19 Marketing ideas for your Home Cleaning Business

Marketing is not a one-time job. Spending time planning your efforts throughout the year is absolutely important if you want to market your home cleaning business right. If you’ve ever felt like you’ve wanted an extensive “how-to guide” for marketing your cleaning business, then your wishes have been granted. Here are 20 things that you can do to promote your home-cleaning business and earn more customers. We’ve also documented all the tools that you can use to get this

1. Getting Certified

Getting your cleaning business certified with the ISSA, IICRC or the Green Seal is a great place to get started when it comes to marketing your business. “But how is this a marketing effort”, you ask? Well, three things:

  • Once you get the certification, you can advertise your business as a certified one on brochures, flyers, etc. that you make in the future.
  • Getting certified makes you look more credible and trustworthy in the eyes of consumers.
  • A certification from IICRC or ISSA also means that consumers who are looking to find a certified cleaning business in their area can log onto these websites to find certified professionals who are part of their network.  And guess who the consumers are going to find if you’re listed there?

2. Help Guides for Customers

If you want your consumers to keep buying your services, then you need to show them that you get two things right.

  • Your employees do a good job of cleaning the customer’s house. (We’ll talk about this in the next point.)
  • You care about your customers and their homes

A simple way to show your customers that you care about their homes is giving them small printed DIY guides with tips about maintaining their houses. Customers will appreciate the knowledge that you share with them and they are more likely to remember you as well, as a result of this.

3. Start With Your Employees

Your employees are the face of your company, at least in your customer’s eyes. Making sure that you hire the right employees is extremely important if you want to come across as a trustworthy and warm business to your employees. Make sure that you hire employees with experience, as much as you can. Spend time and money training your employees to be thorough with their cleaning. Ask them to be warm to your customers, greet them nicely and get their job done without disturbing the customers. You’d be amazed at how appreciative some clients are when it comes to small things like this!

4.  Get Customers to Find You

Marketing is all about getting more customers to find you. If you go ahead and ask anybody under 40 about how they generally discover new businesses, the two most common answers word be 1) from a friend/family or 2) online. Consumers are constantly searching for businesses online, but making sure that your cleaning business is found online is completely your responsibility. Consumers often search for cleaning businesses on websites such as Yelp, HomeAdvisor or Angie’s List. Or if they’re feeling lazy, consumers search for something like “home cleaning businesses near me”, or “home cleaning businesses in Oregon” on Google, and this is what shows up.

Unless you’re listed on all these websites, your business will not show up when a consumer makes a search. Making sure that you’re listed on the internet is local marketing 101, and a sure-shot way to get discovered better by customers. (not sure how you’re listed on the internet right now? You can run a free scan to check that out right away)

5.  Earn Referrals

Remember how we said that one of the most common ways customers find your business is through a referral from a friend/family? You can make sure that you activate your existing customers into marketing your business for you by putting referral programs in place. Several online services such as Referral Saasquatch allow you to give rewards and discounts to customers who put in successful referrals for your business.  Referral programs can help you earn more customers while bringing down your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).  You can incentivize these referrals to add value to your customer relationships.  Give them a discount on their next purchase, or perhaps an Amazon gift voucher.

6.  Automate Your Marketing

While marketing your business is extremely important, you have a ton of other responsibilities as well if you’re the owner of a home cleaning business. One way to handle all your marketing efforts efficiently is using small business marketing automation tools to take care of your marketing for you.

7. Detail Your Vans Right

Everybody in town who owns a home cleaning business is probably doing it, and this can give benefit you greatly in terms of advertising your business. Detailing your van by putting your business’ signature colors on it and making sure that your business name + phone number is legibly printed helps more people in your area discover your business and get in touch with you. Think about it – every time you drive around to a customer’s home to finish a job will be like a campaign to introduce your business to new customers. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it?

8. Everybody Loves Gifts!

Giving customers a complementary stain remover or microfiber wash-cloth with your business’ name imprinted on it is a great way to market your cleaning business. Apart from coming in handy when customers want to keep their residence clean, your business’ name might catch the eye of others who happen to see it.  Use a service such as Quality Logo Products to get it printed in bulk and see whether this works out for you!

