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Marketing your carpet cleaning business in the right way can help you increase your revenue, build your brand and make meaningful customer relationships.
So, if you’ve been having trouble letting people know that your carpet cleaning business is awesome, then you’ve come to the right place. What you need is a comprehensive marketing guide to show the world how good your carpet cleaning business is, and we’re here to help you with just that. Here are 20 actionable things you can do that will give your carpet cleaning & floor care business the marketing boost that it needs within a very short duration.
Probably the oldest trick in the book – the act of giving your customers a pen or a keychain with your cleaning service’s logo and name on it is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways you can market your business. Besides, nobody’s going to say ‘No’, to a free pen that you give them as a token of appreciation for choosing your business (after you’re done cleaning their house/establishment). It’s a great marketing scheme that works, because a pen/keychain with your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) printed on it will reach more people than most adverts would, since people tend to lend pens and carry their keychains around with them whenever they go out. And the best part about this? You get all this marketing for a very small investment.
If you own a cleaning business, then it’s likely that you have a van with your business’ name, logo, address and phone number on it already. But if you don’t, then we highly recommend that you immediately get a neat-looking van and have it detailed, especially with your phone number. Detailing your van is one of the simplest ways to let more people know that you exist. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re driving it around or having it parked outside the house that you’re cleaning for the day, a good-looking van will speak for itself, and give people the impression that you run a high-profile carpet cleaning business. Skeptical whether it would work? Read about this carpet cleaning business owner’s experience.
Having a van makes it easy for you transport all your equipment to the job location on D-Day as well, so this is definitely an area you need to invest in if you have the budget for it.
Marketing is all about projecting your strengths to potential buyers in the hopes of convincing them to buy the produc. Getting certified by associations such as the ICRA, IICRC, ARCSI or LMCCA not only makes you seem more professional and more credible, but also gives you the liberty to market yourself as a business that has been certified by a governing body on every newsletter, brochure or banner that you print. Being certified by LMCCA or IICRC also lists you on their premium directory of cleaning businesses, and this is a huge bonus, since anybody who wants to search for a certified cleaning business can head over to these websites and find you listed there.
We live in an age where the usage of environment-friendly products are given utmost importance, and it only makes sense to leverage this client expectation to market ourselves better. Consider your options to see whether it is feasible for you to switch to using 100% natural solutions, disinfectants or cleaning materials. This will not only help attract customers who give importance to the usage of eco-friendly products, but will also help you market yourself in banner ads and brochures as a business that is conscious of environmental pollution.
Having yourself listed on online directories is a great way to get more people to find you online. Making sure that you’re listed on Facebook, Google, Foursquare, Yelp and YellowPages is a must for any SMB, since people visit these websites/directories the most for finding local businesses. Getting listed on niche directories (which in this case is any directory for home services/carpet cleaners) like Angie’s List or carpetcleaningdir.com, is also integral to make sure that people who are searching for carpet/upholstery cleaners find you before they find your competitors.
Is your carpet cleaning business selling other products that are essential for carpet care to your customers? For example, after cleaning the carpets at a house, you could give some DIY tips to your customers and try and sell them carpet cleaning solution or blotting paper that could come in handy for them in the future. From a marketing perspective, the fact that you spent time giving them helpful DIY tips will increase mentions of your carpet cleaning business’ name when a person from one household talks to a person from another, and the products will help more people get to know about you if you have a label/print on them carrying your business’ name and logo (just like in tip #1). By cross-promoting products, you’ve let your customers know that you sell other things beside cleaning carpets. The next time they want a product that is related to carpet like a fabric softener, even, they’ll think about calling you, if they like your product and your service quality. And this gives you an opportunity to build a relationship with your customer, and possibly get the opportunity to get them to buy your services again in the future.
Before you turn this idea down as unnecessary and expensive, let’s run a quick experiment. Take a look at this screenshot below.
More than 80% of the people would pick comment number three as the one that stands out amongst the four comments. The person who posted this also seems to know what they’re doing, since they have a display picture that catches a person’s attention, and that’s not where it ends. They’ve also made sure that they mention the name of their business in the ‘Name’ field. For all we know, people might even search for this employee on their website, and search for the company’s name on search engines. The person who made comment #3 has evidently planned this out, to make sure that more heads turn towards their business. This is an example of smart and subtle marketing, and it also proves the fact that it is never a bad option to go for a face that everybody likes, may it be in a banner ad or a comment on a forum.If hiring a model seems like a very expensive option, then at least make sure that a man/woman with a face that is easy to remember is featured on ads/profile pictures of your business.
This is one of the most effective exercises that you can do to determine the type of clients that seem to need your services the most. Create an Excel sheet that is linked to your database of customers (manually doing this is nearly impossible if you are a business with several hundred customers) and categorize your clients based on their type (e.g. home, hotel, salon, etc.). See which category you have the most customers in, and also look at the categories that you are yet to explore, to get some data that might help you figure out who you can market to. For example, if most of your clients are restaurants, then this data indicates that restaurants probably need their carpets cleaned more often than other types of clients. Using this data, you can try and contact other restaurants who you aren’t your customers, and tell them that a lot of other restaurants in that area seem to be wanting their carpets cleaned, so maybe they would want to do it too. If it’s something that’s been on their mind, or if you even sell it well enough, then they would want you to do it, and you might end up earning a new customer. On the other hand, if you notice that there are no, say, car showrooms in your database, then you can possibly contact a few car dealerships/showrooms in and around your area, and you can pitch your services to them. If a considerable amount of them want to avail your services, then that opens up a completely new business type as a customer base to you. You can keep doing this for different businesses, and keep expanding your client base.
