefore, I opened my shop and set about getting the news out to the community. When it came to advertising and marketing, a few of my friends advised me to use online marketing. In particular, they advised me to place the business in hosted yellow pages. A few people came to have their laundry done in few days, saying that they found my business through the Internet, and I even enjoyed a few repeat customers during the few weeks that followed. Not bad for a good start, but when I analyzed the business's heartbeat, I realized it would take ages for me to recover my expenses instead of my projected two months. I thought really hard. I just felt as if there was something that I wasn't able to do. Business is all about marketing, I realize. I said to myself, "I did web-based marketing but it isn't working for me" I realized that because my target audience is the local community, I had to hard sell to the folks. No, I won't be knocking on people's houses, although I may have to do that if everything else fails. I had to get some leaflets printed on a cheap printing services online and passed them out to people! I felt sheepish when I eventually realised what I had failed to do in the beginning. I actually did not have to depend on the Internet because the people I was concentrating on was just around me. The leaflets will work, I know, so off I went to have my leaflets printed. I thought 2,000 leaflets would have done fine in this case. I asked my family members, buddies, colleagues, and relatives to hand out the leaflets and, sure enough, customers started pouring in within a couple of weeks. Many of my clients are people living just a few blocks away, not aware of the service I'm offering. As I thanked them for their patronage, I could not help but realize how I failed a bit when I did not recognise the virtue of using those leaflets and flyers for marketing. They were willing to help promote the business through word of mouth marketing. I should have started leafletting earlier! If I had, my business would have increased in only a few months. I learned my lesson to not underestimate using these classic media again.