Facebook advertising can be a double-edged sword for cleaning business owners. Facebook advertising for cleaning businesses can be very profitable or a money pit if you aren’t careful. In this post, you’ll learn the top 5 Facebook advertising mistakes most cleaning business owners make and how to avoid them.
Foundations Your Website Needs Before Starting Facebook Advertising
Before we even jump into the most common Facebook advertising mistakes cleaning business owners make, most cleaning company owners don’t have the right mindset towards marketing, to begin with. Most cleaning business owners think that they have a traffic problem, and that is why they aren’t generating leads or getting new clients for their businesses.
Certainly, traffic can be a reason to not generate leads and new clients, but more often it isn’t a traffic problem, it’s a conversion problem. When someone comes to your website for the first time if you don’t have a means to capture their information in some manner likely they won’t ever return.
This makes setting up your cleaning businesses’ website to have means of generating leads essential. For example, you could create some type of lead magnet that solves a common problem of your ideal customers. A lead magnet is simply something you give away for free in exchange for your target market’s name, email, and phone number.
You could use a variety of options of lead magnets, such as an ebook, video series, PDF guide, or even a coupon on future cleaning services. The goal is to get your website visitor’s information in some form so that you can continue to market to them later on. For example, a lead magnet we use at Marketing Systems By Design is a free guide on the Top 10 Lead Sources For Cleaning Business Owners.
Most people who visit your site for the first time likely are not ready to buy from you, but if you can capture their information you can continue to provide value to them. Then down the road when they are ready to buy, they come to your cleaning business and not a competitor’s business.
Is Your Facebook Advertising Targeting The Right People?
Once you have started to fix the foundation issues on your website and have options to generate leads from visitors, you want to make sure you are targeting the right people with your Facebook ads. A common mistake that cleaning business owners make with Facebook advertising is targeting the wrong people.
Most people using Facebook advertising don’t have a method or system of how they are advertising on Facebook, and just pick who they think might be a good ideal client. Often cleaning business owners just guess on who might be a good client. Facebook advertising has targeting options that you can add interests and demographics to who you are showing your ads to.
For example, we’ve found people often target people who like cleaning services. While that may sound like a good idea, this can often lead to targeting other cleaning business owners, and not actual people who use cleaning services.
Another thing we see is people targeting only females, or only parents. Certainly, in many cases that can be a majority of the clients you end up getting, but we’ve found working with our clients that many males also become leads and clients from Facebook ads. When in doubt, always test your targeting before eliminating large portions of the population.
One strategy we have found to be extremely effective that we implement with our clients is creating lookalike audiences. A lookalike audience will take an existing list of people and then Facebook will work its magic and create a list of thousands of people who are likely to behave the same way.
Typically we start with a lookalike audience of a cleaning business’s existing customer list and target them as a foundation for the ads. The picture below shows you where you can access the custom audiences feature.
Use Facebook Pixels To Retarget Your Site Visitors
Another form of targeting the right people in your Facebook advertising is to retarget your site visitors and those who engaged with your content on Facebook. This again hinges on the idea that most people who visit your website for the first time won’t be ready to buy, and you’ll have to find some way to communicate to them on an ongoing basis.
This is because most people tend to do business with those that they know and trust. The first time a person visits your cleaning company’s website, they may just be in research mode, and not yet ready to buy. Even if you don’t capture their name, email, and phone number with some kind of lead magnet, with a Facebook Pixel you can still remarket to them through Facebook ads.
This is very powerful because it can help establish your cleaning business as one that your ideal customers know and trust. You’ve probably also heard that the more times someone is exposed to something, the more likely they will buy it. This is yet another advantage of using Facebook advertising to promote your cleaning business.
There are even more advanced Facebook advertising strategies we use for our clients to create highly targeted lookalike audiences based on how people engaged with Facebook Pixels to further increase conversions and lower ad spend costs.
How To Install A Facebook Pixel On Your Website
- From the Ads Manager Menu in the top left highlight “All Tools” and click on the Pixels link circled in the picture below
- Click on the Details button on your Facebook business page
- Click on the Set Up button and then on Install Pixel link and follow the instructions to install your Facebook Pixel on your website
With The Right Targeting In Place For Your Facebook Ads, You Need To Focus On Tracking
Another common mistake we find cleaning business owners making with Facebook advertising is that they don’t have various means of tracking in place. A few examples of this we find is just boosting random Facebook posts, running traffic ads to their home page, and using the same link on ads as everywhere else in their marketing efforts.
If you aren’t tracking what you are doing, how can you expect to improve your marketing efforts? Instead of just boosting posts at random and sending every form of marketing to your home page, you want to have tracking in place to see what is working and what isn’t working.
