If you want to grow your cleaning business, you need to have a solid cleaning business marketing plan in place. Without a plan, you plan to fail. In this post, you’ll learn a simple 12 step cleaning business marketing plan that will help you get more clients for your cleaning company.
1. Know your difference
The first step in creating your cleaning business marketing plan is to know your difference. Basically, this means that you need to know what separates your cleaning business from the competition.
Likely, you are one of the dozens of cleaning businesses in your local area. Whether your average customer is a homeowner or if you do commercial cleaning and it is the local businesses and buildings around you, most people think clean is clean.
The average person you are trying to reach, might not truly understand your subtle differences that make your cleaning company stand out. It’s your job to educate them on what your cleaning business does best.
Really take some time to figure out what your cleaning business does better than anyone else. Is it your customer service? The fact that your employees become like family with clients? Maybe it’s that your commercial cleaning business is one of few that actually track and share important metrics with clients.
Whatever it is, knowing your difference is a key part of your cleaning business marketing plan as you will refer back to it again and again. You’ll talk about it in your company tagline, your content, to your employees, and even in your advertising. Figure this out first and it will help you down the road when you start to market your cleaning business.
2. Know your target market and ideal customer avatar
Another critical element of your cleaning business marketing plan is to fully understand your ideal customer and target market. If you don’t know your target market and niche, your marketing efforts will fall flat.
For example, if you have a commercial cleaning business your target market is typically building owners and facilities managers. For residential cleaning businesses, a person in your target market could be homeowners who have extra disposable income and want to save time.
Start by creating an ideal customer avatar. This means that you create a representation of your customer and what they do, where they live, how they act, etc.
When you know these things it will help with your messaging, and with speaking to your ideal customer’s problems, needs, and interests. The correct targeting of your message makes a huge difference in success or failure when promoting your cleaning business.
Spend some time to really understand your niche and target market and it will help with creating an effective cleaning business marketing plan.
3. Your cleaning business marketing plan should include local networking
Digital marketing as a means of promoting your cleaning business is essential, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only option. Most cleaning business owners don’t fully utilize the power of marketing their cleaning businesses offline as well.
Your cleaning business marketing plan should also include local networking as a part of your overall marketing strategy. A great place to start is by joining your local chamber of commerce or other networking groups like BNI.
Don’t go into these groups looking for something for nothing as that doesn’t work. You also shouldn’t go to these groups in “pitch mode” where all you do is talk about selling your cleaning services.
You need to go to these networking groups to build relationships. When the timing is right, your cleaning business will come up and if appropriate you can ask for the business or referrals.
The idea behind networking is to participate and get yourself out there. As you develop relationships it can lead to new contacts and even leads and sales for your cleaning business. Make sure that networking is a part of your cleaning business marketing strategy.
Check out this post on offline marketing for your cleaning business to learn more. 30 Effective Offline Marketing Strategies for Local Businesses.
4. Optimize your cleaning company website
Getting traffic to your cleaning company website is important, but there is more to getting cleaning clients online than just traffic. Once someone lands on your site you need it to be set up appropriately to actually generate leads and grow your cleaning business.
By using the key difference that you discovered in step one of the cleaning business marketing plan, you will have the basis of messaging for your website. For example, it could be that you have superior customer service. You might set up a tagline on your page of something like, “The cleaning company that is always there when you need us.”
Your tagline is the first thing people see when they get to your site, and it is likely the first reason they will stay on your site. You want it to resonate with your site visitor and create the feeling that people are in the right place and that you are the solution to their problems.
If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your cleaning business website, check out this post. How to Set up a Cleaning Company Website that Actually Gets Cleaning Clients.
5. Focus your messaging on benefits not features
Focusing on the benefits your service provides to your customers and not just features, applies to all aspects of your cleaning company marketing plan. A common mistake we see cleaning business owners make is that they are frequently only talking about company or service features.
For example, they say that they provide janitorial services, and here’s what that is…bathroom cleaning, concrete floor polishing, auto detailing, etc. While those are good things to have on your website, in general, you need more than that to generate cleaning client leads and sales.
During your market research in step two of your cleaning business marketing plan, you should have learned some of the benefits your ideal customers are looking for. If you know your target market’s problems, pain points, and common questions, you can start to talk about solutions to those issues and answers to their questions.
If you had a residential cleaning business you might talk about time savings by having someone else do their cleaning. You could also mention things about stress relief by removing yet another thing on a busy family’s plate.
When your cleaning business marketing is focused on highlighting benefits and not just features, your conversion rates of new cleaning clients will be much higher.
6. Get reviews and testimonials for forms of social proof
If you are looking to increase sales and conversion rates, social proof needs to be a part of your cleaning business marketing plan. Even if you had the best cleaning service in the world, people won’t necessarily take your word for it.
However, if your customers say that you have the best cleaning service in the world, it’s a different story. If a third party, such as a happy customer says your service is great, people are more likely to believe them. Along with this idea, people buy into your customer’s stories and how your cleaning business helped them.
For example, maybe you helped a building owner reduce their turnover rate because their tenants loved staying in a clean building. Maybe your clients have less stress because they can now spend their time with their family instead of cleaning.
When your customers share their stories, your potential customers may resonate with them and decide to buy your service. Use reviews and testimonials as a powerful marketing strategy to promote your cleaning business.
If you’d like to learn more about our automated system for getting more reviews and testimonials, click here to learn more.
7. Building an email list is essential to your cleaning business marketing plan
As people visit your company website they might not be ready to buy the first time. This is totally fine, but most cleaning business owners drop the ball at this point.
