Every now and then trade magazines carry articles on how to advertise and promote your laundry business and make it grow. They will tell you to have the right budget, but seldom have anything to say about how to find the cash money to use for the advertising. That just may be because, after the grand opening, many laundries don’t maintain enough cash flow to warrant them having such a budget.

              

When you listen to advertising experts from companies that buy a lot of advertising, they will say you should plan to spend three or four percent of your income on ads. What is three or four percent of your laundry’s income? It won’t be enough to make much impact on an advertising plan for your business.

              

Instead, select a specific sum of money you’re willing to spend to promote business. Then, carefully plan how to use it.

              

Advertising and promotion are really forms of gambling. Whatever format you select, you have to be willing to lose. Moreover, you have to stay patient and be willing to wait to see what the outcome will be. Just like playing poker, only risk what you can afford to lose.

              

We don’t mean to imply that providing -coffee or advertising in the yellow pages are your only options. You have many choices, pretty much only limited by your imagination and willingness to work. We know these two are right for many and might work for you.

              

Let us take the sum of $500 and see what can be done with that. Over the year it’s about $42 a month. In most areas, that could buy a small ad in the yellow pages. It could also be about what it would cost to offer free customer coffee in the morning. The gamblers job is to make his bet on which of these two programs would bring in the most business. In this case it might favor offering coffee.

              

The yellow pages requires designing an ad and signing a yearly contract. The coffee offer can be more closely monitored and changed if it is not working. You can see the results on an almost daily basis. Once you sign a contract with the phone book, you’re stuck paying for it for at least a year, whether it helps or not.

If we were to spend around $85 a month, which is a thousand a year. That could give us a larger and more readable yellow page ad, or we can add cookies to our morning coffee.

              

Cookies won’t add a lot of business, but the larger and more readable yellow page ad could actually bring in more customers. First of all everyone in business is supposed to be listed in the yellow pages. Most laundry ads amount to a line or two, but one that cost about $80 a month will be quite readable, and should have an impact on business. Although a quarter at a time is still something of a gamble.          

Although it may take more work thinking up a promotion for the laundry, it may prove to be far more practical than advertising. By promoting, you should receive more income from clientele you already have, if the purpose of that promotion is to get them to increase their laundry use.

              

One example is the Wash Club idea which is to offer prizes and awards when customers reach certain use levels. For instance, the 11th wash is free, after they’ve done ten. When they have done twenty washes, they have their wash card entered in a drawing to get prizes.

              

You will need to spend money on having cards printed. Get at least one thousand, or more if they are cheap enough. The cards should have numbered spaces or boxes that can be punched each time customers do a load. You will see this idea spread among customers, and your cash flow from business will get better and better. Printing will cost under $100.

              

The cards should also have a place for their name and address. That will also aid in development of an in house mailing list for future advertising adventures.

              

There is no need to have the contest prizes be ultra costly. For the same “double the ante promotion” amount of $1,000, one can purchase dozens of prizes that will be appealing to your customers. Radios, knife sets, wrist watches and even bicycles for their kids. Everyone likes the chance of getting something for free.

              

This type of promotion helps you to build customer loyalty and will also bring in friends of your customers who have done laundry else-where. The beauty of the idea is that it looks expensive, but isn’t.

              

There’s a myriad of promotional ideas that are possible. All you need to do is think of one and have it work in your laundry. The majority of laundries have enough cash flow to pay for it. When it works, it pays for itself and can give owners healthy profits too.