Three places on the internet that historically have not returned a good roi.
FIrst one is Yp.com the company is owned by the att yellow pages so they have a very aggressive sales force but a very small number of people go there to search for carpet cleaning.
Second is angies list. They claim that they have high end customers. And that people pay to participate. This is all true. However if you divide the total membership by the total internet connected homes you will realize that their percentage of internet connected homes that are members is very low. Do I recommend getting reviews there and trying to build a good reputation...Yes. Do I recomend paying them hoping to get customers... No. I Love spending money to get customers. But I need to get a good return on my investment. I figure if I am paying more than 25% marketing to get a customer that is too much. If they charge $200 dollars a month for advertising then I would need at least $800 per month average (busy season, slow season) to get a good return on my marketing costs.
Third is Yelp. Yelp is probably the most important business listing/review site on the internet aside from google right now. Iphone siri searches default to using yelps ranking in its search results. So if a person says siri give me carpet cleaners in My city. They will show the same results as if you typed carpet cleaning your city in yelp. Additionally google is giving a lot of weight to the reviews on yelp helping your seo. That being said I still don't think you get a good return on investment by adverising with them. Customers that turn to yelp are looking for a quality carpet cleaner and they will read the reviews to get a picture of your company. If you have few reviews or negative ones all the advertising in the world will not help. Recomendation... Work hard on getting reviews on yelp, they are hard but customers that you have do use them and encourage them to leave reviews.
Words of cauton... If angies list or yelp calls you to advertise never tell them no. I have read about horror stories that both companies punish business's that do not advertise with them. Instead of telling them outright no, tell them you will think about it, or you dont handle the marketing and you will forward the message to the person that does, or that you would love to but just can't afford it right now. Any way to avoid saying outright no.
I spend an enormous amount of time looking into ways to maximize my web presence. Ask my web guy it probably drives him crazy. I have researched other home service industries such as plumbing and more to get a good total picture of this. I have not found any one, industry simililar to our or ours, that gets a good return on investment from those 3 sites. If you do, please let me know, I am very open minded but do lots of reasearch before I spend money.
