Running a cleaning business is like starting a lawnmower.
It takes an intense burst of initial effort to bring in your first clients.
But once you’ve got a few happy customers under your belt, the business can run on autopilot for quite a long time.
As long as you provide excellent service at a reasonable price, your clients will have no reason to switch to a competitor.
That being said, there are times when an established cleaning business needs to find new clients.
Maybe your best client went out of business. Or perhaps one of your employees has been doing a sub-par job, and you lost the client as a result.
As far as client acquisition strategies go, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a brand-new cleaning business searching for your first client or a well-established company looking to expand. Every cleaning business can employ the same methods to great effect.
If you’re looking to get more clients for your cleaning business, you’ve come to the right article. We’re going to cover nine tried-and-true methods for bringing in more cleaning business customers.
Let’s dive right in.
Your website will be the hub for many of your client acquisition efforts.
The foundational strategy in most digital marketing campaigns is to find potential clients all over the internet and direct them to a sales page on your website. And cleaning businesses are no exception to this.
As such, you must make a website that looks professional, loads quickly, and has great search engine optimization (SEO).
If you don’t have a website yet, I highly recommend that you use WordPress as your design framework. It’s free, highly customizable, and has hundreds of thousands of easily installable themes and plugins.
Even if you do have a website, switching to WordPress is a great option if you feel your design is sub-par or looks outdated.
If you’d like to use WordPress to power your website, use this excellent step-by-step guide from ThemeAisle to get started: How to Install WordPress: Complete Beginner’s Guide
You aren’t a web designer; you run a cleaning business.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a web designer to set up a beautiful website to advertise your cleaning services.
Some incredibly talented professionals have already done the work for you; all you have to do is install one of the themes they’ve created and personalize it with your business’s information.
These themes are premium, which means you’ll have to pay for a license to use them.
However, the professional feel these themes will imbue your company’s web presence with is more than worth the extra cost.
Once you choose and download your preferred theme, you need to install it. If you don’t know how to install a WordPress theme, this guide from WPBeginner should help: Beginner’s Guide: How to Install a WordPress Theme
While having a sharp website design is important, it isn’t the only thing you need to focus on. You also need to make sure your site is built to rank well in the organic search results.
SEO is a massive topic, and I can’t do it justice in this post alone. I will provide you with a few essential SEO tips, though.
Making and optimizing a website is a great start. But you can’t rely on that alone to bring in the clients. You also have to build a web presence in the places your potential clients are hanging out.
I’m talking, of course, about social media.
There are dozens of social platforms you can use to bring in clients. I’m going to talk about the two most effective platforms for cleaning businesses to target: LinkedIn and Facebook.
As your most lucrative clients will likely be other businesses, LinkedIn is an excellent place to start your social media client search.
Your first order of business on LinkedIn should be to flesh out your professional profile. Here are the major steps involved in this process:
Publishing authoritative blog posts about the cleaning industry can help establish your credibility and cement your status as an influencer in the cleaning space. People who read your profile will come to trust you, and those who operate in your area of service will be more likely to hire you.
Almost every company with more than a few employees needs a cleaning service.
Connect with every business you think might be interested in your services and let them know you’d love to clean their office. If they have a cleaning service that they’re satisfied with, no worries. Thank them for their time and ask them to contact you if they ever need a new cleaning company.
Facebook is an excellent place to find cleaning clients on both the personal and professional levels. And with more than 2.4 billion monthly active users, it’s also the largest social media platform on the planet.
If you’re only going to establish a presence on two social media platforms, I recommend using LinkedIn and Facebook.
Here are a few foundational strategies for getting clients from Facebook.
Much like building a profile is essential to success on LinkedIn, creating and filling out a business page is a prerequisite to finding clients with Facebook.
To make your page, go to Facebook.com/business and click “Create a page” in the upper-righthand corner. Once that’s done, you’ll need to fill out the following information.
You can’t get clients through Facebook if you don’t post anything. Share content your followers will want to read or watch, and they’ll come to look forward to your future posts as a result.
This content will ideally be from your blog or YouTube channel, as the people who click through to view the content will be sent into your sales funnel.
However, there’s nothing wrong with posting content other people or businesses have created. It’s better to maintain a regular posting schedule by posting content you haven’t made than it is to post occasionally by sticking to your own stuff.
If you have some money to work with, spending it on Facebook ads can bring a ton of traffic to your website in a short time.
Advertising on Facebook is a beast of a topic, so I’m not going to try to tackle it here.
