Adding a digital marketing strategy is a must for today’s cleaning companies. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand the best ways to optimize their cleaning company marketing strategy. In this post, you’ll learn some tips to optimize your cleaning company marketing strategy.
Balancing short term quick results and long term passive marketing strategies
One thing to understand when it comes to creating a marketing plan for a cleaning business is that you need to balance short term and long term marketing strategies. Most cleaning business owners are so stressed about getting new leads immediately, that they neglect strategies that can create a foundation of lead generation that can bring in returns forever.
Certainly getting more leads quickly is important, but this often means that you need to run paid advertising for your cleaning business. While this isn’t a bad thing, you do need to continually invest money into paid advertising to generate leads. As soon as you stop paying for advertising, the leads stop coming in.
Also, if you are running paid ads yourself there is a learning curve involved as well. This means you might not get leads right away or at the very least it takes time to maximize your results from paid advertising.
Most people who run paid ads with no experience end up losing a lot of money as they go through their learning curve. For this reason, it’s often better to hire someone to run paid ads for you if you have a limited budget.
Having a limited budget is another reason you should invest in long-term marketing strategies for your cleaning business because it can help build a foundation to generate leads without continually having to put money into it for continued results.
Active prospecting and networking for new cleaning clients
Active prospecting and networking are marketing strategies you should implement throughout all stages of your cleaning business growth. One mistake we see cleaning business owners make is that they reach a certain point in their business and they seem to only rely on passive marketing strategies and abandon all active prospecting.
Passive marketing strategies for a cleaning business can be extremely effective in the long run, but to some degree, you should always continue with actively prospecting for new cleaning clients. This is especially true if you are struggling to get enough leads and sales through your marketing or if you don’t have a large marketing and advertising budget.
Another benefit of continuing active prospecting is that to some extent you can really control the rate at which you bring in new clients. For most people, cold calling and actively reaching out to new potential clients aren’t fun, but it can be effective.
The downside to this strategy is that it can take up a lot of time. If you don’t have a lot of extra income to invest in marketing or are experiencing a slump in business, we still recommend using active prospecting as part of your overall marketing strategy.
When you combine active prospecting with passive marketing strategies it can bring in clients quicker while also planting seeds for future clients with your marketing.
Creating a lead generation strategy for your cleaning business
An important marketing strategy for your cleaning company to implement is creating a lead magnet to improve your lead generation. A lead magnet is something of value that you offer as a download in exchange for someone’s name, email, and phone number. This is something that you offer outside of your regular free quote option on your website.
In addition to creating a lead magnet you also want to make sure to optimize your website for lead generation in general. Some simple tips you can implement is to make sure your phone number is easily visible on the top of every page. Also, include a button that leads to a free estimate on the top of every page as well.
Creating these lead magnets and opportunities on your site to generate leads is important, but you also need the traffic to go with it to generate leads. This is where you can make the decision to run paid advertising for traffic or to use other marketing strategies to increase traffic to your website.
Running paid advertising for cleaning companies
We talked a bit about running paid advertising earlier in the post, but one major benefit to running paid ads is that this marketing strategy can be implemented to get targeted traffic quicker than some organic strategies. The big downside to this marketing strategy for a cleaning business is that you need to have a decent budget to invest each month to see results.
For example, if you are a smaller cleaning company you might not have the extra funds available to invest in this marketing strategy. Part of running a successful ad campaign for a cleaning company is having proper expectations.
Let’s say that your budget available for running paid ads is $300 a month. If you typically are getting leads for around $15/lead, that’s roughly 20 leads per month. Also, understand that not every lead you generate will hire your cleaning service, plus without an effective sales process and follow-up strategy, you might struggle to convert these leads.
In the beginning, you may lose money on paid advertising until you optimize your advertising strategy and sales process. The good news is that some of these customers you acquire through advertising can become repeat customers which can greatly improve your return on investment in paid advertising. This is why we recommend a combination of a short term results marketing strategy like paid advertising and other long-term marketing strategies.
