In todays blog we are going to cover the Top 9 Advertising ideas commercial cleaning and janitorial services can use to sell accounts. This can apply to commercial carpet cleaning, disinfecting, tile cleaning and all other specialty services.
Some of these platforms you will be aware of but some others you might not be or never thought about.
The key to Account Based Marketing is reading our previous blog about creating a customer profile . Then we can decide which of these platforms is best to reach that specific prospect.
For example: medical has a lot of women over 30, makes perfect sense to use Facebook for advertising.
Property Managers tend to be older, using Linkedin is a great way to promote your business. They are already on Linkedin themselves trying to sell office space.
Youtube is going to be a younger demographic but can be used for all really.
Top 9 Paid Advertising Platforms For Commercial Cleaning & Janitorial Services
1.Paid Search Marketing
2.Paid Display Ads
3.Targeted Display Ads to specific businesses
4.Social Media Ads- Small Business
5.Social Media Advertising- Medium to Large businesses
6.Content Marketing
8. Smaller search engines
9.Video
10.Sponsorship
1. Paid Search Marketing
Adwords has several products but we are focused on the most popular product of Search Marketing. This is where prospects search a term “ commercial cleaning services” and then 1-3 ads are listed at the top.
**** Adwords is a huge subject with 8 million hyper-technical details. We are only going to cover it’s a top 10 advertising idea for commercial cleaning, carpet & janitorial services. Plenty of other resources to learn the details.
Account Based Marketing- in ABM we would consider these growth accounts and 1x jobs primarily. Most large accounts and premium jobs will have sales people calling on them so they would never search in the first place unless for research.
Example strategies:
- One strategy would be geographic, you have an area, town, etc that you really want to hit hard and dominate in. Adwords gives you the opportunity to do this.
- Another strategy for a office cleaning or janitorial service would be using the specialty services like carpet cleaning, upholstery, VCT to get your foot in the door to sell daily office cleaning later on.
This section is going to depend specifically what service you are looking to advertise on adwords. Commercial cleaning, office cleaning, janitorial service are all keywords that have good search volume.
Specialty cleaning services (commercial carpet, tile,) is much much harder. You will want to visit adwords and use the keyword planner tool for search volume on the specific keywords you are shooting for.
Floor stripping and waxing and various combinations of waxing, polishing of VCT has some decent search volume and is generally not too competitive. Definitely worth investigating.
For example commercial carpet cleaning is very low volume search unfortunately, people just search for carpet cleaners. Commercial tile cleaning is also very low in most markets so we need to get creative and test some ideas.
2. Paid Display Ads
Google display advertising is something we see all day, everyday and probably don’t even realize it. I used foxnews as an example only because they put the ads on top and can easily point it out.
*** Don’t pay attention to the content! This isn’t political
The arrows point to examples of display advertising.
The big thing with display advertising is understanding this is a completely different tool then search marketing. With search prospects are specifically looking for a service but with display they are going about their normal day and we are putting an ad in front of them.
Account Based Marketing- we would want to combine a display campaign with a tool more direct like cold calling. Display is a much bigger PR & marketing tool then direct sales.
What will happen is we show an ad like this on news, business websites and then make sales calls to these businesses also. The point is they see our ad and become familiar with our company and then are far more likely to take that sales call and listen to us.
The downside is the campaign will not be exact, we will show this ad to 10k or more people and maybe only be calling on 500 of them. Still is an inexpensive way to get our business in front of decision makers and a certain percentage will click on the ad and buy directly.
Its important to understand how to score this product and use attribution, you won’y just look at the number of clicks, sales but also website visits, overall leads and overall sales. Often prospects will see this ad but buy from another tactic. This is big picture.
3. Targeted Display Ads- To Businesses
Targeted google display ads work exactly the same as regular display ads. The main difference is you are only showing the ads to specific businesses and not everyone. So for example you would show an ad for commercial cleaning services but only to 5000 or 10k businesses in your market. They would be the only ones to see it.
The downside is this is far more expensive per impression then regular google display. You might pay 5 or even 10x for the right to ONLY show an ad to specific local decision makers or businesses. The more you targeted the more we have to pay in digital advertising.
The upside is you are only spending money on prospects and not on random people.