They have the wrong expectation that each person that comes to their site is ready to buy, and all they need to do is have the option to get a quote and sales will happen. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of money on the table and people who never come back to your site.
This is why building an email list is an essential step to your cleaning company marketing plan. When someone lands on your site for the first time you need methods of retargeting them with information about your business in the future.
If you don’t have a method of capturing this information they are likely to never return again. With a lead magnet, (something of value you give away for free), you can request a visitor’s name, email, and phone number in order for them to get access to it.
Often people are more likely to be in research mode and are deciding on what cleaning company to go with, the first time they visit your site. If you can capture their information and add them to your email list, you can continue to provide value to them and build a relationship with them.
As you continue to do this, eventually when the timing is right, they buy your service instead of your competitors. To learn more about email marketing check out this post. Tips for Building Your Email Marketing List
8. Create content that provides value and sells your cleaning services
In conjunction with the last step of email marketing, you also need something to send to your email list. A common mistake we see people make is once they start building their email list, the only thing they send out is offers, discounts, or sales pitches on their cleaning services.
There is certainly a time and a place for sales messages in your cleaning business marketing plan, but it shouldn’t be the only messages you send to your audience and email list. The majority of the content you create should be leading with value first, that informs, educates, or entertains them.
Then throughout the content, you subtly plug your cleaning business instead of directly pitching it. Doing this content marketing strategy is more favorable to people and it will attract new people to your site on a regular basis.
If you aren’t sure where to start, check out our post on using content marketing for cleaning businesses here. How To Create Engaging Content To Market A Cleaning Business.
Also, we know creating content can be a time-consuming process. That’s why it’s one of the services we provide to our clients. If you’d like to learn more about us using content marketing to promote your cleaning business, click here to fill out a quick survey about your business so we can learn how to help you best.
9. Focus on local SEO in your cleaning business marketing plan
Another key component of your cleaning business marketing plan is to have a strategy for local SEO. As a service business that does business in a specific area, the positioning of your cleaning company in local search matters.
In fact, when your local SEO is optimized you can generate a significant amount of traffic and leads from the local community. Two of the best ways to do this is through the use of location pages on your website and with Google My Business.
Creating location pages for each major city that you service can draw in traffic from people looking for things like “janitorial service near me”, “commercial cleaning near me”, “house cleaning services near me” and more.
With an optimized Google My Business page, you can start to increase your company presence on Google Maps. This way when people search for a cleaning business in your area you have the potential to show up first.
This can create a lot of free exposure for your cleaning business and why it is an essential part of your cleaning business marketing plan. If you’d like to learn more about local SEO and Google My Business, check out this post. How To Advertise A Cleaning Business With Google My Business.
10. Provide exceptional service
This step of your cleaning company marketing plan might seem a bit obvious, but exceptional service can increase your revenue in a number of ways. The first reason this can help you get more cleaning clients is through word of mouth marketing.
When people experience exceptional service from your cleaning business they are likely to spread the word. Another part of this ties into the earlier step of getting reviews and testimonials.
When your customers are extremely happy with your service the likelihood that they will leave a positive review is much more likely. More positive reviews on your Google My Business page can actually help your local SEO improve as well.
Google tends to prioritize Google My Business pages of companies with the most reviews. Plus as we said earlier, the more social proof you have to back up your claims of how exceptional your company is, the more likely people will choose you over competitors.
As you can see below companies with lots of reviews show up on the first page of Google Maps.
11. Set up a reward program for referrals
Now that you have set the foundations of exceptional customer service and are getting reviews from happy customers, your next step is turning that into new cleaning clients. Setting up a referral rewards program should be the next step in your cleaning business marketing plan.
A great concept to learn is that you want to “celebrate what you want to duplicate.” This means that if you want better employees, you need to praise, celebrate, and reward their good behavior.
You can apply the same concept with your existing cleaning clients. Not only could you incentivize them to leave reviews for your company, but you could also incentivize them to refer new customers.
There are many ways to do this. You could offer gift cards for referrals, use something like refer 10 cleaning clients, get 3 cleanings free. You could also add in additional services, like one-time concrete floor polishing, for people that give you referrals.
Really the opportunities are endless. Just make your referral incentive congruent with the amount of business the referral generates for you. When you add this referral rewards program into your cleaning business marketing plan the value of each customer could multiply greatly.
12. The last step of the cleaning business marketing plan is to advertise
The final step of your cleaning company marketing plan is to start advertising your cleaning business. You might find it odd that advertising is the final step, especially when it’s something almost every cleaning company should do.
The reason for this is that most people think that advertising is going to fix all of their marketing issues. Unfortunately, if you don’t have the right foundations in place with the earlier steps we covered, your advertising could fall flat.
For example, if you don’t have your difference established and don’t know your target market, the messaging of your ads will be off and people won’t buy. If your cleaning business website isn’t optimized and you only talk about features and not benefits, and start sending more visitors to your site, it’s a waste and they won’t convert into leads and sales.
From there if you don’t have quality reviews, people are less likely to take your cleaning business seriously and your ads will be less effective. If you don’t have an email list and no way to capture the information of visitors that came from ads you’ll let many potential customers slip through the cracks.
Without exceptional service, the leads you get from advertising won’t turn into repeat customers, and they won’t give you referrals. So while advertising your cleaning business is essential, you can see without the other steps of the cleaning business marketing plan in place, it can get less than optimal results.
When you follow these 12 steps, your cleaning business marketing plan can be a huge success! If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you set up this cleaning business marketing plan, click here and fill out a quick survey on your cleaning business so we can know where to start!