How I advertised my residential cleaning business

inmatetalks

New member
Google Local Services:

This was by far my favorite method. Cost per lead was $16 (depends on your city and how competitive it is). I would close probably around 50-60% of leads. I've done phone and messaging leads and closed 0 leads from messaging so I turned that function off for the ads. Many high quality clients came from this.

EDDM:

I had a pretty bad advertisement I would say-I designed it myself. I should have hired someone off fiverr or something to make it look good. I sent out about 4,000 I think, I had 1 person call. That person was with me literally from the start of my business until I closed so although the cost to acquire that customer was very high, it paid for itself several times over. I would recommend trying EDDM, I've been told it is better to hit the same neighborhood multiple times than do a larger audience once.

Door hangers:

I've had mixed results with this. I've canvassed an entire neighborhood with door hangers and had 5 calls that day, and I've canvassed similar neighborhoods and never received a call. Not really sure how to feel about these. It is a LOT of work, probably not the best use of your time but if you want to give employees more hours maybe not a bad idea as long as you make sure they were actually done and not just thrown in the garbage by your staff.

Alignable:

This actually worked surprisingly well. This was a few years ago but I posted an engaging question to the local community on there and people would respond. I would like and comment on every comment I received. A fair amount of work but it helped me get started.

Google Ads:

Yes this is different from what I mentioned before. I only tried this when I first started and had literally no idea what I was doing (I used 0 negative keywords and paid the price). Not enough experience to judge but I've heard of a fair amount of people in the industry getting the cost per lead to around $30 if I remember correctly.

Facebook Ads:

Same experience as Google Ads, not enough experience to judge.

Bark.

No. Just, no. They have a get hired guarantee which doesn't make up for their horrible leads. Their leads are super flaky and cheap. Bark runs ads like "hire a cleaner to clean your home for $10." Those are not the type of clients you want, one lead even asked for a job after my price was too high. I will say Bark had good customer service but the leads are trash.

Home advisor/angi/etc:

No. I never signed up but they have SUPER aggressive sales tactics. Before committing I looked at service providers from outside my area. I found their business information on google and called them saying I'm in *town 3 hours away* so not a competitor, how has your experience been with this company? All, and yes I mean all of them said they absolutely hate it and will not be renewing. I took their word and never signed up

Yelp:

No. They gave me I think $150 free ad spend as a perk for signing up. Each lead cost me $75 and were garbage leads. They also used aggressive sales tactics and I just told the salesperson to explain to me why I should pay yelp $75 for a bad lead when I can get all the clients I can handle from google local services and pay $30 to convert a lead to a client? They didn't call back after that surprisingly. Also Yelp is generally terrible because they are known for hiding good reviews. If you have 20 5-star reviews they might show 3 of those. Then if you get a 2 star review then they will show all of your reviews. I saw an owner on youtube who would reach out to select customers who had a positive experience but ask them to leave a 3 star review but write out why they are a terrific company. Apparently this worked and their great reviews were shown and even the 3 star reviews were actually 5 star reviews, just under the disguise of 3 stars. ANOTHER reason to not even put your business on yelp is because of all the spam you receive. SO. MANY. SCAMS. "hi, I would like my carpets shampooed 5 days per week and willing to pay $10,000 per week, please email my brother at adamsmith123@hotmail.com)"

Linkedin:

Didn't result in anything. Tried using a similar strategy as I did with Alignable

Networking:

I had an opportunity to clean 2 HOA communities with homes over 8,000 sq ft but didn't have the staff to service. Hiring staff was my downfall for this business.

I think that's most if not all the methods I used, if you have any questions about any other methods feel free to ask and I will answer to the best of my knowledge.
 
@proverbs31an I think my suggestion was something pretty high too but like I said it never actually went high.

I'd say give it a try and see how much they actually charge you. Even if it costs 50 per lead and you close 50% of them it costs you $100 to get a client. For a move in/out clean that's expensive but for a recurring clean that will pay for itself really fast
 
@rls I never did mu h on nextdoor but I've heard it can be very useful.

I forgot to mention local Facebook groups but I never had much success there.

For Craigslist I only received requests for topless cleaning or naked cleaning...so nothing there either. Although I'm a man so it probably would've been an entertaining conversation if I reached back out to them
 
@inmatetalks Thanks for the info - how did you get the opportunity to get 2 HOA contracts?

I’m confused on how I can get HOA contracts for my gutter & roof cleaning business. Would love to hear how you went about getting two offers!

Thank you
 
@roostercogburn There was an event through my Chamber of Commerce that helped early stage businesses. A part of that wad a presentation in front of 150ish people. One of the people attending lived in 1 community and used to live in the other so she was close with both.

Unrelated, but I also had the opportunity to clean 10 hotels everyday because they were so short staffed. Unfortunately so was I. They literally just called me out of the blue and asked if I had the capacity
 
@inmatetalks That's a cutthroat low margin business. Learn how to build your own website, do SEO and rank it. If you have a local chamber of commerce That's a great resource. What you really want to do is get to know realtors. Good house cleaners are actually kind of hard to find because they routinely keep going out of business.

Do whatever you can to keep your overhead down. The successful ones I know, this is why they're successful

Lastly, and you may already know this, never do business with anyone that calls you trying to sell you or get you into any product. If they call your business, it's because they want your service. Never forget this
 
@613jono
That's a cutthroat low margin business

Not really, the margins with employees is usually 15-25%. From what I've heard the 15% is about what franchises make, larger local companies make around 20, maybe a bit more. Then smaller local companies are around 25%, maybe more.
I didn't have an office or any office staff so my margins with employees was probably around 50%
 
@inmatetalks That's not really what I mean by margin. I mean all the downtime for the number of hours in a day. Keeping yourself working with enough jobs and especially finding employees if you're going to go that route. That's the hard part so you have to minimize all of your expenses. Work the business out of your house, do whatever you can to keep the overhead low. Like the actual profit on the jobs is great on paper. You're only using a few dollars of product to make, well it depends on the market but probably 50 to $75 an hour? What kills these home cleaning businesses is lack of work. It doesn't take much to start the business so you're competing with everyone that just got out of jail, lost their job and so on and so forth. You have to build a brand, get a good online presence, you can't rely on these pay per click or advertising services. The only time that kind of thing makes sense is if you're in a high profit per job business like roofing where each job is thousands of dollars in profit. The average cleaning job is what $200? 4 hours. So if you're paying $16 for a click, you spend $20 in supplies. Well right there that's $36 but let's say you get three clicks for every booked job. Now you're spending what is that $48 plus 20 in supplies plus gas money and wear and tear on the car. Now what you're putting in your pocket if you're doing it yourself is all the way down to about $30 an hour and how many jobs per week are you going to get?

Welcome to why this is one of the most failure ridden businesses out there. So if you don't want this to be you. The expenses have to be greatly minimized, take advantage of every free type of online presence you can. Learn how to code WordPress. Build your own sites, do your own SEO, the competition in house cleaning is not very stiff. It's not like you're a car dealership or an attorney. You should be able to rank a page pretty easy in the locals
 

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