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Advertising in this digital age is much more than print and publications. It’s important for your laundromat to have a visible presence on the web, regardless of the size of your business. Here are a few tips for maximizing your coin laundry’s web presence.
 • Take advantage of www.dexterlaundry.com. This web site is your greatest tool and resource. On this site, you’ll find extensive Dexter Laundry company, product and technical information.
• Build your laundromat’s web site in steps. Start small and build your web site up from there. When you start to build your site and add information and products to it do it one page at a time, completing each page as much as possible as you go. If your site will have more than 5 pages don’t create those pages in your site’s directory until you are ready to work on them. The more pages your site has the longer it will take you to complete them all and the longer it will take you to “go live”. Start with just a few pages and a handful of products or articles and that way you can start to put your site to work for you a lot sooner as you build it up.
• Include pictures of your laundry and make sure they are “web friendly”. Good use of graphics can make your site appealing but, if they load too slowly it can chase your visitors away. Always make sure to test your web site on a dial up connection, and see how long it takes your pages to load. . . Make sure large graphics are properly optimized for the web or reduce the amount of graphics, if you find the site is loading too slowly. For Dexter artwork that can be used on the web, contact your Dexter Authorized Distributor or click here to visit our online artwork library.
• Plan your site to be easily updated and make sure you do those updates. In keeping your web site current you may need some pages that can have information easily updated by your secretary, co-worker, employee, or from you at home. Visitors want important information they are reading to be current and new. If your web site has features such as a Calendar, Current News, Schedules, or Specials, it should have an administrative login section where changes can be made without the use of special software or programming ability.
• Include your web site information on anything and everything. Promote your web site on everything you have including flyers, letterhead, print ads, business cards, brochures, even t-shirts or your delivery vehicles. Visitors won’t know to check out your web site if they don’t know it exists or what the address is.
• Include your contact information, especially your phone number prominently on every page. The main purpose of your web site is to encourage customers to contact you---so make sure you tell those customers how to do so! Include your phone numbers, address, e-mail prominently on the site so that customers can easily find your information.
• Make online yellow pages part of your media mix. While the yellow pages have been and industry must the past few decades, more individuals are using online listings rather than paper directories. If you’re not already doing so, talk to your yellow pages provider about online advertising. Usually it’s a small additional cost to your regular bill and it can yield big results...just make sure to link it to your web site!
• Include customer quotes, testimonials and lots and lots of store pictures! There is no better place to showcase your laundromat for new and existing clients. For easy content that shows off what your business offers, be sure to include lots of store pictures and customer testimonials on your web site. These will help draw traffic and show customers what you can do for their laundry. Be sure to send copies of your photos and success stories to Dexter Marketing so that they can be included on www.dexterlaundry.com as well.
• Offer resources or content to your site to give your customers a reason to keep coming back. Make sure each page in your web site has something valuable to offer. A web page exists to provide something that’s useful or interesting to visitors. If your page doesn’t have that, then you must fix that problem before you worry about how to present it. Be sure to consider what information you are offering to your visitors and why they would want to visit your site.
• Avoid image backgrounds. These will make your web site look amateur, slow down the loading of your pages, and take away from your content. If you look at some of the top web sites such as yahoo.com or google.com, you’ll notice that they use simple white backgrounds. This makes your web site look cleaner, more professional and will make those great photos of your Dexter Laundry equipment look even better.
• Keep it simple. Put as few clicks between your visitor and your information as possible. The more you force your visitors to click around your site the more likely they’ll abandon it. Even if they don’t leave they might get annoyed, or not view as much of your content -- either of which is bad for you.
• Include a way to get back to the home page, on every page. When users get lost they like to start over from square one. Make it easy for them to do so. If you’re including a clickable logo on the top of every page, make sure to also include text that says something like “Home”, because some users don’t realize that logos take you back to the home page. Also remember that users might not be able to hit the “Back” button to go back to your home page, because they might have entered the middle of your site after clicking a link to it from a search engine or from some other site.
• Link to (valuable) industry sites and take advantage of links that are available for you. Every time your site links to another site is not only a chance for another customer to find you, it’s also an opportunity to improve your placement in the search engines. Be sure to take advantage of free link opportunities that exist on other industry sites such as trade publications as well. |
