Advertising for Cleaning Services Businesses: Addressing New Customer Demands

Now more than ever, the average consumer is hyper-aware of the importance of proper sanitation, as well as the potential dangers hiding in plain sight on common surfaces they encounter every day.

This is true even at home, where a counter top or door handle could harbor infectious materials that lead to illness. For local cleaning service businesses, new public health concerns are top-of-mind for both existing customers and prospective customers seeking a residential cleaning service for the first time.

Meanwhile, the demographic makeup of cleaning service customers has shifted over the past decade. While cleaning services were once considered a luxury service, industry experts now argue that many dual-income homes view cleaning services as a necessity—and with children currently home from school, the urgency for an in-home service may be even higher.

Is your cleaning business ready to handle this influx and grow your base of satisfied customers? Here are three tips to position your company for success:

1. BRACE FOR HIGH CONSUMER DEMAND

If you’re a local cleaning company, you’re probably already seeing an increased volume of phone calls and other queries asking for rates and availability of your services. How you respond to this wave of demand will have a lasting impact on your business. While the cause for this heightened interest is nothing to celebrate, your business needs to have a plan to handle this new demand and use it to stabilize and grow your business.

Responding to consumer demand requires a few different changes to your business strategy. First, you need to be prepared to spend more time responding to inquiries, scheduling new services and building up your waitlist.

To streamline these communications, it might be smart to post updates to your business website that alert current and prospective customers to the services you offer, your target response time to new inquiries, and what they might be able to expect in terms of scheduling new service.

This might also be the time to expand your workforce, bringing in new cleaners who can take on new accounts. Keep in mind that in order to maintain quality service across your organization, you need to have the infrastructure in place to adequately train those new workers so they can hit the ground running.

And while increased demand may tempt your business to expand its service availability as quickly as possible, keep in mind that new public health concerns have brought important safety protocols that will have a direct impact on how you service customers in their homes and business settings.

2. ACCOUNT FOR NEW SAFETY GUIDELINES

Demand for cleaning services may be high, but customers—and local government officials—expect those cleaning services to follow sanitary protocols that keep both customers and workers safe in any work environment. If local guidelines have been issued, refer to these regulations first, as they will offer the best blueprint for upgrading your safety protocols to meet legal guidelines, and to address your customers’ top concerns.

At the very least, your cleaning services company should implement policies and procedures that minimize contact between your cleaning professionals and other occupants of the property they’re cleaning. You should also reference CDC guidelines on properly cleaning and sanitizing the home, and update your cleaning procedures to align with those recommendations. Doing so improves the quality of your cleaning as it relates to preventing the spread of disease, and it can also give customers greater peace-of-mind about hiring your services in the first place.

Other basic safety measures can include requiring facemasks and shoe covers when entering a home, insisting on online or cashless payments, and enforcing stricter policies that keep workers home if they’re sick or showing symptoms.

3. PROMOTE THESE CHANGES AMONG A LOCAL AUDIENCE

Safety is essential when operating a local cleaning business. But it’s just as crucial that you communicate these changes and increased safety measures to your audience of current and prospective customers.

Advertising is the best way to communicate this information to a large local audience—particularly one that includes both existing and prospective customers. While email lists and social media are a great way to dispense business updates among your built-in base of customers and followers, heightened demand for local cleaning services means that businesses need to leverage channels that will help them reach new customers.

Local TV advertising, SEO and paid search, and other digital ads targeted to a local audience are the best ways to share your company’s new messaging among a broad audience. Keep in mind that this mix or traditional and digital ad channels also helps reinforce your company’s reputation among existing customers, which is crucial during a time of heightened concern around sanitation.

As consumers scrutinize the safety measures being taken by local businesses, they’re essentially re-evaluating all of their existing relationships with companies to make sure they’re working with the most trusted businesses possible. This includes your cleaning service business—and it’s exactly why empathetic, safety-aware ad messaging is crucial to helping your cleaning service strengthen its position in your local market.