When you do have tracking in place on your websites or by simply split testing different ads and audiences, you can begin to see which Facebook ads are performing better than others. With the Facebook advertising platform, there is also complex analytics they provide on the ads you run so you can continually improve them over time.
With these tracking features, you can determine things like which ads get the most clicks, see what landing pages work best for conversions, and even see what images on your ads perform best.
In the picture below you’ll see some of the things you can track such as cost per click, click-through rate, how many times your ads were seen, and even track things like purchases on your website.
Another Common Facebook Advertising Mistake Cleaning Business Owners Make Is Only Talking About Company Features
Having great company features is important, but the reality is that most potential customers for your cleaning service don’t really care about the features of your company. It may sound great that your company has been in business for 10 years, or that you provide excellent customer service, or that you do bi-weekly cleaning, but most people won’t use that as a reason to buy from your cleaning company.
Instead of making buying decisions on what your company has as features, you need to talk about the benefits of your cleaning service in your Facebook ads. Features are centered around your cleaning company and how great you are, instead of focused on your potential customers and their needs.
People want to buy from a company that understands them and cares about them, and when your Facebook advertisements focus on benefits they will feel that way. Some examples of benefits you may talk about in your Facebook ads are things like time savings by not having to do your own cleaning, or being more productive with your time instead of spending it on cleaning your home.
You could also talk about benefits of your cleaning service such as eliminating the stress of having to come home to a dirty home, or coming home to a clean home and being able to relax, rather than having to clean your home.
When you focus on the benefits of your cleaning service and not features, people are less likely to tune out from your Facebook ads.
Don’t Just Use Stock Photos Or Overly Professional Facebook Ads For A Cleaning Service
One thing to understand is that when people come to social media, they come to be social and connect, and they don’t come there looking to be pitched on something. With this in mind, the more your Facebook ads can look like someone’s friend’s post, the better.
Most cleaning business owners think that their Facebook ads need to have an expensive graphics designer create all of their Facebook ads images. Obviously, you don’t want your images to be of low quality, but you often don’t need to have the photos in Facebook advertisement actually look like ads.
Certainly, test and track which ad images perform better for your business, but one thing we’ve found is that simple pictures of a cleaning business’s smiling employees cleaning a home in branded clothing work best.
An explanation for this can be that with a cleaning service, a client needs to let the cleaners into their home. Would you rather let a stranger into your home or a smiling face you recognize into your home? Obviously, the smiling professional-looking employee is someone you’d trust more than just a stock photo or company logo.
If you don’t yet have some pictures of your actual employees cleaning we’d suggest getting some taken to use for your Facebook advertising. Below you’ll see an example of a couple of pictures we’ve used for one of our clients.
Do You Use Social Proof In Your Facebook Ads?
Another thing we find a lot of cleaning business owners are missing from their websites and Facebook ads are social proof. Do have testimonials or results from happy customers on your site?
If not, it could be a great way to help you bring on more customers from your advertising, as well as, convert more visitors to your site into leads and new clients.
In today’s day and age, almost everyone is going to say that they have great products and services, so what will separate your cleaning service from everyone else? Positive reviews and social proof in the form of testimonials can be a great way to help your cleaning company stand out.
People are far more likely to believe what someone else says about your company than you are. Having salespeople in your company is important, but the best salesperson you can find is actually a happy and satisfied customer.
Having them leave a positive review and having them give a positive testimony can go a long way to helping you acquire new cleaning clients. You can even use these testimonies as the basis for your Facebook advertising and create audiences that resonate with those ads as well. This is one strategy we use with our clients and it tends to work very well to drive traffic to their websites and very cost-effective leads.
If you are struggling to get more reviews for your cleaning company, click here to check out our automated service to get more testimonials and online reviews.
Don’t Feel Like You Have To Master Facebook Advertising To Get Started
As we mentioned before Facebook Advertising can cost you money if you don’t know what you are doing. There is definitely a learning curve to it, but if you’ve struggled with getting results with Facebook ads before, it doesn’t mean that they don’t work.
Instead of trying to figure out the ever-changing landscape of running Facebook ads for your cleaning business, you’ll likely get better results faster by hiring a marketing agency that knows what they are doing.
It may be an additional investment initially, but you’ll also save time and money by getting Facebook ads running that actually work, instead of spending your profits trying to figure it out alone.
If you haven’t ever hired a marketing agency before, or haven’t had good results in the past, check out this post of ours on How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Agency for Your Cleaning Business. Also if you’d like to learn more about working with our agency to help you set up profitable Facebook ads and more, click here to apply for a free strategy call.