This is another product I would recommend combining with a more direct approach like direct mail, phone, door to door. Although being so targeted we will see more closes then regular display advertising, still people are not looking to buy here.
Best case scenario would be run a targeted campaign to 5000 businesses and then call them on phone/door to door quarterly.
This would be a very powerful combination.
4. Social Media Ads- Small Business
One thing to consider when deciding to advertise on facebook is whatever advertising option you choose the algorithm will seek that behavior out.
For example if you choose awareness (page liking) facebook will seek out people who are serial page “likers”, some people will like anything. If you choose to use a traffic campaign or link to your website/landing page they will seek out people with a history of clicking on links, people who watch videos they seek out people who watch videos, etc.
For commercial advertising using the ads manager is the best option to target specific types and behavior. Especially for businesses with multiple services. Although for a dedicated commercial cleaning business post boosting should still be tested, we still recommend using the ads manager most of the time for commercial.
For commercial cleaning pr and marketing will be the biggest benefit of using facebook, no other platform gives us access to so many people of our target at such a small cost. Think of all the managers, executives, receptionists, small business owners that use facebook all day everyday to stay in touch with family and friends.
At a cost of .005 per impression its impossible to beat right now
The downside is most are not directly looking to buy from a commercial cleaning or janitorial service BUT we can influence them to make other campaigns more effective.
If for example you were running a door to door campaign or phone marketing. If that receptionist sees your ad on facebook all the time they will be far more likely to patch you through to the decision maker.
A simple budget of $5 day Monday through Friday to a targeted audience can make your other campaigns so much better at a cost of $100 month.
The important part is deciding what your objective is so you can score it properly, facebook can be used for direct sales AND pr/marketing at the same time so its important we score it that way.
What this means is not only looking at direct clicks, sales, forms but also looking at your overall website visits, leads, calls, etc and see if they are improving.
Often I will run an ad and get 300 clicks but then my website will get 3-4000 visitor boost. See people are not just seeing your ad and clicking on it but also reminding them you exist and going directly to your website. Or reminding them of the topic in general and they go to google search and hopefully see you again.
5. Social Media Ads- Medium to Large Businesses
In this section we are going to cover one of the most overlooked and underused marketing strategies for commercial cleaning services (including carpet, tile, window, etc.)
Why is it misused?
Mainly because cleaners take what works in other platforms like facebook and try to apply those same strategies to linkedin. This is a completely different platform and needs to be used differently, although some main ideas still apply.
One big difference is people spend hours upon hours every week on facebook, while linkedin the average user is only on for about 30 minutes a week. That’s enough time to check updates, messages and maybe a quick scroll through your timeline.
The biggest benefit of this platform is the targeting, you have the ability to keep your messages to a very specific group of people.
Text Ads
Text ads are the small ads on the right sidebar, usually 3 of them. Text ads are great for branding, if you spend $50 month it can be a great value provided you are doing other things. The cost for an impression is usually less than .01
Text ads do not bring in a lot of clicks or direct sales.
Sponsored Content
*** note sponsored content can only be done with a company page.
Sponsored content is the main articles/content in your timeline. How this works is you post content on a company page and then sponsor it. Similar to boosting on facebook.
I have found if doing this to also use text ads in conjunction, this will boost the number of clicks 50-100%.
To measure the effectiveness of the campaign you wouldn’t want to only look at results of the linkedin activity but also other campaigns phone, direct mail, door to door, etc.. A successful linkedin campaign in most cases will provide a boost of 10-30% to other campaigns.
Linkedin can be used as a direct sales tactic and pr/marketing at the same time.
The big thing about linkedin is it is not cheap, you can easily spend $5-10 per click but if you look at the other sponsors most of them are major national players and this can give you a lot of credibility.
My best advice with using Linkedin is tying it together with a broader linkedin strategy of making connections, messages and posting. Just using paid ads will most likely end in failure.
6. Content Marketing
Content Marketing is similar to display advertising and most people don’t really see the difference but it is a completely different topic. Like display advertising you will want to focus on news, business type of websites but there is two main differences.
- The ad is placed in the middle of the page usually mixed in with other news stories but labeled sponsored or paid advertising to let the reader know the difference.
- The landing page needs to be actual content, article, usually text based just like a normal news story with pictures and videos to support but text is the main content.
