There will always be no shortage of demands for cleaning businesses. The average Americans spend six hours each week cleaning, and many of them feel that it is still not enough. So, setting up your own cleaning business is definitely a lucrative move: it’s not very expensive to set up one, and the market is huge both for residential and commercial cleaning services.
However, that’s not saying you won’t meet plenty of competition in the cleaning service industry. You’ll need to heavily promote your business so you can attract enough potential clients to choose your business over others, but you will also need to persuade them about using your service rather than taking on cleaning jobs themselves.
This is why for your cleaning business, having a sound marketing strategy is very important, and in this guide, we will share some actionable tips you can use right away to promote your cleaning business.
Want more ideas to market your cleaning business? Read this post on how to start a cleaning service company.
Without further ado, let us begin with the first one:
1. Define Your Target Audience
A key part of any marketing strategy is to define and understand your target audience so you can build a marketing strategy around this target audience.
It’s very important to realize, as soon as possible, that you can’t, and you shouldn’t try to please everyone. It’s best to figure out the most ideal audience that is the most likely to purchase (and retain) your service and focus on it.
If you don’t know your target market and niche, you won’t have a successful marketing strategy, period.
For example, if you are a residential cleaning service business, then your target audience could be homeowners who want to save time (and have spare money). Create a buyer persona while considering factors like what they do for a living, where they live, their behaviors, and so on.
Some examples of target audiences to consider are:
- Newlyweds/new parents
- Retirees
- Busy professionals
- Those who just move in/move out
Always consider your target audience when developing your marketing strategy.
2. Improving Your Online Presence
Think about it. Nowadays, what’s the most likely way you’ll learn about a new local business? Unless you’ve been living under a rock, most likely the answer will be “online”, “social media”, “Google”, or any other similar online activities.
In short, if you want your business to be found by your target audience—as defined above—, you’ll need to help your customers find your business online by improving your online presence.
While this can be a pretty broad subject, in general, you should focus on:
- SEO: create content about your business and about the cleaning industry in general, and optimize them so they can rank high on Google for certain target keywords.
- Local SEO/Google Maps optimization: when you search for queries related to local businesses (i.e. “restaurants in New York”), Google will push results from Google Maps above the organic results. Since a cleaning business is by nature, a local business, we should aim to improve our Google Maps ranking.
- Social media: pretty obvious. Social media is where people are nowadays, so it would only make sense to build your presence on social media networks frequented by your target audience.
In short, find out how your potential customers search for information online—especially information related to local services—-and make your business available on these channels.
3. Retargeting Ads
This is still related to optimizing your online presence, as we’ve discussed in the previous step. One of the key ways to attract your potential audience is to advertise your business online, but as we know, online advertising can be expensive and are often not very effective.
Retargeting, on the other hand, is essentially showing your ads only to those who have shown interest in your business beforehand. For example, those who have visited your site and/or consumed your content.
The basic idea behind retargeting ads is that people are more likely to purchase a product or service after multiple contacts with the target audience. In fact, most people need to have engagement with your business 6 to 7 times before they are ready to purchase.
The two most relevant platforms for retargeting are Google Ads and Facebook Ads, and you should make the most of them to your advantage.
4. Deliver Your Promise
This is a very important tip to implement in any marketing strategy: deliver on your promise.
This is how you can impress new clients, encourage them to leave good reviews for your business, and preferably, recommend your business to their friends, peers, or family members, effectively converting them into advocates that will bring you referrals.
For example, if you promise to always show up on time, do so. This is where cleaning management and scheduling software like fieldd can help to create a unique competitive advantage. So, you can not only advertise a unique advantage only your business has over your competitors but actually deliver on these promises.
5. Content Marketing
Effective content marketing is not about creating content about your service and solely talk about yourself.
Instead, your content should attempt to provide value for your ideal audience, for free. This is how you establish your position as an expert/thought leader in your industry.
Remember, people only want to do business with businesses they can trust, and in this age of social media, they will look up your business online before they’ll decide on purchasing your service. If, when they search for your business’s name, they see a lot of relevant, valuable content (i.e. an article about effective tips to keep your home clean), you can win their attention quickly.
Wondering what kinds of content you should deliver? Here are some suggestions you can use:
- How to effectively clean old tiles
- How to get a sparkling clean bathtub without expensive tools and supplies
- How to organize your shelves
- Top recommendations for affordable cleaning supplies
And so on. Attempt to provide value, and not always about shoving your brand name on every opportunity trying to build awareness. In fact, if you are too hard-selling in this day and age, people will simply get annoyed.
Conclusion
Arguably in this online day and age, there are two main approaches you should focus on in marketing your cleaning business (or any business in general): build your online presence, and make sure you deliver a good experience so your existing customers can talk about you (both online and offline).
The five tips we have shared above are effective in building a marketing strategy for your cleaning business and can act as a foundation as you add more marketing tactics and utilize other channels.
Interesting Related Article: “How To Make Your Business Safe During Covid-19“