How to get cleaning clients online – what’s the best way to market my cleaning business? Online marketing and social media have changed how advertising a new business works.
Are you trying to extend your reach? There are other ways to advertise, too! Here is what you need to know before diving into paid advertisements.
Listen: How to Get Cleaning Clients Online
Watch: How to Get Cleaning Clients Online
Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
How Do You Get Cleaning Clients Online?
How do you get cleaning clients online? There was a house cleaner who asked this question.
“I just started a cleaning business, and I don’t know how to get clients online. I have the website with Vistaprint, they haven’t published yet, but I need to find another way to get the client in the meantime. What do you suggest?”
Don’t Go Online Yet
You asked the question, how do you get cleaning clients online? And I don’t want you to actually go online yet. There’s a way to do that. And what I recommend if you’re going to do that is through Facebook ads.
The reason I say this is because Facebook ads, are first and foremost, a billion-dollar company.
It is a publicly-traded company and Facebook makes its money by selling ads. So, they have honed this down to a very tight science.
Run Facebook Ads in Specific Areas
So, let’s say that you live in Charlotte, North Carolina. What you can do is you can run a specific ad for homeowners in a particular area of Charlotte, North Carolina.
Here’s a secret. The longer you run the ads, the more the algorithm gets to know you and the people that have clicked on the ads. So, the longer you run the ad, the more effective it is.
So, if you only have a little bit of money and you can start with a little bit of money, but you’re not going to get very many results right away. It’s going to take a little bit of time and you need a marketing budget to do that.
Don’t Run Ads Until Your Social Media is Set Up
Now I don’t recommend running ads online until you have your other social media in place. Because even if you run an ad and someone is interested and they click on the ad, where does that take them? And so, they want to know your social media.
They want to see your business Facebook page. They want your social proof. Of course, they want ratings and reviews. They want all of the things that are going to make them feel warm and fuzzy about hiring you, so they feel safe having a perfect stranger come into their home.
Now, if you don’t have your social media set up, that’s going to be your first step. When you’re not cleaning and you’re not looking for jobs, you’re going to be setting up your social media so that when people click on your ads, that’s where they go. They go to your home base, which has all the information that they need to make them feel warm, fuzzy and comfortable about hiring you.
Here’s the Thing in the Middle
So, there’s the thing in the middle. Once you start running ads, and once the social media stuff is done, there is paid to advertise, which is like direct mail advertising. So, this is the paper version of what you were going to do with Facebook ads.
If you have a marketing budget, I’m assuming you don’t because you’re just getting started. But if you do, you can contact them and they have no minimum, but they have the world’s most amazing breakdown of the people that live in your area.
So, for example as companies are moving in, homeowners are moving into a house, you can follow the moving truck. And you can say, “I want all the 10 new people that moved into this neighborhood.” And those are the 10 people that you market to.
So, you market 10 pieces of mail to those 10 people. So, it’s very, very, very specific. And you only pay for the advertising that you do. So, you don’t have to do like 60,000 mailers to get a discount. You get a discount on even one piece of mail. Now you’re going to want to do many to get a broader reach. And so, as I said, you’ll still need a marketing budget, but it’s not limited and there no minimum. So, I love this. All right, that’s the thing in the middle.
I Broke Down Ads in My Book
Over here, you’re just starting the cleaning business. And I have a breakdown in a book that I wrote called How to Start Your Own House Cleaning Business. you can get this book 100% free on Amazon for the eBook.
In this book, we break every step of the startup process down for you. And what’s important is this. I want you to start thinking of the reality of your business, if you’re just getting started in the business, your body is not used to to working for 10 or 12 hours a day.
So, you’re going to burn out after like four or five hours of cleaning, you kind of have to get up and running. It’s like working out, you go to the gym the first couple weeks, you’re sore and you ache, and you don’t feel great. And then finally you start getting in shape and you can do more.
House Cleaning is a Physically Demanding Job
House cleaning is the same thing. It is a physically demanding job. And so, in the beginning, you can only do one or maybe two houses a day. And so, if you’re looking for one or two houses a day, times five days a week, that’s going to be a maximum of 10 houses.
So, we don’t want to run online ads, if you’re only looking for 10 houses. I want you to start right where you live. And I don’t know about you, but I live in a neighborhood that has 500 homes. Are there 10 homes in my neighborhood of 500 homes that need cleaning?
