This carpet cleaning marketing guide will clean up your efforts. Learn how local and digital marketing techniques can help you stand out from the crowd.
Homeowners are on the hunt for professional carpet cleaning services at least once or twice per year. When they do their research, they’re always looking for the best value around. If you want to prove that you’re the best in the business, you need a carpet cleaning marketing plan that makes you stand out from the crowd.
It’s easy to feel lost among the competition these days, with online platforms giving your potential customers easy access to hundreds of carpet cleaning options. But with the right strategies in place, you’ll be more than just another contender. We’ll give you some solid carpet cleaning marketing ideas to help you reach new leads and re-engage current customers.
9 Carpet Cleaning Marketing Strategies
There are plenty of promotional strategies that work well, but the ones that work best for carpet cleaning businesses fall under at least one of two categories: local marketing and digital marketing.
Local marketing is critical in your industry because your work is location-dependent. If you want to maximize your return on investment (ROI), you need to reach your target market—and, preferably, only your target market—with every marketing campaign.
As consumers continue to move toward online platforms, you also can’t let digital marketing opportunities slip past you either. All too often, carpet cleaning companies are missing out on the huge opportunities that a robust online presence can bring, which means you have a big gap to take advantage of.
Here are some carpet cleaning marketing strategies that you can blend together to take your business to the next level:
1. Nextdoor Marketing
We’re currently in the heyday of social media marketing, which means that promoting your business on just about any heavily-used platform like Facebook or LinkedIn can greatly expand your reach. But when you really want to focus on reaching the people who are likely to be interested in your carpet care, Nextdoor is the social media platform you want to focus on.
Nextdoor is an app used by millions of people who want to connect with their neighbors. This social media platform requires every user to verify their addresses and uniquely boasts a 74% homeowner member base. This means that Nextdoor is prime for location-based targeting and reaching an audience that truly cares about home maintenance.
Using this app, you’ll be able to engage with your community and build strong relationships with the people you want to convert by posting through your business account. Creating a business listing gets you access to posting beyond your general newsfeed, where unsolicited and undisclosed self-promotions aren’t allowed. Plus, you can run local ads that can accelerate your marketing efforts and send enticing offers directly to people in your service area.
2. Google Maps Marketing
When people search for home services, they’re looking for professionals in their area. Google Maps marketing is an easy way to boost your rank for local searches, both on Google.com and on the Google Maps app.
Just by filling in your Google My Business listing with service areas, contact information, and business description—using keywords where possible—you can already rank higher and get more clicks from relevant, location-based searches.
3. Online Reviews
Customers don’t shop blindly for the home services they need. They want to make sure they’re working with trustworthy business owners who can get the job done. However, they aren’t turning to your carpet cleaning website to confirm that you’re the right choice. They’re turning to their peers.
While most consumers will avoid the ads you push, 91% of consumers aged 18-34—as well as the majority of all consumers—trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations. Your online reviews provide the same great impact as word-of-mouth, only each review can reach thousands of people fast.
So where do you need to get reviews? Your business pages on Google and Facebook can get a lot of traction, so it’s important to continuously gather online reviews on the two platforms.
Beyond these sites, we recommend claiming your listings on industry-specific review sites like Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor. These niche websites get a lot of traffic from people who are already interested in carpet cleaning, so if you have an active profile with plenty of reviews, you’ll stand out for the most high-quality leads.
When you have your business listings created, getting reviews is as easy as asking. Reach out to your most loyal customers or follow up right after a service. Or, if you want to automate this carpet cleaning marketing strategy, you can use a tool like Podium Reviews to instantly send review invites via text message to the people your team helps. Podium Reviews will also compile your incoming reviews all on one platform, so you can easily track your reputation and respond to show your current customers you care.
4. Landing Pages
Landing pages are powerful marketing tools that can bolster your local SEO efforts even further.
A landing page is a dedicated web page that is built to convert. It’s typically focused on a single topic and search engine optimized for a specific keyword. As a carpet cleaning business, you can create specific landing pages for specific services — like commercial carpet cleaning, area rug cleaning, and upholstery cleaning — or for specific cities you service. The more landing pages you create the better.
In order for your landing page to successfully convert, it should be optimized for all devices, well-organized, and focus on a single call-to-action. For example, your landing page may lead users to schedule a consultation for the service you’re marketing on the page.
Including visuals can also keep your potential customers engaged on your landing pages longer. In fact, landing pages with videos can actually boost conversion rates by as much as 80%.
5. Direct Mail
Traditional marketing techniques haven’t completely gone out of style. Even with all the tech and online platforms consumers use today, direct mail campaigns can still create powerful results.
