Many of the clients that I help are not sure how to go about getting the most bang for their buck, marketing-wise. It’s the struggle that every cleaning business owner faces—how do you find more customers for your service without breaking the bank? Here are a few obvious and not-so-obvious ideas about where you can look for more business.
Word of mouth
This is normally a huge untapped market for new customers for you. Do you already have a few happy clients? Ask them to tell their friends about you. Give them business cards with your information that they can pass along. And be sure to thank them for helping you.
Mailers
People think that print is dead, but we know it is not so. Door hangers, postcards in the mail, mass mailer coupons still work. The key to success is repetition. Don’t stop and start, but keep your brand in front of your target audience and they will call you when they need your service.
Book recurring clients
When you get a new client, be sure your staff provides its usual amazing, high-quality cleaning service, and then follow up with the customer after the cleaning and ask how your team did. If they liked your service, offer to confirm their next cleaning and suggest a date. This is called “the assumptive close” in the world of professional selling, and it works like a charm. When your customer agrees, confirm that they will be on the schedule every two weeks and in many cases, their answer will be yes! One issue I see over and over with cleaning companies is that they neglect to ask for the sale. You have not because you ask not! Once you start asking for business, you’ll start closing more recurring bookings.
Barter
Bartering is where you exchange your services for those of another professional without any money changing hands. Need a new paint job for your home office? Why not ask a local painter if they’ll accept a trade in cleaning services for payment. To learn more about using bartering to market your business, be sure to check out my Barternomics book.
Flyers
Have your staff start flyering the neighborhoods they visit. As a cleaning business, you’re inherently local. You can also pick a few neighborhoods you’d like to have coverage in, and print up some snazzy flyers that you can leave on door steps or in mailboxes. Hand out flyers in person at a spot where you know busy commuters are flooding past, like a local coffee shop or gas station or bus stop—tell them you can help.
Partnerships
Find a business that you can try a partnership with— for example, a local nail salon. In exchange for cleaning their building, the nail salon could incorporate your marketing into theirs and offer a discount on your services when the customer purchases a service from the nail salon.
Web site
Get a website if you don’t already have one. If you do, make sure it’s up to current design standards that put your company in the right light. It’s worth the investment and acts as the “face” of your business online. If you have not invested in making your website mobile-friendly, spend the money to make it look good on mobile devices, since the majority of traffic these days is on phones and tablets.
Social media
Promote yourself on NextDoor or in Facebook groups by frequently posting unique content. One of the cleaning business owners that I coach has had tremendous success with getting clients from posting in various Facebook groups of the community or in her NextDoor group. She found that success is in the repetition. She posts every day to her Facebook community groups and to NextDoor. By posting different pictures of houses that she cleans, she keeps the content unique and fresh to each post. The last thing you want to do is post the same thing, over and over, making other people in the group angry. So make your posts personal, tell them something about yourself and your business, share a story with each post. Get out there and join some local community groups online, introduce yourself, start to provide helpful information not just about your business, and let people get to know you. Then ease into talking about your business, and keep it up day after day.
Discounts
This is a tried and true method for attracting new customers. Offer a very rich discount on your services (30-40% off) and consider that the cost of acquiring a new client.
This is just a sample of the kind of help I can offer in my Cleaning Business Fundamentals course.
