How to Market your Cleaning Business if you are Temporarily Closed
Has your cleaning business been negatively impacted by the recent pandemic? Have you lost customers or maybe even temporarily closed your doors? If so, you might be wondering how to market your cleaning business and you aren't alone. Many cleaning companies have been losing business, but now isn't the time to throw in the towel. While you may not be servicing as many customers, there is still a lot you can do to grow your cleaning company. In this post, you'll learn what to do with your marketing strategy to continue to grow your cleaning business even if you are temporarily closed or if your business has slowed down.
Optimize or Redesign Your Cleaning Business Website
At this point, you might have some extra time on your hands. While being closed or losing clients is never a good thing, on the bright side, it could give you some more time to focus on some marketing foundations you probably haven't had a chance to get to.
One of the foundation steps you should make a priority during this time is to optimize or redesign your website. Your cleaning business website is your hub or foundation of your online presence.
Most cleaning business owners haven't put much time into their website nor optimized it to generate traffic and leads. A foundation of your optimization should be to highlight your core difference.
Your core difference means you talk about how your company helps your customers achieve the results they desire and what makes you better or different than the competition.
Another priority for how to market your cleaning business should be to add employee photos, reviews, and testimonials to your site. Positive reviews build social proof, credibility, and can help you convert more visitors into customers.
Optimize your Google My Business page
Your cleaning business website works like your hub for your business, but in addition to that, you really should spend some time on optimizing your Google My Business page. There are many benefits to optimizing your Google My Business page, such as increased traffic, more phone call leads, and showing up higher in Google Maps.
As most cleaning businesses operate locally, having a listing that is optimized to attract local traffic is essential. That is exactly what optimizing your Google My Business page will do.
Whether your business is operating right now or if it has closed, optimizing your Google My Business page should still be a priority. Make sure you fill out all of the services you provide, hours of operation, add photos, and make sure your business category is correct at a minimum.
If you are still open and providing disinfecting services, that should be highlighted on your Google My Business page. You can do this through posts mentioning your disinfecting services, posting pictures of your cleaning crew in safety gear, or highlighting posts talking about your new policies regarding COVID-19 issues.
Also, be sure to update your hours if those have changed, but we don't recommend marking your business as closed even if you are temporarily closed. That way if you are still able to take calls, that could at least provide you with continued traffic and leads to schedule future clients.
Set up a Lead Magnet
The next thing you can do as traffic starts to increase to your website is to create a lead magnet. Most people have some kind of free quote or estimate form on their site, which is a great place to start to get cleaning leads.
At the same time, not everyone who visits your website for the first time is ready to request an estimate. Some that are visiting are still on the fence and are simply researching various companies. Others know that they want to hire a cleaning service, but are comparing various companies to choose from.
Another thing to understand is that for most people if they don't buy from you the first time they come to your site, they likely won't return unless you give them a reason to. This means you need something to capture their information to remarket to them in the future.
Some people offer an option to subscribe to a newsletter, which is a start, but most people don't care about a newsletter. You need to offer something more, which is a lead magnet. Something for free that your ideal customers actually want.
Offer a cost savings guide, home cleaning hacks guide, cleaning product buying guide, commercial floor care guide, etc. Something that helps them solve a problem, improve their business/life, or that answers common questions of your ideal customers.
You can deliver this value in many ways, for example, an ebook, video series, audio download, PDF checklist, etc. Capture their email address, name, and phone number, and put the leads into an email autoresponder which we'll cover below.
Set up an Email Autoresponder
You've probably heard it before, but the fortune is in the follow-up. As we mentioned above, not all of the leads you generate will be ready to buy immediately. This means you need a method to remarket to them and to continue to educate and sell them on your cleaning services.
Using an email autoresponder in conjunction with your lead magnet is a marketing strategy to do this. With an email autoresponder you can send out an email blast that has the potential to reach thousands of potential customers at once.
In this email blast, you can drive traffic to your latest offer, blog post, or even ask for referrals. Using an email autoresponder in conjunction with your lead magnet and a well-crafted email series, you can turn cold traffic into warm leads that are ready to buy.
If you don't yet have an email autoresponder they are quite cost-effective and typically user friendly. A couple that we recommend are Aweber or Active Campaign.
