House cleaners turn to outside-the-box marketing to grow their business post-pandemic. Joining us today is master guerilla marketer Mark Imperial from Imperial Action. He shares interesting outside-the-box ideas to get your wheels spinning.
Listen: Outside The Box Marketing
Watch: Outside The Box Marketing
Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
Have You Tried Out of the Box Marketing?
Have you tried outside-of-the-box marketing? This is something you do a little bit differently than you normally do to get results that are a little bit different than you normally get.
Now, today, I have a special guest to join me today. It is Mark Imperial and he is an expert marketer. I’m super excited that he’s joining us. He has a background in martial arts and kickboxing, and Muay Thai.
He’s worked with major mega-companies and smaller companies, and he’s helped them brand their businesses in a little bit different way with a laser focus on getting the end result, which is more customers and more business coming in the door.
Mark is an Out of the Box Thinker
One of the things I love best about Mark, not only that he’s an author on a podcast, running YouTube host, and all these different things, but that he thinks outside the box. So let’s have a conversation with Mark Imperial.
“Absolutely. Well, if anything that the martial arts has taught me is, is just like pig-headed discipline and determination and the repetition of exercising fundamentals.
As boring as that might sound, it’s like the flashy stuff that you see in the movies and martial arts, that’s not what gets the job done. It’s the jab, cross, hook, kick. It’s the basics. And it’s almost the same thing when it comes to marketing your business.”
Some People Tend to Overcomplicate Things
“Some people tend to make it over-complicated. And the reality is, it’s the simple fundamentals and consistent execution of it is that helps you be successful. So that’s what martial arts have helped me do. In business, what I did at a young age, I started a DJ company.
So I was a DJ entertainer playing at first in my own bedroom and in the basement, going to basement parties, and then I graduated to nightclubs and eventually turned it into a business where I was offering my services for bar and bat mitzvahs, for weddings and for corporate events.”
How Mark Fell In Love With Marketing
“So, when I stumbled into marketing, doing all that, I was hired as an entertainer for some corporations like McDonald’s, some of the world’s most famous brands, Nintendo, Sony. Pokémon, for example, I hosted the Pokémon world’s competition in Hawaii for them.
And then that’s when I fell in love with marketing because what I was learning from these companies was I was doing the entertainment for their sales and marketing events and experiential entertainment. That’s when I learned experiential marketing, how to engage customer attraction.
And throughout this whole journey, I started to devour everything I could about marketing. So I ran into my closest mentors, Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer, among many others that taught me a direct response.”
Mark Has Experience on Both Sides of the Coin
“And so, I’m like one of the few that has experience on both sides of the coin when it comes to direct response for practical cash flow if you will and the big brand world of what the big brands do.
And I have created a framework in which I’ve melded both together because what happens is direct response creates cash flow and immediate sales into a business, but it’s the by-product of branding that actually accelerates your acceptance into the future.
So that’s a future bank for you when people start to get to know your name and what you’re about.“
How Important is Experience in the Marketing World?
I’m curious how important it is to have experience in your marketing as your marketing to companies or you’re marketing to businesses, or you’re marketing to homeowners like would be in the house cleaning world?
“Experiential marketing, in essence, what it is, is it is your engagement with your marketplace. So what big brands do for… I’ll give you an example. When Nintendo hired me to launch the game Nintendogs, if you recall that little, it was for the Nintendo DS handheld game. So they created an experiential event that was being held in Battery Park in New York City, and they brought me and my team in there a week in advance.
And we were going out to the public. We were going on the streets in front of dog grooming places and just kind of gimmicky places, Central Park. We were handing out invitations for people to come to this event where we were going to do, essentially, it was a doggy fashion show based around the game that was being released.“
Experience is All About How You Engage People
“We had celebrities tied into it. And the creator of Nintendogs himself was going to be there signing autographs. It was going to be a whole show. So it was a free party in the park if you will. And so, experiential is all about how do you engage?
How do you interrupt somebody’s day in a positive way? How do they see you in a positive way, how do you get them to take action? Experiential is also where we do events where we have to capture leads for example, if you want to build a list of leads.
Depending on the company, I did an entire tour for the state of Illinois. It was the Reality Illinois Tour. It was kind of like that truth, anti-smoking campaign. We were going to County fairs all across the state, and we were engaging young folks and kind of educating them on the dangers of smoking and that. We were capturing an audience in that. And so we did that for the entire state of Illinois.”
