In this interview, Martha shares some key Facebook marketing tips that have contributed to her success.
Jonathan: I’d like to share an interview with you. It’s with Martha. She’s a friend of mine, and she owns a company by the name of Quality Driven. We did a series of 5 interviews. I’m gonna be releasing those over the next 2 weeks, and in this first one we’re talking about Facebook. Now her business is not quite like ours. She’s in the residential cleaning business. Imagine how difficult that would be to send your teams into your clients’ homes every day. Her typical client, her buyer is a woman. Much like our business, but she deals a lot with the woman of the household. She has found a way to make Facebook really successful. They utilize Facebook at a very high level inside their company, not just from a marketing standpoint but also from the communication standpoint and from an internal communication standpoint with the team. She has a number of tips for you, a number of great ideas. She’s absolutely worth listening to because she knows how to use Facebook. Enjoy the interview.
Hey Martha, how are you doing?
Martha: I’m good. How are you?
Jonathan: I’m doing great, thanks for doing this. I wanted to ask you a number of questions, and one of those questions has to do with Facebook. I’ve noticed that you and your team do a pretty good job with Facebook, I think both publicly, and then I’ve got to guess that behind the scenes communicating with your clients you probably do a pretty good job. I’m not so great at Facebook. Do you have any best practices or tips you’ve learned over the years?
Martha: Well, unfortunately I spend way too much time on Facebook but I do use it for business a lot. I do that to the customers that we serve, and prospective customers of course, but then also internally we actually use Facebook for … I have an office Facebook group, I have a staff Dusting Divas Facebook group, and it’s just an easy way to communicate, “Hey, we’re closing today because of the weather.” I mean we do a lot of just internal marketing to our staff in that group. I have mainly women so we share recipes, they share things about their family in there, and I’ve purposely made it that way so we get staff engagement and as I’m sure you know from gallop polls, one of the most important reasons people stay is because they have friends at work. I think that’s probably more true for females than males but we have men too, and they engage as well, so we use it for that.
It’s quick, easy communication for office staff because I work from home a lot and then we have 2 branches, so it’s easy for me to communicate there, and then our official Dusting Divas page, I guess we have about almost 5,000 followers, and you know what I’ve done is just figure out who’s our market, who seeks out our service, and then we post things that are of value to them. Because we are appealing mainly to women between the ages, our target market is 28-55, we do a lot of Pinterest type posts where, I don’t even know if you know Pinterest.
Jonathan: Yeah, oh yeah.
Martha: Okay.
Jonathan: I don’t do it, but I know of it.
Martha: Okay, and I don’t actually do a whole lot of it, but I have actually outsourced that because I just couldn’t keep up. You need to do at least 3-4 posts a day, and it’s just very time consuming. We have a person in the MyService world who actually does the posts for about 20 of us, all in different locations. It’s awesome because she makes money posting on Facebook, and we all get our needs served for a very reasonable price. If the lawn care world could work together and come up with something like that, that would be awesome. In addition to, I’ll go on and post and I certainly use our page for posting specials that we might be running. I will post opt-ins so that they opt in our newsletter for newsletter-only specials. We may have contests around the holidays like for Mother’s Day or something and do a give-away and do a lead capture. We’ll definitely run ads for employees on our Facebook page. What I do is if something’s popular that was posted I’ll boost it, and then I may run ads on something in particular I want to promote.
Jonathan: Do you feel like Facebook brings in business? Can you with certainty measure or determine that you’ve brought in some new clients or that you’ve sold additional clients more business because of using Facebook?
Martha: Definitely, and I wish I could quantify it better but here is what I know. We ask every lead that comes in, “How did you hear about us?” Believe it or not for us, Facebook is our second leading source, right behind Google online search.
Jonathan: Wow.
Martha: Yeah, it’s huge for us.
Jonathan: Is that because of running paid ads, or is it, and I know you boost sometimes but is it because you’re running paid ads on Facebook, or is it because they’re just having to find you organically?
Martha: It’s both.
Jonathan: Okay.
