While word of mouth plays an important role in the acquisition of new customers for your commercial cleaning business, digital marketing offers the best potential if you want to grow your business faster. Your website, PPC campaigns, social media, and blog can be invaluable tools that generate enquiries more consistently than word of mouth and referrals alone.
But how do you make your digital marketing effective and what can you to do make sure it brings in those all-important new customers? I explore this topic below and provide seven useful tips that can help your commercial cleaning business thrive.
7 Tips to Boost New Customer Acquisition for Your Commercial Cleaning Business
To attract new customers, your digital marketing strategies have to be robust. You need to have a deep understanding of your target customer, and how you differ from domestic cleaning companies. Concentrate on the services you provide, the areas you cover, and then take a look at the tips I’ve suggested below.
1. Make Sure Your Keywords Target Commercial Cleaning
At the heart of any digital marketing strategy that includes SEO is keywords. These are the words potential customers search for on search engines like Google to find your business.
It’s important that your keywords are targeted towards commercial cleaning. This is because if you use generic keywords, you risk wasting money and effort on low quality leads.
For example, let’s say that you use the keyword “cleaning services in Nottingham”. This is a great keyword – it’s targeted to your industry and location. However, one key aspect is missing – the type of cleaning services. By using “cleaning services in Nottingham”, you could potentially get enquiries from people looking for domestic cleaning.
A better keyword would be “commercial cleaning services in Nottingham”. Distinguishing between commercial and domestic services makes sure you don’t waste your marketing budget generating unprofitable leads from people who want their house cleaning.
Additionally, if you offer “industrial cleaning services” or “high level cleaning services” it makes sense to build web pages that target those particular services and keywords specifically. Adding the town or city also helps. If you target more than one town, having pages for each service and town or city enables you to target even more keywords. More on this next.
2. Pay Attention to Local SEO to Dominate Your Immediate Area
As a commercial cleaning business, you most likely have a specific radius of destinations you service. For example, if you were based in Nottingham, you might only service businesses in the East Midlands and South Yorkshire.
To make sure you appeal to customers within your serviced areas you must give attention to local SEO. This is a type of SEO that uses techniques to target different geographic demographics. Things you can do as part of a local SEO campaign include:
- Using localised keywords such as “commercial cleaning Nottingham”.
- Creating a Google Business Profile.
- Creating businesses listings with directory sites like Yell.com and Local Pages.
- Produce locally relevant content for your website.
- Manage your social proof and online reviews.
When targeting a wider area than a city like Nottingham, consider adding additional pages to target towns across Nottinghamshire for example, if you service the county. For example, it may make sense to add a page for “commercial cleaning Newark” or “commercial cleaning Mansfield” if you cover those towns.
It’s worth noting that most searchers don’t search and add a county like Nottinghamshire, they tend to add the nearest big town or city. They may of course not add a geographic word but tend to as they refine their search.
3. Conduct a Site Audit to Check for Technical SEO Issues
Search engines must be able to access and understand your website easily. This allows them to index your pages and rank your content for their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Your site could potentially have multiple issues such as poor loading speeds, a lack of mobile optimisation, and an incomplete Robots.txt file.
By conducting a site audit, you can outline technical SEO issues that could be harming your rankings and search engine visibility. If you would like to have an initial chat with us you can book a session and we can discuss the potential of a site audit as a part of your revamped digital marketing strategy.
4. Consider Targeted Marketing Strategies like PPC
If your potential customers are searching for what you offer on Google and the other search engines, it can often make sense to use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising such as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising to ensure your company is near the top of Google for your target keywords.
Now could be the time to look at this type of digital marketing. You can control the costs easily as you only pay for positive results (such as clicks), and the ads can be targeted. For example, you can base the ads on your commercial cleaning keywords and create local targeted ads that are aimed at businesses in your area.
The beauty of PPC ads is that they don’t have to be permanent either. You could run an initial 3-month campaign as a tested and allocate a fixed budget.
If you found positive results at the end, you could extend the campaign and make refinements to improve it. Alternatively, if you found it wasn’t working as expected, you could cut the campaign instantly.
