Promoting your cleaning business doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, there are several ways to market your cleaning business without having to spend a fortune. In this post, you’ll learn 10 ways to market your cleaning business without running paid ads.
1. Meet potential cleaning clients at trade shows
Of course, a digital marketing plan for a cleaning business is crucial to your success, but you shouldn’t neglect offline marketing strategies either. One method that can work well to promote your cleaning business is trade shows.
This isn’t always the most cost-effective method, but it can get new people interested in your cleaning business. If you decide to set up a booth at a trade show, you need to have a means of drawing attention to your cleaning business.
A great way to do this is to put on cleaning demonstrations. For example, you might offer a carpet cleaning service and you could get wine stains out of a carpet sample.
Maybe you clean flooring in commercial buildings and you could take a soiled piece of flooring and demonstrate how clean you can get it. Ideally, you want your demonstration to be something that can create dramatic before and after visuals.
If you go the trade show route, make sure you connect with people online as well while you are there. A great option is to give away some kind of free lead magnet or offer in exchange for your booth visitor’s names and emails.
You might not get a cleaning client at the trade show, but if you have the means to follow up down the road, like with email marketing, you can earn their business later.
2. Use networking events to grow your business locally
One of the best ways to grow your cleaning business locally is with networking events. There are many options for these kinds of events some popular options can be found on meetup.com or with a BNI group.
Meetup.com is a free option to find business networking groups in your area. Once you set up your account you can search for meet up opportunities that are highly targeted for your industry. A great option could be searching for “business owner” groups.
You could also just simply Google “local business networking events” and you’ll see several local events coming up that you could attend.
Another great resource for networking and building potential leads for your cleaning business is with your local chamber of commerce. One thing to understand is that you shouldn’t just show up and expect to get leads, you want to network and become active in the organizations.
You can’t just passively show up and expect to get quality leads; new cleaning clients come from building relationships. Networking works when you work it. Plant seeds and develop relationships with other business owners – you’ll harvest when the timing is right.
3. List your business in citation sites to improve local SEO
Another thing that can help you get exposure for your cleaning business is listing it in business directories or citation sites online. This can help your business appear more often in online searches.
When you list your cleaning business in various directories they will typically link back to your website. One of the determining factors for ranking your cleaning business website on Google is the number of sites linking to it.
These links are called backlinks. Now we typically don’t recommend a full-blown backlink outreach strategy because it can be extremely time consuming and may not get many results.
However, with a citation directory listing, you are almost guaranteed a link back to your site without having to beg for sites to link back to you. There are often dozens if not even hundreds of these directory sites out there that could provide relevant links to your website.
It can be difficult to find all of these sites on your own, so one of the services we provide to our clients is citation and directory management. Click here to check out our marketing packages.
4. Market your cleaning business locally by optimizing your Google My Business page
Have you ever wanted your cleaning business to show up first in the maps on Google? Optimizing your Google My Business page can be a great way to help your cleaning company rank higher on Google.
Setting up your Google My Business page is just the first part of the process. Optimization is the next step you need to focus on or your traffic is likely to stall out from Google Maps.
One tip to consider implementing is to completely fill out all that you can. This means filling out your hours of business, services you provide, and especially adding pictures that are geo-targeted. You can also “post” to your Google My Business page, just like you do on Facebook or LinkedIn.
When you follow these optimization tips for your Google My Business page you can start to dramatically increase your free traffic locally and increase leads.
Check out this post to learn more about using Google My Business to grow your cleaning business.
5. How to use SEO to promote your cleaning business
SEO for cleaning companies can be as technical or as simple as you want it to be. The idea is to build out content that is based on search terms that your ideal customers are looking for.
For example, if you have a commercial cleaning business, your ideal customers might be building owners interested in floor care tips. If you have a residential cleaning service, your ideal customer could be looking for house cleaning tips.
If you are looking to promote your cleaning business with SEO and to get organic traffic locally, location pages would be a good place to start. A location page is basically a page that you describe your services, and benefits of your cleaning service while also mentioning the city and location you do business in.
You can also add location pageson your cleaning company website, which will drive more visitors to your site from those location. If you have a quality site and calls to action that generate leads, the increased traffic can eventually convert new cleaning clients.
6. Blogging as a method to market your cleaning business
Another method to market your cleaning business is blogging. Unfortunately, many business owners misunderstand blogging and think that it’s a waste of time.
The truth is, blogging can be an extremely powerful method to promote your cleaning business. Blogging is an essential part of developing a content marketing system for your cleaning business.
Not only does blogging capitalize on the benefits of SEO and get traffic to your website, but it can also be used to educate potential customers and help convert them into leads.
