How To Use Facebook Ads That Generate Targeted Leads For Your Cleaning Business

When speaking with business owners, there’s a couple of questions I get asked a lot…

“Sean… should I be advertising on Facebook?” & “Does Facebook produce a good return for the money I spend?”

To which I make no hesitation to reply by saying.. “If you are looking to acquire fresh leads for your cleaning business at a cheaper lead acquisition than other marketing channels like newspapers, leaflets, radio or even TV.. then 100% YES!”

The chart below from the good folks over at Lyfemarketing illustrate this quite well.

As you can make out from the chart, Social media is cheaper than any form of advertising available today. It is one of the only forms of media that can expose you to over 1,000 people for less than $3.

Advertising on social media can allow you to incorporate traditional elements into your social media campaign. You can advertise video commercials, publish articles, host live podcasts and webinars, and much more. Social media is the only “billboard” that can communicate to your customers, answer their questions, and provide them with feedback. The level of engagement from social media is far more effective than any other media channel out there today.

Product-based businesses and service giants aren’t the only companies that can benefit from Facebook advertising. Residential & commercial cleaning companies can also acquire new targeted leads and customers using a popular social media platform such as Facebook or Instagram.

A lot of cleaning businesses I reach out to and converse with have indeed experimented with boosting their posts, but far fewer have taken advantage of Facebook Ads Manager. That’s where the real magic happens. The learning curve is a lot steeper, but the potential rewards are also far greater. The targeting and creativity you can do on Facebook is mind boggling. That's why its considered the most intuitive platform for online advertising.

An example I read not so long ago was MyClean in New York City. They created a campaign on Facebook targeting young professionals & busy moms. They offered a $30 off promo code which was linked to their booking page on their website. MyClean saw increases in website clicks, conversions, and bookings. The revenue generated was somewhere in the region of $17K over a seven month period.

Now bare this in mind for a minute. This was an ad that was marketing to just a couple of target audiences. The $17k that was generated, was only from first time customer purchases. This campaign would have produced far more than just the initial $17k, because as you well know… being in the cleaning business typically means, weekly, bi-monthly and monthly repeat business.

Without knowing their number of customers, average order value and lifetime value, it’s hard to gauge what return was made on their ad spend with Facebook, but I bet they made way more than the initial $17k return on investment where average lifetime value is considered.

Why Use Facebook Ads for Your Cleaning Business?

There are a number of places you can invest money into marketing your business. From local newspaper ads, leaflets, sponsorship's etc etc. But why use Facebook ads for your cleaning business? I’ve got a couple of points on this…

The Price: If we compare to many other forms of traditional advertising, Facebook is relatively inexpensive. It’s not too difficult to setup ads on Facebook, but the real skill is in knowing what ads are performing and being able to optimize your marketing campaigns to achieve a higher return on investment for the ad spend.

Typically you can create campaigns for as little as $10 a day with no long-term commitment. You’ll need to spend more than that to see real results, but it’s possible to start small and test ads without fear of losing large sums of cash.

Specificity: One of my favorite things I LOVE about marketing on Facebook, is its vast information of data on its users. When you like, comment, share or tag people on posts, like a certain page, express an interest on a certain event or simply add your date of birth or place you live as part of your profile, Facebook keeps a record of this. The purpose of harvesting these data points is to create avatars to sell to businesses looking for that specific target audience.

This collection of data has revolutionized advertising and has put it miles ahead of effectiveness against the traditional forms of advertising. When setting up marketing campaigns on Facebook, you’re able to target people by gender, age, location (down to zip code), education level, career type, income, and interests (hobbies, sports, favorite products, industry associations), life events (anniversary, birthday), and more.

Just imagine how effective it would be to target young professionals and or busy moms in your local area whose birthdays are in the month of say… September. You can create a birthday gift to advertise to them in the form of a 20% discount code.. Or a free carpet clean that covers a certain square footage (Upsell them on getting the rest of their carpet cleaned now that you are in their home). The response rate would be very good on something like this as you are tapping into people’s special life occasions with a special offer.

Marketing and advertising on Facebook allows you to laser-target people most likely to buy your services.

Reach: At the time of writing this article, 196.5 million Americans use Facebook, making it the largest social network, and 74% of those users visit the site every single day. Facebook isn’t only popular among young people; 125 million of its users are older than 35, which hits the target market of most residential cleaning companies. Social media sites like Facebook & Instagram are also the most commonly used mobile apps, which is important because mobile apps now account for about half of all global Internet traffic.

Advertising on Facebook lets you reach buyers where they spend much of their time.

Develop a Smart Strategy Plan for Facebook Advertising

Its very important that you approach Facebook advertising with a well thought out strategy plan. You need to know what your end goal is when using this platform. Is it to acquire a lead? Perhaps demonstrate brand awareness? Maybe promote a special coupon code. What’s the end goal?

Facebook offers a number of strategies to help you get the word out about your business. My three favorite campaigns I like to run for cleaning companies are as follows -

Conversion Ads: These are Ads that work to persuade people to sign up to an offer or to make a purchase with one of your products and/or services.

Engagement Ads: These ads are designed to help build engagement in the form of likes, comments and shares for a target audience. An example would be… creating a post that shows before and after results of a cleaning job that was carried out by your company. This could be in the form of an image or a video. The purpose is to help sell the results of your cleaning business.