Every House in the World Needs to Be Cleaned
The answer is yes, they all need cleaning. So, whether they clean them themselves, or whether they hire a cleaning service, they all need cleaning. There are 74.5 half-million homes in just America, and they all need cleaning.
Somebody has clean those homes. And so what you might do is run a flyer to your neighborhood and say, “Hey, listen, I’m the new house cleaner in town. I would love to help you. And maybe today is not the right day. Please keep this flyer until that day comes.
And if you ever think about changing, please give me the first right of refusal. Please call me and see if I have an opening. I would love to clean your house. I live in this neighborhood.”
Cleaning in Your Neighborhood is Easier
There’s something very powerful about cleaning in the neighborhood you live in because you probably belong to a neighborhood app. I know my neighborhood has a Facebook page. It is for just my neighborhood. So, I can jump on there in my neighborhood and say, “Hey guys, I got a question.”
I’m the house cleaner in that area, right? I live in this neighborhood. This is my neighborhood page. It’s not like I’m going to rip them off or anything. It builds instant comfort because you’re their neighbor. They walk past your house. They see you out in the yard. And they wave to you. They know you; they know your kids. They’ve seen you at the school bus stop.
And so, I want you to work where you live because there’s already a comfort zone there. And when people walk by, they see your impeccably manicured yard, they’re going to go, “Whoa, maybe she cleans houses the same way.”
Your Life is an Advertisement to Neighbors
Your life is an advertisement to your neighbors. And when your car pulls out of the drive and it’s completely clean, they’re going to go, “Wow! She even takes care of her car.” And so, in the back of their minds, they’re saying, “If she values cleanliness, even in her car, I know she’s going to take care of my house.”
They look at your house, your car, they see how you take care of yourself, and your property. And they’re going to say, “Yes, she’s the perfect person to come to my house because I know she will respect my property the same way.” And so, it is a great advertisement to work in the area in which you live. And so, I recommend that first. Then as you expand, you can run flyers to the neighborhoods on each side of you.
Use the Rule of Six at Every House You Clean
Every time you clean a house, we have a rule of six, where you leave a flyer on the door of each of the neighbors of the house you clean and the two houses across the street. It’s a total of five houses or five or six houses and what you’re doing is you’re advertising your business to them.
“Hey, I work in this neighborhood,” and they’re going to go, “Whose house did you clean? Oh, yes. We saw your car out there. It was out there for a couple of hours. We know that you’re cleaning one of our neighbor’s homes.” Well, you’re already there. You have a job there. And so how do you get to the next level of your business?
Well, you go across the street on the same day when you were cleaning this house and you clean their house and we’ve done this so many times, we park our car in one spot, we take our cleaning supplies out. We come back out of that house. We drop the cleaning supplies off in that car. We grab the next cleaning caddy; we go across the street and we clean their house. The car stays in the same spot.
Don’t Advertise Everywhere When You’re Starting Out
So, I don’t want you to advertise on social media. I don’t want you to advertise all over the city or online yet. I don’t want you to have a wide sweep because I don’t want you to commute. You don’t make money when you commute. So, I want you to work close to home.
And if somebody cancels, you’re close to home. That’s when you go back inside and you work on your social media. You can still do business, even if you had a cancellation. But if you drove for 40 minutes, one way, you’re stuck out there for 40 minutes.
Now you have to come back, and you didn’t get paid for that time. And you can’t be using it to build your business.
Facebook is Great for Online Ads
So, to run ads online, Facebook is a brilliant way. They’ve spent billions of dollars on the algorithm and it is so finite. You can get exactly what you’re looking for. So, thumbs up to Facebook.
The direct mail marketing is now so tailored that when you get ready to do that, and you have a budget and you have your social media in place, it’s a brilliant way to go. But for right now where you are, get a copy of the book, download the book, read it from cover to cover.
You can read it in an afternoon, and it will give you lots of questions. Those questions will help you streamline the startup process. And it will save you a lot of money as you get started.
Resources
These good karma links connect you to Amazon.com and affiliated sites that offer products or services that relate to today’s show.
The Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising – http://amzn.to/2ChWwjC
CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone – https://amzn.to/2NmaESb
YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Various Other Platforms – http://amzn.to/2HcH8bT
The 8 Pillars of Social Media Marketing in 2018: Learn How to Transform Your Online Marketing Strategy for Maximum Growth with Minimum Investment. Facebook, … Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram +More – https://amzn.to/2McPBRN
The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out from The Crowd – http://amzn.to/2CiBl0U
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