Write an Email Series
By applying all of the steps above, there is a good chance you are getting more leads, but you still need a method to follow up and to remarket your services. Once you have an email autoresponder in place, the next step is to write a follow-up email series for your leads.
The idea behind this is to continue to further educate your leads on your services, and show them the value of what you do, and then sell them on the back end. Writing an email series in this fashion will allow you to transform a cold lead into a warm lead that is ready to buy your cleaning services.
This is a marketing strategy where you should focus 80% of your content on value and the rest of it on selling. You can sprinkle in calls to action that are sales based in your emails, but make the majority of the content simply helpful to your readers.
When you are writing an email series, do so in a conversational tone. You don't need to be overly formal in your emails, and you can write as you would normally talk with someone in person.
Also, you should write your emails in a way that is framed like you are talking to one individual. Your best bet is to treat email marketing as a personal one on one conversation.
In total, you should strive to have your email series be around 5-7 email long, and you can spread that out to go out over a week or two.
Create Industry Pages on Your Website
Another foundation marketing strategy you could work on during a slow time in your business is to create industry pages. When people are exploring your website or searching for a commercial cleaning company, they are looking for a company that serves their business.
Unless you clearly state which industries you serve, people may leave your site and go to a competitor because they think you can't help them. This is one reason to include on your website the industries you provide cleaning services for.
For example, do you serve the medical industry? Do you clean schools or banks? All of these things are good to add pages about on your website. Also, by adding pages on your site for specific industries, you can improve your SEO for those terms.
Building industry pages can attract local traffic for those industries to your website. Obviously, the more targeted traffic to your website the better, so make sure to incorporate industry pages into your cleaning business marketing plan.
Create Service and Location pages
Similar to industry pages, you should also create pages around the specific cleaning services you provide. Doing this marketing strategy can help to attract people to your website for specific cleaning services that you provide.
For example, you might build out pages related to carpet cleaning or floor care, and explain how your services help maintain floors in buildings. Other pages right now that are working well are cleaning and disinfecting service pages.
The basics of a service page is to go into greater detail on the services, explaining your process and then link to the various location pages on your site. Location pages are similar to an industry or service page, but you simply talk about the general services you provide, include an embedded Google map, and mention some information about the specific city you service.
Write Blog Content
Writing blog content is another marketing strategy you can do during your off times or if business has slowed down. If you've lost customers or are temporarily closed, now is a good time to build your marketing foundation for the long-term.
Blogging for your cleaning business can be a great way to increase organic traffic from targeted visitors. There are several possible things you could write about to attract your ideal customers.
As a basis, try and focus on common questions your ideal customers would have in relation to your cleaning services or focus on helping them avoid problems. Your goal should be to educate your visitors on things they don't know but should, and that can sell the value of your services.
As you produce more blog content, your organic traffic should naturally increase. Another additional benefit to blogging is that it can position your company as an expert in the cleaning industry.
If people are choosing between your business and another, they will go with the business they perceive as being an expert in the industry.
How to Market Your Cleaning Business with a YouTube Channel
Do you have a YouTube channel set up for your cleaning business? This is yet another great foundation marketing strategy and social media profile you should spend time setting up.
Marketing your cleaning business on YouTube has a lot of benefits. One great benefit is that content you post on YouTube can be found in SERPs results, and the time you spend to create videos continues to work for you many years into the future.
The kind of content you produce on YouTube should be similar to what you create for blog posts. You can even simply restate what you write in a blog post but put it in a video format. That way you can capitalize on both methods of how people consume content.
Some people prefer one medium over the other and others only consume one type of media. By creating both videos and blog posts you can reach both of those markets. Also, as you make videos be sure to embed them on your blog posts as that can keep people on your site longer, which helps your pages to rank even better with SEO.
Overall, just because your business may have slowed, or even temporarily closed, it doesn't mean it's time to quit working your marketing strategy. How to market your cleaning business when you are closed needs to focus on setting your business up for the future. When times are slow it's the perfect time to build the right marketing foundation so you can skyrocket your results when business picks up again. Plus, it might be one of the main reasons business does pick up in the future!
FREE VIDEO - Top 10 Lead Sources for Cleaning Business
Click here to get instant access!
Visit our Store for Certification Training Programs
