Broadly Q&A: Harper Carpet Care
Broadly Q&A features our small business partners. This week, we are featuring our conversation with Christi Harper, Owner, Harper Carpet Care near Austin, Texas:
Tell us a little about your business. What makes Harper Carpet Care unique?
We are a family-run business. We’re small, but we service Austin and surrounding areas, so our service area is quite large. We provide a customer experience that large companies cannot. Our dedicated employees have been with us for a long time.
What’s the market like in Austin? Who are your customers?
There are so many carpet cleaners. Right now, there are too many companies out there to choose from. We have a mix of new customers, and a lot of return clientele who wouldn’t even think of using anyone else. We do have some people calling around and asking about prices. Our pricing is comparable to other reputable companies. I encourage them to read our online reviews and let that be a major weight in their decision.
What have you done to attract new customers?
We’ve done some direct mailing and advertising with Yelp. We’ve done ValPak and once paid thousands for advertising with no return. This was extremely heartbreaking, and they wouldn’t allow us to get out of the contract. We’ve even done new home buyer gift packages.
How do you learn about new marketing programs?
I usually get hammered with solicitors and people calling us to advertise with them. You’ve got to turn my ear to get me to listen. I fielded 10 phone calls yesterday alone. When Luke (from Broadly) called, he said something that caught my attention. It was a brief synopsis of what Broadly does to generate more reviews, and it interested me. We know that good reviews do bring new business.
What excited you about partnering with Broadly?
These days, you’ve gotta have reviews. I get calls from people who see that Harper Carpet Care is a local, family-owned business, and that our online reviews are amazing. I probably book 75% of our new clients off of Yelp alone, and one job will pay for the month. At one point, we started exploding, and we were getting to the point where we couldn’t accommodate new customers quickly enough. We recently added a third van. We are growing!
Broadly is encouraging my clients to get online and write reviews. It’s no secret – the more positive online reviews you’ve got out there, the more business it’s going to bring you. I think Broadly is very well paying for itself. We don’t have a very big marketing budget, so where we do spend, it needs to matter. Broadly is definitely working.
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