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Whether you’ve just started a cleaning business or are firmly established in the market, it’s always important to grow your client base for increased revenue and job stability. With so many ways to market a business, it can be tough to know what will have the biggest return on investment and what’s not even worth doing.
I’ve laid out 7 targeted ways to get you more clients for your cleaning business, based on my years of expertise in marketing and growth. These methods are relatively cheap (or even free) and easy to implement. All you have to do is choose which ones are best for your business.
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7 Ways a Cleaning Business Can Get More Clients
1. Examine Your Market
When you first start a cleaning business, it’s hard to know exactly what will make it successful. Some cleaning businesses try to offer too many services, while others may offer too few. One way to differentiate your business from other cleaning services is to niche down in the market.
Try to define your specific clientele. If you’re spreading yourself too thin, you need to hone in on your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and how it sets you apart. Your USP doesn’t have to be complicated. Maybe you specialize in cleaning homes with pets, offering cleaning services with environmentally friendly products, or even crime scene cleaning services.
On the other hand, if you’re not offering enough services, try to find ways to expand – that make sense for your business. This can be as simple as adding on window cleaning or oven deep cleans, but it can be anything that adds value for the customer and sets you apart from other services.
2. Grow Your Social Media Presence
A great way to get noticed to grow your client base is to be active and present online. Many cleaning companies today use social media to promote their services, share customer testimonials, and connect with potential customers.
The key to growing social media is consistent posting, high-quality content, and branding. Knowing your brand voice and target client can help you carefully craft your content and tailor your channels to achieve the best outcome.
If you’re targeting commercial clients, you may want to focus on LinkedIn to appear more professional and network with businesses that may need your services. Alternatively, if you’re targeting millennial homeowners, Instagram and Facebook might be better channels to grow a following.
Growing a social following can have secondary benefits as well. There are many cleaning services that film their work and put it on TikTok and YouTube. This helps build awareness of their services, promote products they use and love, and maybe even earn some passive income from sponsorships and monetization.
3. Build a Professional Network
Connecting with other businesses in your area is a great way to grow your professional network and find new clients. Specifically, seek out businesses that are adjacent to your services, or work with the same types of clients. That way, you can refer clients to them and they can do the same for you.
For instance, if you specialize in residential cleaning for pet owners, network with vets or groomers in your area. If you work specifically with tenants to deep clean their apartments before inspections and move-outs, network with property management or landlord groups.
You could also find businesses that may want to offer joint services. For instance, if you exclusively clean carpets, you could team up with a full service home cleaner to offer bundled deals for clients that want more robust services.
Just be sure to keep in contact regularly with your professional network and ensure it’s a two-way street. Don’t expect referrals if your business isn’t also putting in a good word for other small businesses in your area.
4. Get Referrals and Testimonials
One great way to grow your business is through word-of-mouth referrals. Ask clients to refer their friends and family to you when they need your services. You could even offer referral discounts to help sweeten the deal and make it beneficial for both parties.
Even if your clients don’t have specific referrals in mind, they can still help you by providing testimonials or reviews online. Adding testimonials to your website can help build trust, and reviews on Google, Trustpilot, or other sites can confirm your reliability.
It may not be easy to broach the subject with your clients, but many are more than happy to review services they are satisfied with. You don’t need to push it too much, but even just a few strong reviews can pay dividends in the end.
5. Optimize Your Website
Optimizing your website is one of the best tools you can use to help potential clients find you online. At its most basic, this means ensuring your website is functional, reactive, and easy to navigate, while also utilizing specific keywords and location data to help you rank high in search engines.
For example, every time a potential client goes to a search engine to look for “mold cleaning” in your area, you want to ensure you appear as one of the first results. Using these keywords and location information on your site helps the search engine better index your cleaning business as a top option.
You can take things a step further and use content marketing to grow your web traffic even more. Creating a blog on your site that is updated regularly with specific keywords will help you appear in more searches online. These should bring value to your potential clients, while also building trust and authority.
It may be a bit of work, especially in the beginning, but having an optimized website is a great way to drive organic traffic to your site and earn you new business.
6. Expand Your Payment Options
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to gain new clients is by increasing the ease and convenience of your services. If you’re only accepting cash or checks as payment methods, it may be worth providing your clients with more options.
Cash is used less and less these days, as people turn to digital payment methods. Checks are a hassle both for you and the client, plus they run a risk of bouncing, leaving you without fair compensation for your services.
Even just adding on card payments can increase the number of clients who want to work with you. Pay.com offers a simple way for businesses like yours to accept multiple payment methods and grow your client base. Click here to get started now.
7. Offer Discounts for New Clients
Everyone likes to feel like they’re getting a good deal, especially when trying out a new service for the first time. More people may be inclined to give your business a shot if they are made to feel valued and special. Discounts for new customers are a great way to provide value and get clients to try your business out.
You could offer introductory rates for the first few months of cleaning, half-off coupons for the first visit, or free add-ons like oven deep cleans for any new customer that signs up within a certain period. You could even use sites like Groupon to sell these discounted services, reaching a much bigger audience in your market.
While these may cost you a bit of revenue in the short term, winning over a client can help secure better growth in the long term. The discount draws them in, but your professional services and attention to detail keep them coming back for more.
What’s the Best Way for a Cleaning Business to Accept Payments?
For a small cleaning business that’s balancing many things at once, it’s crucial to have an easy way to collect and track client payments. Pay.com is a full payment service provider that gives you an easy way to do just that.
Through the simple dashboard, Pay.com allows you to send payment requests to your clients with Pay Links, which direct them to a personalized check out page. For clients who prefer to pay over the phone, you can simply enter their credit card information directly into the Pay Virtual Terminal.
With Pay.com, you can also rest assured that all your transactions are completely secure.
Click here to get started now!
The Bottom Line: How Should You Market Your Cleaning Business?
There are many different ways to market your cleaning business and get more clients. What works for one business may not work for another, but understanding your clients’ specific needs and targeting can help you grow your clientele quickly.
Cleaning services usually benefit a lot from word of mouth and referrals. This puts potential clients at ease, knowing they can trust your business to be reliable and honest.
That said, referrals might not always be enough. It’s a good idea to try online marketing if you really want to increase your client base. After all, Google and other search engines are often the first place people turn when they are looking for new cleaners.
No matter how you decide to market your business, optimizing your payment system and allowing your clients to pay conveniently can go a long way. Pay.com provides a simple way for you to accept credit cards, debit cards, and many other payment methods. Best of all, it’s really easy to set up. Click here to sign up now!