9. Earn Reviews Online

What people are saying about your residential cleaning business on the internet plays an important role in customers choosing your competitors over your business. You can do a multitude of things to make sure that your review ratings on forums such as Yelp, Facebook and Google improve. Responding to reviews online is one such thing. If you’re unsure about how to respond to each review, or if you don’t want to spend too much time writing responses, you can check out this set of review response templates. You can also see how you can generate more reviews and amplify the four and five-star rated reviews that your business receives.

10. Loyalty Pays

Giving loyalty bonuses, discounts, and reward points to customers who make repeat purchases is a great way to keep them happy and increase the chances of them returning to your business. Using a subscription based service like BellyCard can help you implement loyalty programs with ease for your cleaning services business.

11. Website and SEO

If you own a home cleaning business, then it’s absolutely important that you have a website that’s SEO optimized to include keywords that you can rank for on search engines like Google. Making sure that you rank for local terms such as “Sunnyvale” (or the locality your business is situated in) will increase the likelihood of your business showing up when people in the vicinity search for residential cleaning businesses. Beyond this, having a website is also a great way of introducing your businesses to customers. You can provide information about what kind of services your business offers, and mention your pricing as well, if you’d like to.  Most importantly, you can prompt customers to give you a call on your website by publishing your phone number on all pages, or create a form that they can fill to schedule your cleaning services for their home.

12. Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing isn’t dead.  Using billboards in your city, sending a newsletter or buying a spot in the most widely read local newspapers with a witty ad are still options if you’re thinking about marketing your cleaning services to potential customers. Come up with creative eye-catching designs for your ads and make sure that the right people get to see it.

13. Social Media Presence

Maintaining an active social media presence can be a great way to market your business. Besides bringing in leads, your social media can prove to be a great branding exercise. Being a chilled-out, fun business on social media can do wonders to your business. Post DIY tips, comics or memes about home cleaning to gain popularity on social media. You can also post promotional deals and create events on Facebook to make the best of this avenue.

14. Use AdWords

Using Google AdWords to promote your business to people who are searching for “cleaning service” or a similar keyword in your locality can be a great option for you.  Granted, Google AdWords isn’t the cheapest option out there when it comes to marketing your business.  However, it can help you attract a targeted group of potential customers to your home cleaning business’ website. Check out this guide that explains how you can use Google AdWords for your business.

15. Direct Mails

Just like what we said for traditional marketing, direct mail isn’t dead. Creative direct mail campaigns can get a lot of people talking about your cleaning service business in your town.  The cost per acquisition for direct mail is said to average at $19, according to this article by Radius. You can work on creatives and ship them directly using a service like InfoUSA as well.

16.  Electronic Mail

Email marketing has a huge load of statistics that makes it an effective marketing option.  Email marketing has an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent and has a higher conversion rate than search and social combined. You can use email for a number of things like promoting upsells and cross-sells. Using InfoUSA to buy email marketing lists with people who are most likely to buy from you can be a great way to introduce your business to new customers.  Using a tool like Hello Bar effectively will also help you create a mailing list of people coming to your website as well!

17. Get the Word Out with Influencers

Reaching out to influencers in your industry or in the press who will be willing to feature you on their blog/publication is another great way to get the word out about your home cleaning business.  Build contacts in the industry, get a feature on a home cleaning business specific publication or see whether any online blog that focusses on home-owners’ home maintenance tips would like to host your thoughts.

18. Forums to Frequent

Being an active member on relevant forums can help you build contacts in the cleaning industry and give you more ideas to market your cleaning services business.  Apart from this, you get access to content and tools on these forums.  Here are some popular forums that you can join:

19.  Tools & Services You Can Use

We’ve mentioned tons of things that you can do to market your residential cleaning service on this guide.  However, you might need to work with a lot of online tools and services to execute all of this effectively.  Here are some that you can use to automate and help your marketing efforts. Design – Canva Printed Booklets – Smartpress Location/Review Management – Synup Referral Marketing – Referral Saasquatch Van Vinyls and Lettering – The Sign Chef Complimentary Imprinted Products – Quality Logo Products Loyalty Programs – BellyCard Website Creation – Squarespace DIY SEO Checklist – Local SEO Checklist Social Media Automation – Buffer, Hootsuite Mailing List Providers – InfoUSA Email Marketing – MailChimp Paid Search Engine Ads – Google AdWords

Bonus

Just to make things more interesting, we thought that we’ll host a challenge about home cleaning service business 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.