If you want to learn how to build a campaign that brings in a flood of new cleaning business clients, I recommend you read this article: How to Build a Facebook Ad Campaign That Bumps Traffic, Trials, and Sales for Your Local Business.
Referrals are one of the most consistent and cost-effective ways to get new clients. And as the people most familiar with your services are those who have already hired you, many of your referrals will come from both current and past clients.
To maximize your chances of receiving a referral from a happy client, show your current clients that you care about your work, and want to provide the best services possible.
Here are a few ways you can do that.
Some clients don’t care how the job gets done; they only care that everything looks clean.
Others will have preferences about how the cleaning gets done, though.
When you start with a new client, ask them if they have any preferences about what gets cleaned or how you clean it.
Nothing will annoy a cleaning client more than an area that didn’t get cleaned properly. Make sure you give every single area the level of care and attention it deserves.
And if you have employees, make sure they understand how important it is that every area is thoroughly cleaned. A few missed spots can add up in the client’s mind, and they might decide to go with a different cleaning service as a result.
If you offer other services besides cleaning, let your clients know about it. A few services some cleaning businesses have added to improve their client retention rate include dog walking, appliance installation, and moving.
If you’re having trouble finding clients with a general cleaning business, you might have an easier time of it if you niche down into a more specific type of cleaning business.
If you’re considering switching things up, here are a few options:
A lead magnet is an offer you give to potential clients in exchange for their contact information. Creating one and placing it on your website is a great way to get clients who might not be ready to hire you into your sales funnel.
Most businesses offer one of three types of lead magnet: a piece of educational content, a discount, or a free trial.
As a cleaning business, your best bet will be a discount on a new client’s first cleaning session.
Most people who are looking for a cleaning business don’t care too much about the process, so educational content explaining how you clean won’t bring in too many leads.
And the free trial option is typically used by businesses selling software, though you can incorporate it by offering a free first cleaning session.
Once you decide on a lead magnet, you’ll need to place a lead capture form on your website. Use this comprehensive guide from Instapage to implement a lead capture form on your site.
While most client acquisition advice you’ll read on the internet revolves around digital marketing, there’s still something to be said for going door-to-door and selling yourself the old-fashioned way.
What are the benefits of this?
First of all, you don’t need any technical savvy to pull this off.
If you don’t feel comfortable with setting up a website or running social media accounts ‒ and you can’t afford to hire someone to do it for you ‒ driving around town and asking if businesses or homes need a cleaning service can land you a few clients.
It also instantly humanizes your business.
The online presences of many cleaning businesses fail to impart the human element of their services, which is something that is only growing in value in this increasingly digital era.
By knocking on doors and having one-on-one conversations with business owners in your area, you’ll leave a more memorable impression than a website ever could.
When it comes to marketing, the best opportunities come from so-called “low-funnel” prospects - people who are quite close to making a purchase decision.
One of the easiest ways to place your business in front of low-funnel buyers is by running a PPC campaign on Google.
The beauty of Google Ads is that it allows you to target people who are typing in specific keywords.
Unlike social media advertising, where you’ll show your ads to just about anyone who fits your target demographic, you can use Google to exclusively show ads to people who are near the end of the buyer’s journey.
Here’s how you can use Google Ads to bring in clients for your cleaning business.
I mentioned targeting low-funnel keywords in the previous paragraphs. But what constitutes a low-funnel keyword?
A low-funnel keyword is a search phrase that indicates the searcher is looking to make a purchase decision soon.
Some examples of low-funnel keywords in the cleaning industry would be “office cleaning company near me” or “best cleaning service in topeka.” Both of these keywords indicate the searcher is actively looking to hire a cleaning service.
If you run an ad targeting keywords like this, you’ll almost certainly see an influx of interested traffic to your website.
Whether any of the people click your ad depends on the quality of your landing page, which is the next thing we’ll cover.
Your Google ad is only as good as the landing page it sends people to.
To build a landing page that brings in clients, follow this terrific guide from Neil Patel: The Definitive Guide to Creating High Converting Landing Pages.
When you start your ad campaign, Google will automatically set you up with automated bidding.
I recommend disabling this and setting your own bid prices to start, as Google’s automated bids can be way higher than they need to be to show your ad.
To make the switch in an informed manner, use this guide from Wordstream: How to Switch from Automatic Bidding to Manual Bidding in Google Ads.
If you’re looking to clean homes instead of businesses, you’ll want to target people who have the spare income to hire a cleaning service.
Google Ads allows you to target searchers by income level, so make sure you enable this before running your first ads.
