4 Winning Carpet Cleaning Advertising Ideas

Carpet cleaning can be quite a competitive industry and if you don’t get out there and market your carpet cleaning business no one will know about you.  It doesn’t matter how great your service is or how beautifuly you’ve designed your van, you need potential clients to know about you.  Advertising can be done correctly or incorrectly and can become a real money sink. 

Measuring you advertising efforts

Before we go into the specific advertising ideas, you need to make sure that your advertising budget is working for you.  Don’t throw away money at useless advertising efforts, because very quickly advertising costs can balloon out.

You need to work out your return on investment (ROI).  Sometimes this can be a bit difficult to work out exactly, but you’ll need to make your best effort to get this under your belt.  For example, if you place an ad in the local paper, in order to measure your ROI you’ll need to ask people where they heard about you from.  You’ll also need to keep track of how much each of these clients bring in for you.  In the end to work out the ROI you’ll need to divide the total revenue generated by the advertising spend.  Remember, this is taking into account revenue and not profits, but it will give you a good idea if your advertising effort is effective.

The 4 Winning Carpet Cleaning Advertising Ideas

1.        Google PPC advertising

Google is a great way to get targeted traffic.  For example, if you have a carpet cleaning business in Denver, you can advertise for people who are specifically searching for “carpet cleaning Denver.”  This is highly targeted traffic as these searches indicate consumers who are looking to make a purchase.

Google PPC ads for "carpet cleaning denver"...can be effective but need to keep close eye on costs.

While the traffic is highly targeted, Google Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has become more and more expensive overtime.  In our example of “carpet cleaning Denver”, to advertise this term will cost approximately $8.35 per click.  Of course, not all “clicks” will end up in a sale, so the cost to acquire one client will be significantly higher than $8.35.  For example, if it takes 10 clicks until you close a sale, your approximate client acquisition cost will be around $83.50.  (Hint:  you should be keeping close track of this metric).

2.        Google Places Listing

Over the last few years Google has launched a new search product called Google Places.  These are special listing which list local businesses with a physical address.  Google is constantly tinkering with how these results appear, but often the Places Listings will appear as part of the normal search results.  Google Places will appear when someone search for a search term & a local city.  So in the previous example, if someone searches for “carpet cleaning Denver” then the places results will be displayed along with the regular organic listings.

Google Places Results...For "Carpet Cleaning Denver" the Places results come before all other results.

There are some special tips and tricks in order to get listed in Google Places.  Carpet cleaners who have successfully optimized their places listing find that they get an amazing ROI for this form of advertisement.  This is really powerful stuff and it allows you to “jump ahead of the queue” in the Google listings.

3.       Advertising in the Local Newspaper

Local rags can make a great advertising source.  While more and more people are using online advertising, especially for the older population offline advertising can be effective.  The ROI can vary greatly and there are many factors specific to your local area.

It’s really important in this case to measure the return on investment.  For offline advertising, measuring ROI can be a lot harder, but it’s critical in order to work out if this form of advertising is effective for you.

As a tip, make sure that you find out the readership size and demographics and of course the advertising costs for various ad sizes.  You can often get the media kit (the information regarding the advertising costs and readership) sent via email.

You can also tinker and optimize the ad copy (the wording of the ad) and the ad size to see which works best for you.  Make sure that you have a “call to action” in the ad body, such as “Call Us Now to Secure Your Discount”.  Calls to action are proven to increase the response to ads.

4.       Distribute Flyers (Plus a secret tip)

While it might seem out-dated, flyers can often be quite effective forms of advertising.  Often flyers can be designed, printed and distributed fairly cheaply.  Some communities have very good responses to flyers, whilst in others they are viewed as more “spammy”.  You should also consider investing a little more to create fridge magnets, which people often keep for their own use of for their children.  Whereas flyers are often thrown out, fridge magnets may be kept around for a long time.  Finally when the client will look for someone to clean their carpets, all they’ll need to do is to look to their fridge in order to find you.

5.       Bonus Tip!

The last tip is a bonus (I know we said “4 great carpet cleaning advertising ideas”) for having come so far.  This last point is to get your customers to do your advertising for you.  This may seem obvious, but few carpet cleaning businesses put this into use effectively.

The right way to this is to turn your customers into “raving fans”.  The only way to do this is to do such a good job that your clients will not be able to help themselves but talk about you and recommend your services to their friends.  This means that your whole package has to be professional and customer orientated, but there are some extra ideas that you can throw into the mix.  

For example, consider sending out postcards for events like birthdays or holidays, especially if you take the time to write a hand written note.  You can also throw in a small “bonus” with the completion of a job, such as a professional can of stain removal spray or perhaps a box of chocolates or bottle of wine.

You to learn more about how to create these "raving fans" you can pick up the book Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service for some light holiday reading.  (This is an Amazon affiliate link, I get a small commission if you purchase the book, but I included it because it is a highly recommended book and well worth the small investment).

You want to create more of these...

Lastly, you need to also actively ask for referrals.  For example, you could send a survey following the completion of a job.  A few days later you should contact those customers who gave you highly favourable reviews and ask them for recommendations of neighbours or friends who may want the service.  You can then actively go about contact them and acquiring new customers.