Commercial Marketing

I was wondering how exactly would someone market to Commercial/Storefront businesses?

85% of my focus I would say is storefront/commercial. How do you market for this kind as opposed to Residential marketing?

What marketing strategies do you implement in your business to pick up these kinds of accounts? Besides cold calling and phone cold calling, how else can you pick up commercial/storefront???

You could hand out fliers or do a postcard campaign.

remember that postcard campaigns only work after the 5th or 7th mailing.

Post its

business cards

hitting the streets real heavily

contacting NSP’s

We tried faxing a free offer to about 7000 potential store fronts… It bombed harder than you could possibly imagine… It may work in your area though…

Spam?

Yea… I get a bunch to the office everyday and I dont mind… I get usually good offers that I use often. Staples 1 day sales / Lunch specials at local restaurants etc…

I assumed people wouldnt mind because I dont mind. I assumed wrong though…

I do not think postcards would work well with commercial. There are far too many hands involved in touching the card and it most likely will never get to the person in charge.

My experience with commercial/route has shown me that timing is everything. You could try a place today and they don’t care, but next week… they are desperate. Find a way to talk to the person in charge (mail/email/face to face) and keep hitting them. For sure keep following up after a face to face.

Email is great if you can find it, and it is free.

I am actually working on a marketing strategy for this very thing.

I like the email approach. How would you find alot of emails though???

find their website, get business cards… be creative

When I do this approach I only do it with cherry jobs.

What do you mean “Cherry Jobs”…is this like a really good account??
Do you just go in and grab a card, and if so you might as well be cold calling since you’re in, right?

I did mention this in another thread - if anyone has done it?
Could you elaborate on your wording & how images get past their firewall?
Cheers

Images? No images

My wording is much like in an email I send a friend. Very short and just plain talk. What I want is a response. If I get them to respond in any way, I know where I sit. Then I hit them with the quote and info package.

“Cherry” is good paying jobs. I look for big book end jobs and fill it in from there.

As for “might as well cold call while I am there”… not me. I prefer a pre-introduction.

Think casual… however, I am in the Midwest. We are pretty casual.

Be careful in your email campaign if you are in the states. Look up the laws. One I know for sure is you must give the end user an option to be taken off your list. If you do not, the mail will be classified as spam. You can be reported and in some cases your ISP will shut off your service. Another thing to look out for when sending is the amount you send. My ISP will shut off my mail service if I blast out 1000 emails per day. I know only from 1st hand experience. Sent out about 10k worth of emails to Realtors in 1 day. Well I tried to send them out and could not figure out why after 1001 I was not able to send or receive any mail. If you have comcast, this is a policy they use. I was able to talk them into turning my mail back on and then set up my program to send out 800 mails per day for a couple of weeks. I got a few responses but nothing major. I did get a direct response from the owner of a century 21 who has sent me a couple of clients. In the end I would say it was worth the 3 day nightmare to set it all up correctly.

yes, be careful not to end up SPAMMED.

That is another reason to make it personal. No blast email for me… only CHERRY jobs.

I know that it takes time, but I am very fond of the good ol’ cold-call-walk-in method. I grab a stack of my cards and walk in. I ask for the manager or General Manager at some places. I usually get to talk right to them. I give them a couple of cards (give them two or three, as many will loose only one card–and they are too cheap to not give out like that), I tell them my name, the name of my business, what we do, and how I’d like to help them. If I get a positive reaction, I keep on. If not, I had them another card and tell them to give me a call if they need something. I get calls as much as a year later. And then I land the job.

If I don’t get past the gatekeeper, or get to see the person in charge, I still give them a card, and I ask when they are going to be in. I return later at the time given to me, and then ask to see them. I keep that up until I see or talk to them.

I landed two deals week before last from a quick cold-call-walk-up. These two will total a whopping $4800/year for only 9 days of work per year. Thats over $500/day–just because I walked in and asked.

Chris if you don’t mine me asking, what type offer was it and what was the % return ? What’s NSP’s?

The offer was 1 FREE Window Cleaning at there store front. If I remember correctly the response was 0.

NSP = National Service Provider

Which is a company that coordinates maintenance for company’s that have multiple locations. IE: Floor car / Window Cleaning / HVAC… etc…

//youtu.be/- YouTube

http://www.cuil.com/

Ahhhh…another search engine to worry about.

I searched something and it threw a bug on my browser…shut it down and started to automatically download Microsoft XP Anti-Virus, which is funny because I have a Mac…this search engine is very buggy, so beware PC people.