The New Drycleaning Social Media Marketing Playbook (Part 2)

CHICAGO — Making customers aware of your company and location is a key part of any marketing effort. Educating your potential customers on why they should come in, however, can build the impulse to bring them through the front door. Social media marketing is a way to accomplish both these goals

In Part 1 of this series, we examined the efforts of two successful cleaners who have used social media to build their business, and the importance of pulling back the curtain, rather than offering discount codes. Today, we’ll continue by looking at the importance of choosing the right platforms and what type of messages might work best for your business

Picking Your Platforms

It’s important for operators to build their social media toolkit, and often this is arrived at through trial and error. Zach Pozniak, co-owner of Jeeves NY, the New York drycleaning operation he runs with his father and co-owner, Jerry Pozniak, posts to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and has come to see each platform doing a different job

“Instagram definitely gets the most people in the door,” he says. “TikTok has been the kindest to me as a content creator. YouTube is more the true educational core. My litmus test is comments. I get the most curious, intellectual questions on YouTube. On Instagram, I think everyone having a bad day feels the need to post something.”

Janet Garman, who co-owns Glyndon (Maryland) Lord Baltimore Cleaners with her husband, Mike, sticks to Instagram and Facebook, having dropped YouTube over what she calls “wonky privacy policy” around music licensing. “It’s more of a pain than I wanted to sign up for,” she says

Both Garman and Pozniak edit with CapCut, which also auto-generates captions, a feature Garman considers essential for viewers scrolling silently at work

“People are drawn more to video now than a standard post,” she says, “as long as you include captions.”

Garman schedules posts through an app called Later, posting at least once a week, and has settled on a target length after some experimentation

“I’ve learned to try to keep the clips to around a minute, and that’s taken time,” she says. “We have some people who just have so much to share that we’ve gone to two and a half, three minutes. But really, the sweet spot seems to be a minute.”

You Never Know What Lands

Neither Pozniak nor Garman has cracked the code on predicting what will perform, and both have made peace with that

Pozniak’s most popular TikTok video took minutes to make. His most labor-intensive one barely registered. 

“My most-liked video on TikTok is just me talking to my phone, front-facing camera, about using a detailing comb instead of a razor blade to depill a sweater,” he says. “Really quick, low-effort clip

“Then I put a lot of work into explaining the actual mechanics of how wool felts and shrinks: scales, barbing, fabric swelling between water and solvents. I made a little animation, close-up pictures of wool. That one kind of flopped. It’s kind of a kick in the teeth when you put a few hours into something and it just doesn’t reach anyone.”

Garman has seen a similar pattern: “If we have a generic, ‘Here’s-our-promotion-for-the-month’ post, we don’t get a lot of response to that. But you have to try. You don’t know if you don’t.”

Two Channels, Two Audiences

Pozniak and Garman run social media and email marketing side by side, and both have found that the two reach different customers instead of reinforcing each other

For Garman, the split runs along generational lines: “Social does not feed our email list. We’re reaching a different audience: more Gen X and down on social, and the newsletter is hitting Gen X and up. Clients who have second homes and are in Florida all winter will email me after they get the newsletter. We have over a 40% open rate.”

She keeps the two touches deliberately separate: a promotional email at the start of the month, a content-focused newsletter mid-month. “We do not like to flood people with emails,” she says. “I personally don’t like getting a lot of emails.”

For an operator with limited time, Pozniak points to email, not video, as the better first investment: “If it were me, I would really focus on a well-written, thorough newsletter that’s rooted in care and a bit about your business, but not trying to push a discount code. Just start with a good foundation and build that trust.”

Come back Tuesday for the conclusion of this series, where we’ll examine the place of AI in social media efforts for dry cleaners, along with where time is best spent. For Part 1 of this series, clickHERE

(Image licensed by Ingram Image)

Source: americandrycleaner.com