Creative marketing requires you make the most of something that is happening around you to market yourself smartly. It doesn’t matter whether it is a funny incident in your town that everyone’s talking about or a change in the weather conditions. Try to make everything that happens in your town about carpet cleaning and leverage the occurrence to your advantage. Check out this fantastic personal experience article by Randall Linton about how he made the best out of a freak storm in April, to get an idea of how to do this. Try to steer any occasion or occurrence to make it seem like a good time for people to clean their upholstery/carpets, and you are bound to see a hike in your leads volume.
Responding to reviews of your business online are extremely important for any business to maintain a good rapport with clients. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a review by a happy customer or an angry one. Make sure that you engage with reviews that customers leave behind since it is a reflection of how your business treats its customers. Respond politely to reviews from dissatisfied customers. If the fault was genuinely from your side, then apologize and reassure them by saying that you will do everything in your power to try and rectify the mistake. If it is within your budget, then give them promotional coupons that might help retain them as a customer.
Direct Mail Marketing is a commonly used method by several businesses to attract more customers.. If you’ve owned your business for a few years now, then chances are that you’ve already sent out direct mail containing a promo coupon or a brochure through a postal service, and assessed how effective it is for your business. Some find it helpful, and some don’t. In any case, our best suggestion is to give it a try before deciding for yourself whether it works. The best direct mail campaigns are ones with coupons/promo codes that offer the customers a discount. Direct mail marketing is not very expensive either, so it makes for a great marketing option if you’re up for some experimentation.
This might seem like too basic a marketing idea, but you’d be surprised at how effective this is. Nothing attracts attention like a catchy well designed pin-up. And it needn’t be just a physical poster/notice about your business. Websites such as Pinterest have essentially brought the same to the internet, where you can post an interesting stat/infographic/fact along with your company’s logo to attract more traffic to your website. Which brings us to our next point:
Having an active social media presence on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is one of the easiest ways to get your business’ name out there and introduce it to the world. However, there’s no point to being active on social media if your words are falling against deaf ears. Work out a strategy to slowly gain more followers. Don’t keep posting tips about carpet cleaning or new equipment in the industry alone. As important as this is, it’s also essential to keep your audience engaged with your content. Post funny images that are relevant to your business, or just ones that are funny/informative in general. Make sure that you use the right hashtags on Instagram and Twitter. Another common method that you can use to get more followers is giving your customers a small discount (5% or the sorts) if they like your social media pages. This combined with you posting good content should give your social media page the reach that it needs.
Dishing out flyers are another age-old method to get people to know about your business. The trick is to ensure that the flyer that you are handing out stands out amongst the others and makes people want to read it. Here are some ideas for well designed flyers by other carpet/house cleaning businesses.
Segmented email campaigns always work better than general ones, because the content in personalized email campaigns will be more relevant to the reader’s interests. For example, sending brochures designed differently for a 20-year-old and a 40-year-old is bound to work better than sending the same brochure to the two of them, since the difference in design and word formatting will resonate differently to the two of them. There are several other ways that you can segment your emails, so make sure you read up on it before you start segmenting your emails.
If your budgets permits it, host an event like a marathon, for instance, in your city/town. Hosting/Sponsoring an interesting event such as a marathon would bring a lot of people together and get them to see your business’ name and logo on the banners for the event. Even if you can’t host an event, you can sponsor smaller events that are conducted by schools, charity fundraisers etc. The intention is to familiarize people with your brand name and logo, and make sure that more people recognize your business. This will help people remember your business’ name for future references, provided it was evident that it was your business that hosted/sponsored the event. Guess who they’ll be calling the next time they want their carpets cleaned?
We’ve all heard the cliched quote, ‘A workman is only as good as his tools’. In today’s world, the guys with the biggest, baddest and fastest machines are the ones who win, often. But that’s just one side of the story. If you are regularly buying new equipment, you can mention this in your banner ads and brochures, about how you own the best toolshed in town. Everybody wants the best of the best, these days, and provided that you aren’t priced too differently from your competitors, they’ll pick the ones with the better inventory over the others.
Always keep track of your competitors’ marketing campaigns, to make sure that you’re not left biting the dust when it comes to creative things that you could be doing to market your business. Never do the exact same thing that your competitor is doing, that would just make you seem unoriginal and make people detest you. But keep an eye on their marketing tactics; it might inspire you to come up with something new and unique that you could use to market your business better.
Throughout this article, several services have been mentioned that you could adopt to improve your marketing strategy. Most of these need the help of a third party service. We thought we’d make your life easier by categorically listing out the services that you could use for your future marketing campaigns. Custom Promotional Merchandise: 1. 4imprint 2. Vistaprint Listing and Reputation Management: 1. Synup Lite Email Marketing 1. MailChimp 2. Autopilot Direct Marketing 1. Dynamicard 2. TMR Direct
If you still want to read more about how to market your carpet cleaning business, then head over to these forums right away: – TruckMount – Kleen Kuip – Cleantalk All these forums have sections/threads dedicated to carpet cleaning business marketing, with several people sharing their past experiences or valuable tips that you can employ to market your upholstery/carpet cleaning/floor care business better.
Just to make things more interesting, we thought that we’ll host a challenge about carpet cleaning marketing. Try any 5 of the aforementioned marketing campaigns, and write to us about your experience with them at hello@synup.com. Tell us about your process and whether it was successful or not. If we find your email interesting, we’ll feature you on one of our future posts.