Just like text messages, direct mail has an extremely high open rate of 90%, as well as an average read-through rate that’s almost double that of email marketing. Not only are letters, postcards, and catalogs placed where consumers are already bound to look, but they naturally grab people’s attention by making a promotion more tangible and not so easily deleted.
Direct mail can help you increase the location precision in your targeting. Like Nextdoor, this marketing channel allows you to send messages exclusively to people who live in the ZIP codes your carpet cleaning business serves—no more, no less—helping you greatly reduce wasted ad spend. As long as your direct mail is able to pique the interest of your audience (perhaps using a coupon or a clear call-to-action), your ROI will thank you.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Organic local search engine optimization (SEO) is perfect for small businesses looking to increase their online visibility. It combines the power of local marketing and digital marketing to reach your customer base where they are at. Focus on optimizing core pages on your website such as the homepage and then update your website with SEO-friendly blogs.
Remember search engine optimization isn’t about keyword cramming – search engines don’t like that. Provide high-quality and valuable articles that have keywords integrated throughout alongside other SEO technicalities like writing a meta description. Search engine optimization takes time but gaining traffic from search engines is highly valuable to a small business.
7. Local Listings
Google My Business isn’t the only listing website where your customer will be looking for businesses like yours. There are various local listing websites such as Yelp where you can create a business profile. This improves your online presence and SEO and gives you multiple streams of leads from your marketing strategy.
8. Social Media Marketing
It seems like everyone is on one form of social media or another. The key to successful social media marketing is to, through market research, discover which social media platform your customer base is using and create a strong online presence on that. If you can, take an omnichannel approach to diversify your marketing strategy.
Create engaging content for customers looking for carpet cleaners. Keep an eye on any trends that could be adapted to promote your carpet cleaning services. Create a social media posting schedule to keep consistent and make it easier to track what is and isn’t working.
9. Branding
Successful marketing efforts rely on a strong brand. Your business’ brand should be memorable and identifiable so it doesn’t blend in with your competitors, especially on oversaturated marketing channels like social media. Your brand determines how you communicate with your customer base including the colour-scheme and tone of voice used in marketing materials. Develop a strong point of view and values you stand behind.
10. Google and Social Media Ads
For a quick injection of new leads, try the lead generation strategy of online advertising. Google ads are great for getting in front of users while working on your SEO. Using pay-per-click (PPC) local search ads, you can show up first for relevant Google Maps and Google searches, like “best carpet cleaner near me” or “carpet cleaner Seattle.”
Social media ads such as Facebook ads can be really effective too. Advertising on social media platforms allows you to target a specific customer base to ensure your content is reaching the right people. You can also engage in retargeting marketing campaigns to work on warm leads for the best possible conversion rate.
Carpet Cleaning Marketing Tips
A marketing strategy won’t skyrocket your sales overnight, whether you’re a new business or an established carpet cleaning company. There are some things to keep in mind when creating and executing marketing campaigns.
1. Research your audience.
The better you know your customer base, the easier it will be to market to them. So send out customer surveys and onboarding questionnaires to determine how new customers found you. You could also use data analysis to find patterns among your client profiles. Engage in improving your understanding of your customers to highlight what they need to see in your marketing campaigns.
2. Research your market.
What are your competitors doing? Check out their online presence to see what they’re doing well and what gaps they have left that you can potentially fill. You can learn from and get inspired by the marketing campaigns that already exist within the carpet cleaners industry.
3. Track your campaign’s performance.
A marketing campaign is rarely ever perfect on the first try. Make sure to collect and interpret metrics regularly so adjustments can be made to improve the impact of your marketing efforts sooner rather than later. You may find it useful to segment your customer base and amend marketing to these segments to improve performance.
4. Mind your online reputation.
What others are saying about your business is more important than what your marketing campaigns say about your business. New customers put more weight on online reviews and word-of-mouth than any marketing campaign. Ensure you are building a strong reputation that leads to referrals from past customers, not warnings to avoid the business!
Refine Your Carpet Cleaning Marketing Strategy
Local marketing and digital marketing techniques are key for creating next-level campaigns that make you the go-to carpet cleaner in your service area. With the right strategies in place, your local business will be driving in new customers and keeping current customers satisfied day in and day out.
When you pair your refined marketing strategy with great customer service, you can quickly rise in the ranks and gain loyal customers for life. Learn how Podium’s carpet cleaning software has helped accelerate one carpet cleaning company’s growth and how it can help you become the standard for customer support, too.
