How to Attract Clients for a Residential Cleaning Service
This how you become successful!
Seriously, a must read!!
1. Tap into friends and family (FF) -
not for business, but do charge - do it for the pictures and for Yelp reviews. They don't have to state that they are family or friends and reviews go a long way.
2. Ask FF for a list of people you can call and name drop them as referrals. Ask them for people who will not be upset that you are calling and that their friend gave their contact. Typically young, friendly, busy people.
3. Give you FF cards to pass on and help you out. - if they truly care about you they'll take the cards and share them once or twice at least but from your FF that's all you need.
4. Use that small stream of cash from FF jobs to pay for Yelp advertising, it works! spend 100 or 200 dollars in it. Call them and ask for assistance creating a small campaign.
5. Create a beautiful website!! Don't assume that because is a cleaning business you don't need a website and or a well designed professional website. Image is everything!!
Specially in this industry most potential customers want to know that you will be there next week and the week after that... A professional website helps promote that because you have spent time and money developing an online presence rather than doing a bad job yourself creating a DIY website with pixelated images and a bad font and logo. (My team can do one for you very affordably!)
6. Promote your website shamelessly! Everywhere.
Have you seen "The Office" be like "Bob Vance, from Vance Refrigeration" -
"Hi, I'm ______, from [yourbusiness.com]"
7.Use facebook - don't pay for the ads, the ROI is not as good. But instead run offers, put up pictures of your FF cleaned homes.. FB has this feature where after you post something it lets you 'pin' to the top..do this for your offers or pictures that show the quality of work.
8. Add punch card counts on your business card - this is called gamification... incites people to come back for a 10th free. HonestMaids does this and it works wonders!
9. Attend events, creative idea:many elementary schools run festivals. Stop by and introduce yourself and ask if they have any coming up - YES, even if you don't have any kids enrolled there. What better way to get in front of busy parents in your community? BONUS: these fairs are often free for 'vendors' or really really cheap!
10. Find realtors in your area that you can partner with - these are realtors who give their new home owners a gift basket or something - you can add a '$50 certificate' in there for them. email iwill@unthink.me and I will design one for you for free if you want.
BONUS BONUS!
Use Yelp - I did this to start too... go to your competitors' Yelp pages and look for bad reviews... the site allows for you to contact anyone in there.. offer them a hefty discount if they are willing to try a maid service again and obviously try you... What better way to target people that already hire maids, and are unsatisfied with their current?! Try it.
Unthink Side Note:
Those in business who are successful are because they do what others things is not usually done or frowned upon or don't think about it... In small business, as with many things in life you are limited by your own creativity.
P.S. :
A lot of our Honest Maids of Phoenix clients are young people who like to spend their weekends outdoors. If you are in the Tucson area we suggest checking out San Xavier Mission, a beautiful old church internationally known for its murals and beautiful architecture, natives set up nearby offering their indian fried bread :)