Marketing Activation Depends on Your Audience
“So, depending on what your target audience is and what your intentions are, maybe building a list to market to, or there’s something else called an activation. An activation is signing people up for something, whether it’s for a mailing list or signing up for a free trial, maybe getting people to try your brand.
There are many things that you could do in your community. And I’d imagine in the cleaning community, there are things that you can do to create an event around cleaning. Spring is in the air. We’re heading into spring right now. Spring cleaning I’d imagine can be a great event for cleaners.”
How to Engage Your Audience in a Positive Way
Well, what I hear you saying is creativity and interruption with the intention of having fun. And so not just being spammy or annoying people, but catching them off guard in a way that they’re like, “Hey, you’re doing something really cool. I would like to be a part of it.”
“The best way to engage with your audience in a positive way is to give away value, help something, do something fun, do something that helps others and serves others.
For cleaning, for example, I could imagine perhaps going to the mall and perhaps set up a deal with them to demonstrate cleaning methods because it is spring cleaning after all. Learn the best techniques, the best methods may be, the best products to use, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you could be creative as you can see.”
How Important is it to Create Your Brand Locally?
Well, I think that’s super important because a lot of times we get stuck in our own head and we’re not sure how far we should go. You mentioned going to the mall, and I would assume that with that you would have the activation thing where you would sign up people either for a mailing list, or you would sign them up for some kind of a trial clean or something like that. How important is it to stay local and create your brand on a local level?
“I always say it’s up to you. All businesses are different in how they want to scale. Like in my personal business, now I do more outside of my local market than I do in my own backyard and it’s because of Zoom and the internet and where my audience reaches on my show.”
What is Puddle Jumping?
“However, depending on the business, I love puddle jumping. I call it to puddle jumping because you could start small and focus your resources. Let’s face it. We don’t all have the big brand deep pockets like Coca-Cola. But the dollars that you do have, if you could focus them more on a localized area, you’re more effective. You can do more in a tight area. And then as you start to dominate that one area, you puddle jumps to the next one right next door.
I scaled my DJ business in the exact same way, just puddle-jumping from market to market, to market. I started with the few corporate clients I had, then I had bar and bat mitzvah clients. Then I started doing schools and institutions. I started sending postcards to them to get school events for midweek work. And it’s just all that constant building and growing and stacking all those puddles together and soon you’re in the ocean.”
How to Contact Mark Imperial
Well, that is fascinating. We’ve learned so much from you today. I know that you help small businesses grow their brands and focus on collecting leads and getting started in marketing. Share with us a little bit about what you do and how house cleaners can contact you to utilize your services.
“Sure, absolutely. Well, one of the things I can imagine for cleaners, if you’re looking for a way to build your list or to provide value, maybe it could be doing one of these experiential events in your local community and doing as many as you can, finding reasons to do them.
I’m thinking that one of the best applications of it would be something like a nice little pocketbook. A pocketbook is a frequently asked question sort of a book, Ask the Expert. And it could be about everything you need to know about cleaning your home or cleaning your office or whatever it might be.”
His Company Can Make You a Lead-Generation Booklet
“We do a nice little lead-generation booklet like this. And not only can you give it away on your website perhaps as a download, a digital version of it or an actual physical copy if you want to grab the address on the mailing list, but also, this can also become the book in which becomes the nucleus of your marketing message. If you want to reach out to them all and say, ‘Hey, I’m promoting my new book. I want to do a free demonstration for the entire community on how to properly clean a home. And I’ll be giving away copies of my book.’ Another great tool if you will.
I’m happy to help people if they want to do something like a pocketbook or even more of an expanded sort of a book. Just a couple of different ways among many more. So to reach out to me, simply go to imperialaction.com. It’s imperialaction.com. There’s a contact form that you can book a quick call with me and I’d be happy to see if and how I might be able to help you.”
Resources
Marketing for Dummies – https://amzn.to/3fB8Y5o
Digital Marketing All-in-One for Dummies – https://amzn.to/3mbcNzv
Affiliate Marketing for Dummies – https://amzn.to/39zjYMJ
The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out from The Crowd – https://amzn.to/2QQY9BG
Account-Based Marketing for Dummies – https://amzn.to/2Pt9xDp
Permissions To Share
You Have Our Permission To Share This Episode
Show Sponsor
Savvy Cleaner Training – House Cleaner Training and Certification
My Cleaning Connection – Your hub for all things cleaning.
HouseCleaning360 – A hub connecting homeowners with house cleaners
Savvy Perks – Employee benefits for your employees.
Turnover Cleaning Tips – for Vacation Rental and Airbnb Hosts