Many businesses try Google Ads and don’t get the results they need or want. We have been running Google Ads campaigns for Commercial Cleaning Companies for over 7 years and we are still achieving cost per enquiries of under £20.
5. Do Potential Customers Have a Clear Way and Reason to Contact You?
If you want to bring in new customers, you must give them plenty of opportunities to contact you. Each form of digital marketing material you make should have either:
- A link to your website contact page.
- Your contact information (email, telephone, social media).
- Details of the services you provide and the areas you cover.
It might seem simple, but I’ve seen plenty of cleaning businesses only have contact information on their contact page.
In addition to this, using CTAs (Call to Action) is imperative for your digital marketing strategies. You must make it clear what you want potential customers to do. This could be signing up to your cleaning services mailing list, visiting your website, making an enquiry, or following you on social media for example.
Don’t leave it to chance and hope that they know what you want, or what they should do! Be assertive and proactive and sprinkle CTAs in your marketing media.
And if you get phone calls, make sure your team are picking up the calls.
6. Show the Quality of Your Work Via Testimonials and Case Studies
If I wanted to hire a commercial cleaning company, I would want some form of proof that their cleaning standards were up to scratch. This proof would have to come from a third-party too such as a previous customer – not the cleaning company themselves.
The businesses who you are targeting will think like this too, which is why testimonials and reviews are vital for your digital marketing strategy.
Your website must have multiple instances of customer reviews. The best examples are short customer quotes on your homepage, and detailed case studies on a dedicated testimonials page. Homepage quotes give a quick demonstration of your quality, and if that isn’t enough to satisfy the potential customer, they can learn more via the case studies.
Case studies for your commercial cleaning business should have several key features:
- General info such as the client, location, and services provided.
- A detailed description of what you did for them and how they benefited from it.
- A detailed quote from the client (hopefully singing your praises!).
- Before and after photos of your cleaning expertise.
With several case studies like this, potential customers viewing your website should have no doubt about the quality of your work.
7. Explore the Option of Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing can be especially effective for businesses. In 2023 Statista conducted a survey of for-profit companies which showed 96% of them used it as part of their marketing strategy. 72% of them also said they used it to acquire new customers[1].
For your commercial cleaning business, you must think which social media platforms will be the most effective. We would argue that Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly known as Twitter) might not be suitable, and they would be better for domestic cleaning services. Although Facebook could be useful in helping with recruitment of team members.
The top option is LinkedIn as this social media platform is geared more towards B2B activity. The first step would be to have your staff create LinkedIn profiles and then create a LinkedIn company page. From there, your aim would be to forge connections, build your following, and look to become a voice of authority in the commercial cleaning industry. Post information of value to your potential customers rather than posts about your services all the time. This is where a website blog comes in useful as you can answer questions your potential customers may have and post details of this on your LinkedIn page and profile.
Case Study Analysis – How We Helped Pristine Commercial Cleaning
To give you an idea of what is possible, I want to share with you one of our success stories. We worked with Pristine Cleaning who are a commercial cleaning company servicing Yorkshire. After an initial consultation, we took charge of their PPC and SEO, and generated the following results:
- Increased website traffic.
- Increased business enquiries (23% increase via organic SEO, 117% increase via PPC).
- CPE (Cost Per Enquiry) reduction.
- Improved website performance and ranking.
This was done using many of the tips I’ve listed above including the redevelopment and improvement of their website, technical and local SEO improvements, and social media marketing. This is something you can achieve too with the right mindset and approach to your digital marketing efforts.
Gain Stability and Consistent Business by Revamping Your Digital Marketing Strategy
I hope you have found these digital marketing tips useful and that I’ve given you a great starting point and plenty of inspiration to boost your commercial cleaning company’s customer acquisition and enable you to grow your business ultimately.
I would suggest that you start by looking at your existing marketing to see if you can immediately incorporate any of the above tips. Once you have made an assessment and adjustments, consider implementing any new strategies mentioned such as PPC and local SEO if you’ve not implemented those already.
Alternatively, if you feel like you need assistance, please feel free to contact us for an initial chat and see how we can help.
References
[1] – Statista Social Media Report – Link
