It seems like every day a new marketing tool comes on the market, but what marketing tools do you really need to grow your cleaning business? On top of that, without the right marketing strategy even with the right marketing tool, it may not get the results you were hoping for. In this post, you’ll learn the top 8 marketing tools, and marketing strategies, you can use to scale your cleaning business quickly.
Set up a website
The first marketing tool you need to have for your cleaning business is a website. Even if you have most or all of your business generated through referrals and networking, having a cleaning business website is an essential part of your marketing strategy.
Having your own website will work as the online hub for your cleaning business. Regardless of your marketing strategy or the marketing tools you use, in most cases, you’ll need your own website to maximize their results.
When you talk to potential customers, those who aren’t immediately ready to hire you will go into research mode. This means they want to look more into your company to help them decide if they should hire you or not.
In most cases, the first place they are going to go is to your website. If you don’t have a website or if it has a poor website design, they likely won’t hire you. To make sure you optimize your website properly, check out this post on the top website design tips for cleaning businesses.
Optimize your Google My Business Page
Another great marketing tool and marketing strategy you should use to promote your cleaning business is a Google My Business page. If you want to generate a lot of local traffic and phone call leads for your cleaning business a Google My Business page is a must.
These days most people that are looking for a service business such as a cleaning company will use search terms like “commercial cleaning near me”, or “janitorial service near me”. When people use these kinds of search terms Google typically will show a map listing for the top search results.
The only way to show up on those Google Map listings is by having a Google My Business page. Now just having a Google My Business page isn’t enough, it also needs to be optimized.
Optimizing a Google My Business page for a cleaning business means fully filing out categories and services, listing business hours, setting a service area, uploading photos often, and posting regularly. See an example below of possible results from a Google My Business page when used as a marketing strategy for cleaning businesses. These results are only possible when you optimize and work your page regularly.
Use bidding and estimating calculators
Another marketing tool that can be helpful is having access to various bidding and estimating calculators. Members of The Janitorial Store get access to a wide variety of bidding calculators that you can use to prepare estimates.
These can be used as marketing tools because they can give you accurate pricing quickly to use as estimates for potential clients. When you have a quick turnaround and offer an accurate quote it is more likely that a potential customer will do business with you vs the competition.
There are also a wide variety of different software programs and services you can get for your cleaning company to help with creating proposals. Some services will help you to generate leads with lead capture forms, then calculate an estimate, and even allow customers to pay for their service immediately.
Different services can work better than others and the features you need really depend on other marketing strategies you have in place. However, these types of services could be worth looking into to help you automate some of your quote processes.
Use an email autoresponder
Another recommended marketing tool for cleaning businesses is an email autoresponder. This marketing tool can help you with lead generation as well as with some basic follow-up with cleaning leads.
The biggest benefit to using an email autoresponder is that it can help you leverage your time and be more efficient with follow-up. Instead of manually reaching out to every new lead that comes in, you can set up an automated email that goes out immediately.
This can give the prospect some basic info and lead them to the next step in your sales process. Certainly, you want to follow up in addition to that email, but that first touch doesn’t have to cost you time doing it manually.
In addition to that, you can create an email series that is sent to new leads that offer further value and educates potential customers on the value of your services.
These emails can also gently sell your services without being pushy. Doing this can help turn cold leads into warm leads that are ready to buy from you.
Use Call tracking as a marketing tool
If you track something it can give you the ability to improve it. This also means that if you aren’t tracking something it’s very hard to make any positive changes related to it.
When it comes to your phone call leads, are you tracking them? Do you know what marketing efforts are leading to calls? Are you recording your calls so you can review how your customer service handles calls with potential customers?
If you answered no to these questions you likely could benefit from using a call tracking system such as CallRail. This is a marketing tool that allows you to create custom phone numbers to track your calls and it even records the calls you receive on these numbers.