Each time you make a new blog post that is based on helping your ideal customer it is like one more TV commercial that runs constantly to promote your cleaning business.
If you’d like to learn more about blogging to promote your cleaning business check out this post. How to get clients for a cleaning business with blogging.
We know coming up with quality content to blog about can be tough, which is why it’s one of the marketing services we provide to our clients. Click here to learn more about our content marketing package.
7. Use video marketing and YouTube to market your cleaning business
Yet another vastly underutilized marketing strategy for cleaning companies is video marketing. Video marketing is powerful because it adds a sense of realness to your business.
Plus when you use video it can quickly build trust, rapport, and credibility with your viewers. In business, people hire companies they trust and feel are experts in their industry.
When you utilize video marketing you can benefit from better positioning in the market place. Most cleaning companies don’t use video marketing so if you are one of the few that do, it can make your company stand out from the competition.
Another advantage of marketing your cleaning business on YouTube is that it works like a search engine just like Google. This means that each time you make a video it can continue to work to promote your cleaning business 24/7.
Some video ideas that can work well are testimonials from your customers, time-laps cleaning videos, before and after videos, how-to videos. A lot of people want to be “do it yourselfers” until they see the work involved. How-to videos can be a great way to transition people from wanting to do it themselves to hiring your cleaning service instead.
8. Use email marketing to promote your cleaning company
When people visit your cleaning business website for the first time, they don’t always buy from you or request a quote. For those that don’t, you need a method to follow up with them or they might decide to do business with a competitor instead.
Email marketing can be one method of getting leads and improving your follow up with potential cleaning clients. As you build out your content marketing system of blog posts and videos, you will continually have new content you can send to your email list.
With each piece of content, you send out it will build more credibility and trust with your business. As this continues, when the timing is right for these potential clients, they will buy your services rather than competitors.
An important thing to understand with email marketing is that you can’t just use it to send out specials and offers. You need to follow the 80/20 rule.
80% of the time your email blasts should be helpful value-based content, and 20% should be selling. When you follow this ratio, people stay on your lists, and when you do have offers and specials, people don’t ignore them.
9. Market your cleaning business in Facebook groups
Facebook groups can be another great place to network and promote your cleaning business. However, one thing to be careful of is to market your business in a non-spammy way.
Too many times people end up treating these Facebook groups as a place to just spam their offers and don’t provide any value to the group. If you want to turn people in Facebook groups into new cleaning clients you should only promote your content in groups.
If you are being helpful and providing tips and education in these groups that bring people to your site you won’t be seen as a spammer. Depending on the group, posting your blog articles and YouTube videos could be widely accepted.
This could turn into a steady stream of quality leads for your cleaning business. Plus if you decide to get into paid ads in the future, you could use this method to build up targeted audiences from those who engage with your content.
10. Using existing customers to get more cleaning clients
Happy satisfied customers can end up being your best salespeople. It’s more believable to outsiders when customers talk about the value of your cleaning business than when you do.
You’ve probably heard that “Facts tell, and stories sell.” Facts and features of your business are great, but they don’t sell as well as your customer’s stories.
Testimonials and case studies can be a powerful way to promote a cleaning business. Using stories and testimonials can also be a great way to get new potential customers to relate to your business.
When people hear testimonials or case studies that describe situations that they are in and are struggling with and hear that other people found a solution to that problem by getting your service, they are more likely to want to try it for themselves.
Having testimonials and case studies on your website can help with converting site visitors into paying customers. Also, if you decide to get into paid ads, they work great for those too.
**BONUS** 11. Run paid ads to scale your results faster
Of course, if you follow the above steps you can start to get new leads and cleaning clients for your business. You can follow all of the above cleaning business marketing strategies and not have to invest money into paid advertising.
However, understand that paid ads can be a way to get faster results without waiting to get organic traffic. Certainly, free organic traffic is something you want as a part of your marketing strategy, but organic strategies do take time.
We often recommend to our clients that they should combine organic marketing strategies like those above, and running paid ads. The organic strategies build the foundation for long-term free traffic, and the paid strategies can bring in results quickly.
Both can work on their own, but for example, if you only did paid ads, and stopped running them, the traffic stops. The other side is you could use an organic strategy like blogging to get leads, but it takes time for the posts to rank.
This means you could write a blog post today but might not see returns from it for a few months. However, when you do see returns they are steady and consistent and continue without putting in more work or money.
Each strategy has its advantages and disadvantages, which is why we recommend a combo of both. If you’d like to learn more about how our agency could help you with both content marketing and paid ads, fill out this survey so we can know more about your business and how we can help.
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.