This is one of the biggest questions commercial cleaning and janitorial services ask. What is the best target market for cleaning services? Unfortunately there is not one answer that applies to every company. Remember we have 100,000 commercial cleaning businesses in the united states, 90,000 towns in this country and dozens of different services cleaners provide. 

This tutorial is about how to narrow down your prospect list. Most markets have 10’s of thousands and even 100’s of thousands of local businesses but we can’t practically market to all of them. Our goal is to create a manageable number where we can market and advertise to the same businesses month after month, year after year. 

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If you look at the products you have purchased over the last 5 years, you will realize you have experienced those companies over and over again for years. We should be doing the exact same thing with our local businesses.

In our example we used medical buildings but this is just an example, you can apply this to any industry. Also we can group several misc businesses in one big category. For example professional offices can be thousands of different industries that wouldn’t matter from a cleaning perspective. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc can all be in a broad professional category. 

Another example might be manufacturers, industrial, distribution, all of these businesses are similar from a commercial cleaning perspective and do not need to be targeted by individual industry.

The question is how?

This blog is on building a commercial cleaning & janitorial target marketing worksheet. What we cover on this blog is creating a leads list of prospects to market. For this example we focused on the medical industry and doctors, dentist, clinics and nursing homes. Medical is always a great prospect for commercial cleaning, janitorial, carpet and tile cleaning service businesses.

 

Three Main Targeting Categories

 

1. Geography
2. Employee Size
3. Square Foot Estimate of building

Geography

Geography- the first segment is geography, setting what our service area is and finding out how many medical businesses are located in different radius searches. The first search is 1 mile and equals 53 businesses within 1 mile of the address we are located at. The second search of 5 miles equals 416 and a broader search of 25 miles is 1385.

Employee Size

Employee Size– This next variable a janitorial service can consider,  although not perfect employee size gives us a general idea of the size of the business. For example 5 employees are not going to be working in a 50 thousand square foot building and 50 employees is not going to be in a 2000 thousand square foot building. Understand this is just an indicator and not perfect.

We are applying employee size on top of geography and can see as we apply different employee sizes to the geography segment how numbers change. Using 5 mile radius for the example you can see how the number of medical businesses at small (under 10 employees) equals 394. At medium (11-50 employees) 93 and large employers in a 5 mile radius with 50 or more employees equals only 15.

Square Foot Estimate of Building

Square Feet Estimate- this variable is a little tricky because a building might have 2500 square feet of total space but 2000 of it in warehouse space and only 500 of cleanable carpet or office space for commercial cleaning contractors. Here we came up with 125 businesses with 2500 square feet within 5 miles. 275 medical with 2500 square feet to 10k sqr ft. and 137 in the 10 thousand square feet to 50k square foot range. This can completely change your marketing plan.

Why Do We Segment?

This begs the question why do we care? The size of the building completely changes production rates and number of services. This is not something I or anyone else can tell you. Part of building a marketing plan is deciding I want to focus on 1 time a week janitorial accounts, 3 day week accounts or 5 day week accounts. For example if you want to target 1 day to 3 day week types then you would want to focus on smaller businesses and skip the high employee counts and sqr ft buildings. On the other hand if you only wanted 5 day week accounts then the opposite.

The point is to focus your marketing dollars on the type of clients you want and not waste time and money calling on businesses you have no interest in.