This depends on the publisher, they all have different rules on what can be used as a landing page, some will allow a homepage but most will not allow a straight service page or flat out advertisement.
Instead you will want to talk about a topic, like why is my commercial carpet attracting so much oil or how come my commercial carpet looks dirty so fast after cleaning.
Then at the bottom use a call to action to learn more.
The benefit is most people don’t distinguish and give you a lot of credibility if you are mixed in on a trusted news source. They assume you must be legit.
Also the costs are much lower for impressions and clicks.
The challenge is writing out a 500 word article and finding the right topics, headlines and picture to draw people in.
The other challenge is qualifying the publisher, your results will be much better on cnbc, cnn, foxnews versus a video game website or publisher’s clearing house. You will definitely pay more to be on those sites but the prospect will be much more valuable.
7. Video
As we continue to become older, our contacts will continue to become younger and use platforms and consume information completely different then we do.
Two points to keep in mind with today’s technology
1.Mobile is quickly overtaking desktop
2.Video is growing at an unbelievable pace with 1.3 BILLION people using youtube EVERY single day.
Youtube is a perfect example of this, we always want to remember our prospects consume information the way they want, not how we want them to.
Youtube has several options, we are going to focus on the main advertising in the introduction of videos. Right now they have 7 seconds, 15 second, 30 second and extended ads that play in front of your favorite video’s. I’m sure you have watched these ads and become annoyed but if you look I think you will realize that you often buy from those companies.
The common question is which is the most effective? 7 seconds, 15 or 30 .
A better way to think of this is how well does this person know you?
For example if you were running 7 second ads to people who have visited your website, this makes a lot of sense. They already are familiar with you and this just acts like a reminder. But what if they never heard of your company before, is 7 seconds enough. Probably not for business to business sales in commercial cleaning.
For total and complete strangers I would lean more towards 30 second ads, they need more information until they decide, yes I want to learn more.
You can also mix the 2 ads up, similar to linkedin with sponsored ads and text. The 30 second ad introduces your business to them and the 7 second reminds them you exist.
8. Smaller and niche search engines
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book David & Goliath he pointed out how you are better off being #1 at a small college than being #50 at harvard.
This the big fish in a small pond concept. Most of us are aware of Google’s dominance in search on the internet but if you can dominate a smaller niche search engine like bing it can still be a great investment.
Most of your competitors will never think of this or are too big to bother.
The challenge with these smaller investments is if the volume is really worth it. For residential type of services selling $200 or even $500 per service products it might not be. But for commercial cleaning, janitorial, contract commercial carpet cleaning then it really is worth the investment.
See this is completely different because we are selling $5k, $20k and even $100k recurring contracts so the lifetime value of a client over 5 years can easily be $50k or even $300k for office cleaners and janitorial services.
Absolutely worth it for even a account per month or quarter. Plus the cost is not great either.
9. Local Sponsorship
Sponsorships is mainly a local marketing scheme but can be regional or state based also. This can be a wide ranging topic that includes an ad on your local newspaper website, various associations, local home improvement blogs, events such as the red cross website or sponsoring a marathon, local online business groups and social media groups, newsletters, etc.
The general rule of thumb with sponsorships is they are most effective if it’s something you are active in other ways. If you buy an ad with the local newspaper website, then I would also want to submit press releases and get some stories also.
I wouldn’t want to just sponsor BOMA or chamber of commerce event/newsletter and not call on members or attend events. Sponsorships work best when you make sales calls to members, attend networking and spend a little bit for say sponsoring a lunch.
But I wouldn’t just sponsor a lunch or newsletter and that’s it.
Sponsorships are pr and marketing , they enhance your current campaigns but do not always bring in direct sales. If you were dedicated to the local Dental Association and were calling on the list throughout the year it makes a lot of sense to get your name in front of the decision makers to make your calls more effective.
You would want to look if your direct sales campaigns became better but not necessarily if the sponsorship brought in direct sales. This is the best way to view the ROI is in the total.
Also for sponsors we would recommend at least 6 months to year before deciding if it is a good investment. A one time event probably will not move the needle but if you were in the newsletter all year and maybe a couple lunches this might be enough awareness to improve a cold calling campaign.