Martha: Until the last year, I probably didn’t run a lot of ads. I’ve learned a lot this past year about, I spent a lot of time and money learning about Facebook marketing but even prior to this last year, Facebook I believe it was number 3 for us, so it has been big for us for a long time. We are a relationship building service. In our world, they’re letting us in their home so they want to know us, but you’re service business too, so people want to know you all too. It gives them a way to know something about your company. People comment on posts that I didn’t make, but they’ll comment on it and I make sure I get on there and engage with them. That’s really important to get on there and engage with them and talk to them just as if they were my neighbor. The girl that we hired actually does some of that for us, but like I said, I’ll get on there and when we’re having maybe a company party or we’re doing something inside the business that I want to show them the face of our company, I will post pictures, I’ll tell them about what we’re doing. I want them to feel like they know something about us to build trust. That’s really …
Jonathan: That’s a great idea. Do you post, does your team in a case like that where you have a picture, maybe your team was having a meeting or your team did an event and you took pictures, does your team then post that themselves or do you send that information over to the individual that’s doing Facebook for you and they take care of it?
Martha: Either I post it, or my office manager posts it.
Jonathan: Okay.
Martha: Yes. Anything that is specific to us, I take care of that, and I don’t expect her to take care of my specific need, and I do enjoy it. You know, I maybe go on and post something specific to the company twice a month. She does all the rest of it.
Jonathan: Okay. Did you say she’s posting 4 times a day?
Martha: She’s posting 3-4 times a day.
Jonathan: Okay. Maybe just a couple more quick things here before we wrap this up. In terms of a, have you found a best practice for dealing with a complaint? Let’s say a client goes on to Facebook and is disappointed with service that day, or just something, how do you guys deal with that?
Martha: Of course apologize.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Martha: Whether we did it or not, and then I will when I’m writing the answer, of course you’re not only writing to the person that complained but to anyone who might view it. Really all the clients and then perspective clients want to know is, are we gonna take care of it? Are we reasonable? Are we good to deal with? So I just make sure to apoligize, not make excuses, basically we’ll get it handled now. If it was a person and I had this actually happen, where she’s trashed us and we didn’t even clean her home, we refused our service because she wanted it for a certain price and it was half of the total price, and we were like thank you very much, here are some names you might try. She slammed us online, so in that case I basically said, “I’m so sorry you were disappointed, and I’m very sorry that we were not able to clean your home for the price that you were requesting, dadadada.” The public knew, listen, we did not clean your home, and we did not do these things you’re saying.
Jonathan: Makes sense. Any parting last best practices?
Martha: You know, I guess all I would say is, you have to go all in, you cannot halfway do a Facebook page effectively. Many people don’t have luck with their Facebook page because it does take a lot of time, and honestly, maybe you should come up with a service if you want to be a millionaire, a social media service, but that group sharing that we do is awesome. We don’t even post that much about house cleaning itself, but we post things that are relevant to our target market.
Jonathan: That makes perfect sense.
Martha: They follow us, and so when we go to live events, many times people will read our sign and then go, “Oh, I follow you on Facebook”, and they feel like they already know you. I think that’s the value of Facebook.
Jonathan: That’s good. Last thought on this. If someone were to just get started and look into determine that, this should get some level of priority in my overall marketing plan, marketing calendar, do you feel like there’s 6-months to build it up and start to see results or a year to build it up and start to see results? Or if you jump into it correctly and invest your time, do you see pretty quick results? Do you happen to remember based on when you got started?
Martha: Yes, I mean for sure 6 months, and to be realistic, probably a year, and I will tell you that I used to boost posts way more than I do now. I used to run a lot more content, that’s really how I built up the page, running content and doing things that would bring people in. Now, when I ran the contests, I would only market it though to our target audience, so there’s a way that you can run those contests and have those contests just show to your target demographics including income so that I didn’t get people wanting freebies that really weren’t our target market.
Jonathan: Makes perfect sense. Great. Well, thank you for the tips, they’re absolutely helpful. Thanks Martha.
Martha: Thank you.