Optimizing your off-site SEO cleaning company marketing strategy
One long-term marketing strategy for a cleaning business is optimizing off-site SEO. This strategy is not 100% passive, but it can help your cleaning company get a lot more exposure with a limited investment and consistent effort.
You probably remember the days of looking through the Yellow Pages to find local businesses, well, the online version of this are citations, directory listings, and a Google My Business page. Citation and directory management is the digital marketing equivalent to managing listings of your local business online.
When you set up these directory listings have your business name, address, and phone number consistent across all listings. If they aren’t consistent it can send red flags to Google. When search engines don’t see consistency they may not rank your website as well.
A key component of your off-site SEO strategy is a Google My Business page. This is like your online storefront and can generate a lot of targeted traffic and leads if optimized correctly.
A big aspect of optimizing a Google My Business page often overlooked is adding pictures. You can see the big difference between the results of cleaning companies that do this vs those who don’t. See an example of this below.
Content marketing strategy for cleaning businesses
Another long-term cleaning company marketing strategy you should implement is content marketing. With consistency, you can create content on your cleaning business website that will attract targeted traffic and leads for your business.
Some of the base pages we would recommend creating are things like service pages, industry pages, location pages, and blog posts. Each one of these pages of content can improve your visibility for your cleaning business online.
The idea behind content marketing is to create content that is focused on serving your ideal customers. The content should be easy to digest and can be written in a conversational tone.
Focus on content that answers common questions your customers have. You could also make content on helping them to avoid issues that your services can help solve.
At the end of your content include a call to action to take the next step in your sales process. This could be suggesting they request a quote, call you for more information, or download your lead magnet.
When your content provides value, it will help build trust, rapport, and credibility for your business. When people trust your business and see you as credible, it is much easier to sell your services to them.
Use content marketing to attract new leads, and to improve your conversion rate from your website. A downside to content marketing is it does take time to start seeing results from it. For this reason, we suggest combining it with a paid advertising strategy.
Using SEO as a cleaning company marketing strategy
Using SEO for cleaning companies is another marketing strategy that goes hand in hand with content marketing. SEO is when you write the content in a way that highlights specific keywords and search-terms throughout the content.
When your content is written with SEO in mind, it can help attract visitors to your website. This happens when you optimize for relevant keywords that your ideal customers are using in the search engines.
A major benefit of SEO for a cleaning company marketing strategy is that it can pay returns for years. A downside of SEO is it can sometimes take 6-9 months for a post to reach its full traffic potential.
This time can even be longer if you have a brand new website. Google puts new sites in a “sandbox” where it delays the ranking process. This process can last for a few months until a site becomes more established.
Even with this downside using an SEO strategy is essential for long-term marketing success. Again this is also why we suggest combining a quicker results strategy with an SEO strategy.
Conclusion
A key takeaway is that many marketing strategies work for marketing a cleaning business when you work with them. However, how they complement each other is and work together can be most important.
If you want to optimize your cleaning company marketing strategy, you need to implement strategies that complement each other. In doing so you can compensate for each strategy’s weaknesses. For example, you want to combine a long-term strategy like content marketing with a quicker results strategy like paid advertising.
While one strategy may bring in the majority of your results, you should also diversify your marketing. This is important in case something happens where that strategy isn’t feasible anymore.
As an example, If you couldn’t continue the same level of advertising budget because of a dip in sales. In this scenario, it would be good to have a passive strategy outside of advertising to generate traffic and leads.
By using content marketing in addition to advertising could help attract new leads without having to increase your ad spend. Balancing your cleaning company marketing strategies for the immediate future and long-term should be your overall goal. That way you are prepared for whatever might happen in your business.
P.S. If you are struggling to get quality leads for your cleaning business, Click Here to Learn How to Get More Clients for your business with these Top 10 Lead Sources For Cleaning Business Owners.