With this information, you can easily see where your marketing efforts are actually leading to phone calls. On top of that, since the calls are recorded, you can see areas to improve in your sales process, as well as what methods are attracting quality leads.
If you plan on running paid advertising for your cleaning business, using a call tracking system is something we highly recommend.
A CRM is an essential marketing tool to establish a sales follow up process
One area we see a lot of cleaning companies struggle with is the sales and follow-up process. A marketing tool that can help with this is a CRM or customer relationship manager.
As potential customers request estimates on your website they will be added to your CRM. From there you are able to send out emails to them, follow up via phone, and add notes about the individual prospect.
Most cleaning businesses either don’t follow up at all after the initial contact with a lead, or they only follow up once. Sometimes it takes potential customers hearing from you multiple times before they make a decision to work with you.
Having a CRM can help you organize your follow-up process and track where individual prospects are throughout the sales process. This can help you improve your conversion rates and scale your cleaning business faster as it can help you gain new customers faster.
A system for hiring employees and getting applications
Another common problem we see with cleaning businesses is having enough quality employees on their team. The cleaning industry tends to have a high turnover rate for most companies.
If you don’t have systems in place to keep enough good employees on hand, or a steady flow of new applications coming in to fill spots you need, you could be in trouble.
Often we see companies scrambling to have enough employees as their business grows. The key to avoiding this problem is to market that you are hiring on a regular basis. Don’t wait until you desperately need employees to start marketing and advertising for them.
Some marketing strategies you can use that we have seen to be effective are to create an employment page, write blog posts about employment, and run paid advertising for hiring employees.
Your goals on optimizing an employment page should be to write a quality job description, highlight the benefits of working with you, and sell someone on why they would want the job. The blog post should highlight similar things but also cover who is not a good fit for the position. This can help to prequalify your applications. Finally, you can use paid advertising to get more exposure for your job listings.
Use paid advertising to get traffic quickly
In addition to using paid advertising to find more quality employees, you should also use it to help generate more leads for your cleaning business. There are a lot of great organic marketing strategies you can use to build traffic and generate leads, but if you have the budget for it and want to scale quickly, paid advertising is the way to go.
Now the two most common options for running paid ads for a cleaning business are Facebook ads and Google Ads. Typically we have seen residential cleaning businesses see the best results with Facebook ads and commercial cleaning with Google Ads.
Both strategies can work for either business, but the barrier to entry for Google Ads is typically a bit higher. We say this because for Google Ads you usually need a larger ad spend budget per month to optimize your ads.
The benefit of paid advertising as a marketing strategy for cleaning businesses is that you don’t have to wait long to see results. Also, the more money you have to invest into advertising typically the faster you’ll see results.
Advertising still isn’t an overnight results sort of thing, but results tend to come faster than with organic marketing strategies. This is why we recommend running paid ads for your cleaning business if you are looking to scale quickly.
Conclusion
While there are a variety of marketing tools and marketing strategies for cleaning businesses, there are 8 you should use as a foundation of your marketing plan. The first key marketing tool for cleaning businesses is a website. It will act as your marketing hub and without one most potential customers won’t take your business seriously.
From there you want to maximize your exposure from Google and you can do that with a Google My Business page. In order to provide accurate quotes to your leads, use tools to give proper bids and estimates. Then use the email autoresponder to help you reach all of your leads at once and can even help to automate some of your follow-up processes.
If you are looking to scale your cleaning business quickly, you need to understand where your best leads are coming from. A method to help determine this is by using a marketing tool for call tracking. With call tracking, you can see how your marketing dollars are working. Also, if it has recording features it can even help you improve your internal sales process.
A CRM or customer relationship manager can also help you to improve follow-up and increase your conversion rate of leads. As your business grows you need to have enough employees on hand to handle the additional work. Make sure you set up a system for hiring and use marketing to attract more ideal applicants.
Finally, with your internal systems in place, you’ll want to implement a paid advertising strategy to generate leads quickly. Use these tools and strategies to scale your cleaning business quickly!