Messenger Bot Ads: These ads are native inside your FB messenger and are designed to get a conversation going between a messenger bot and the potential lead. Usually it involves an offer of some kind with some questions the potential customer engages with to get answers and begin a conversation to help understand their needs.

What’s the best ad strategy to get started with?

You might think that going straight for conversion ads might be the best way forward. But in my opinion, its best to start out with some form of engagement ad to get awareness out about your brand. When the target audience engages with your post in the form of a like, comment etc, you can then follow up with these engagers in the form of a conversion ad that entices them to sign up for an offer.

The engagers are considered warm traffic and if they have expressed an interest in your post, they are more likely to be receptive to your offer on the conversion ad.

Perhaps the most important part in the beginning, is figuring out who your ideal customer is. What do they look like? How do they behave? Why do they need your cleaning service? Is it because they have no time to clean and maintain their homes? Maybe they don’t like cleaning activities. Figure this out first!

For a residential cleaning business, some of the most important key targeting factors to consider are Geography and Lifestyle. What are the zip codes you service? What’s the typical age and income range of people willing to pay for house cleaning? Do you want to target only homeowners or renters? What pain points can you address? Are your ideal clients parents, pet owners, C-level execs?

The Facebook ads manager can be overwhelming at first glance and it does take time and practice to learn how to master it. It never stays static either as its constantly evolving. So the learning curve is a steep one for sure.

Hiring someone like me, can certainly take the guesswork out of Facebook advertising, and deliver a higher ROI. Leaving you to work on your area of expertise, which is serving new and existing clients as best you can.

Another cool thing Facebook allows you to do is market to people who have visited your website, joined your email list etc. This is a term we use in the industry called “Retargeting”. This allows you to target existing customers or warm prospects. Doing this is pretty straightforward once you install the Facebook Pixel on your website.

The Facebook pixel allows you to create whats called “Look-a-like” audiences, that target people similar to those who are already on your email list or visit your website. Just keep in mind that you need a certain level of traffic to your website to utilize the Facebook pixel.

Here’s a Quick Guide on How to Use Facebook Ads For Your Cleaning Business

The first thing you’ll need to have, which I am sure most of you reading this will have sorted out is setting up and publishing a Facebook page. You need a page on Facebook in order to access the ads manager as well as posting your content and offers so you can start advertising.

For those of you that don’t have a business page, log into Facebook, click the arrow in the top right, select “Create Page,” and choose “Local Business.” Add a high definition logo and cover photo or video (video is best), and complete the information. Choose the “Book Now” call-to-action button and link to your booking URL.

Start posting content in the form of before and after results using video and images. Offer tips and helpful information about cleaning in your posts using video and images. You can even through in humorous content. All this content is designed to get people engaged.

Here’s some basic steps to start advertising on Facebook:

1. First thing you want to do is install the Facebook Pixel on your website so you can track visitors that arrive via Facebook. It’s just a few lines of code and easy to install (You can send this code with instructions to your webmaster or developer and they can easily attend to this.

2. Next up is to go visit the link at the top right, select “Manage Ads,” and click on your account name.

3. In Ads Manager, click “Create Campaign.” Choose a goal (Brand Awareness, Engagement, Conversion etc) and name your ad.

4. Depending on the type of campaign you’re creating, you may need to give Facebook some additional information (such as where you want to drive traffic or what you consider a conversion).

5. Any campaign you run on Facebook requires you to target an audience. Knowing your ideal target audience, you can enter demographics (geography, income, age, etc.) and use the “detailed targeting” area to drill down more with things like home ownership, children, pets, career, hobbies, etc.

6. As you continue to configure your campaign, you’ll need to set a budget. If you’re new to Facebook ads, start low (about $10 a day is good) and set an end date so you don’t forget to turn off the ad and later get hit with a sizable bill. Let each adset run for a minimum of one week to see how it performs. Spend a few weeks experimenting and add to the budget when you have a better idea of what delivers the best results.

7. Build your ad. You can choose single image, slideshow, carousel, video, or collection. Generally the most successful ad formats are either single image or video. You’ll need to experiment to see how your target audience reacts to your content and offers.

Here’s a few tips to consider -

• Choose a high-quality photo (you can use the stock photos Facebook offers, your own images, commercial free Google images or find free ones on sites like Pexels or Unsplash). Find something that will likely capture the eye of your target audience on a busy Facebook feed.
• Keep the headline of the ad short and make it about the user, not you (as in “Squeaky Clean Home at Affordable Prices” vs. “We Can Clean Your Home”).
• In the text section, call out the target audience and talk about a pain point with cleaning (not having the time to clean) & why they should hire you to solve this problem for them (what can you do for them that’s unique or special?).
• Add the URL for the booking page on your website (and select “Book Now” as the call-to-action button).
• Publish the advert and wait to be approved.

There you have it! That’s Facebook ads in a nutshell. I would be dishonest to you if I told you that Facebook ads are easy to work with. You need to bare in mind that there is a lot of testing involved and optimizations that help to create a campaign that targets the right audience and produces the results you desire. ie generating new customers for your business.

Try it yourself if you wish. If you feel like you want to by pass that learning curve and hire someone who knows the in’s and outs of this platform and how to deliver the right results for your cleaning business, then connect with me on the link below. I’d be delighted to have a chat about what we can do to increase the revenue of your business.