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Marketing Strategies for Your Cleaning Business with Ray Malaski

January 20, 2020 in Grow your Maid Service, Marketing, Mindset

Last Updated on August 26, 2023 by The ZenMaid Team

Mindset #1: Create a marketing budget for your Maid Service

Your marketing budget is a small percentage of your revenue, specifically designated toward the two main aspects of marketing: a combination of lead generation and branding.

Each Maid Service owner might have a different idea of what this should be, but overall it seems to lie somewhere between 5% and 10%.

If we want to go with 8% for the purposes of this example, and you have annual revenue of $100,000, then your budget would be $8,000 for the year.

There are so many great ways this money can be spent to effectively promote your home cleaning business. Here are some some great ideas for you.

Mindset #2: Get into your cleaning companyโ€™s branding and lead generation

Branding and lead generation are two different aspects that should work seamlessly together to build trust with your potential cleaning client.

When you are talking about lead generation for a Maid Service, you are capturing the piece of the market that needs your service.

However, branding is a different side of the same coin. Through effective branding, you can promote your vision, build trust, and also sales.

Ideally, your main goal is to get all of your potential cleaning clients to know and trust your maid service.

Trust is essential to cleaning clients, since you are in their homes. As long as you maintain their trust, they will remain loyal.

Your brand is vital to the standing of your home cleaning company when compared to your competitors, and you can tell when companies spend a healthy amount of energy and resources on it.

Often, companies will even add it to their balance sheet, a document that displays how much a company is worth.

Mindset #3: Know your Maid Serviceโ€™s market

On census.gov or Wikipedia, you can check your home cleaning businessโ€™s market by getting an idea of the population in your area. Continue to track this data as it changes over time.

So, if there is a population of 200,000 and 10% of the market would be open to using a cleaning service, your number of potential customers is 2000.

It only takes about 300 recurring clients out of that 2000 to reach the million dollar mark in revenue.

Now, letโ€™s say 50% are one-time cleaning clients and the other 50% are recurring. A population of 200,000 can support 3.3 million-dollar cleaning companies in your area alone.

These numbers are great to know so that you are aware of what is happening in your area. Awareness allows for planning marketing strategies appropriately.

Mindset #4: Know the lifetime value of your cleaning clients

No matter what size town you live in, you need to figure out the value of the recurring cleaning clients in your area. Knowing the value a customer provides over the course of their time with your company can inform you on how to extend that lifetime.

If you happen to find that you are having difficulty turning one-timers into recurring cleaning clients, then you may need to improve your service quality. The better the cleaning goes, the higher your return on investment will be.

One of the ways you can calculate the value of a cleaning client is to tally up your total number of clients, then divide that by the total revenue. This will tell you the worth of your individual cleaning client regardless of their one-time or recurring status, putting them on the same playing field.

Additionally, you should track your turnover rate for cleaners and clients, you shouldn’t be losing more than 5% a month on either end.

The Maid Service industry can have high cleaning staff renewal rates, so if you are having trouble keeping cleaners be sure to assess and improve your onboarding.

Mindset #5: Catching and keeping your Maid Serviceโ€™s market share

Basically, to catch your full market share, you need to be everywhere you can afford to be.

  • Use Google Local Ads, which has a 50% conversion and closing rate. This route is about lead generation and has a high conversion rate. You can also set it up yourself, but it does lack branding strategy and at times it is not clear who is being hired.
  • Google Ads has a 20% conversion rate and a 30% closing rate. Itโ€™s quick in lead generation if you are working with a company that knows the industry and the market. However, it can be complex so you may want to have a marketing company to guide you through these.
  • Google Maps is awesome because 70% of organic traffic comes from here. Itโ€™s free and easy for any home cleaning company to set up. The fault in this one is that it is complicated to get your company into the 3 pack. In a medium to larger market, it can take a lot of on-page and citation efforts to work.
  • 30% of organic traffic comes from Google organic searches, so be sure your Maid Service has a website. It really needs one. You can even just start with something simple and pay a professional to adjust it later. Most clients will find you via these searches though, so have something nice for them to find.

Googleโ€™s organic searches can be similar to Google My Business in that you need SEO, quality content and backlinks to rank in the top spots.

In addition to those options, there are also pages like Bing, Yelp, Facebook and Instagram that can help you attain your market share.

There are a few other sites like AngiesList and HomeAdvisor that run paid ads, but they are not recommended.

Mindset #6: Hold on to your cleaning client leads

We canโ€™t say it enough, your leads are valuable.

You should have all of your cleaning clientsโ€™ information in an organizer and in your database. You can even add this file to your balance sheet. This allows you to continue to build your brand and to keep those clients informed about developments within your Maid Service.

Never stop building your mailing list, only disregard those who unsubscribe to you.

This master list of potential cleaning clients is made so that you continue to bring in and retarget clients as you grow your business.

Mindset #7: Year sales and your Maid Serviceโ€™s big picture

It takes years to make things happen the way you want them to, and by the time you get there, you often want something else.

Thatโ€™s the fun of goals!

However, itโ€™s important to consider the long-term where proper systems are concerned so that you know what you need to improve upon.

It’s a process…

So keep a basic sales script on hand and add new questions as your clients ask them.

Sales scripts can be vital to your sales technicians in the long run so that you can build on your knowledge and not start over from the beginning with each new hire.

Your knowledge should be passed on so that each time a sale is possible, it is made with your best and most improved pitch.

A tip to increase your year sales: have your automation systems in place to contact your cleaning clients and to schedule your cleaners.

About the presenter

Ray Malaski is the President ofย Get Cleaning Clicks, a lead generation and marketing service for residential cleaning companies.

Previously, he gained direct experience in the cleaning industry for 7 years, including 3 years as a Maid Service owner. Ray has also been a member of the ARCSI for years and is very ingrained in the maid service community often advising on the best marketing for cleaning business.ย 

Ray knows what it is like to struggle to make a profit, so he now helps other cleaning companies increase their profitability using branding, market share, and lead generation.

In his presentation, Ray shared the mindset techniques he uses when setting up a marketing strategy for maid services like yours.

This talk first aired at the 2019 Maid Service Success Summit.

The Maid Summit is an annual online event that brings together the most successful leaders in the cleaning industry, like Debbie Sardone, Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely, Amy Caris, Chris Schwab and more. Get free access to masterclasses and workshops that will help you to grow, scale and automate your cleaning business so you can get more leads and create more profit. Make sure youโ€™re on our email list to find out how to get free tickets to the next event.


You and your Maid Service deserve a little peace and quiet. Sign up for your free trial today of the best CRM for your house cleaning business and discover the freedom and clarity that ZenMaid can bring to your Maid Service!

Read these other articles on ZenMaid Magazine:

ZenMaid

Amar is the founder and CEO of ZenMaid Software, Inc. He started and ran Fast Friendly Spotless, a maid service in Orange County, CA. With the help of customized software to automate work he successfully operated the service in under 30 minutes per day. He created ZenMaid scheduling software to help other maid service owners do the same.

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