If you follow the right process, running Facebook ads for your cleaning business shouldn’t be difficult.
There are a few common Facebook advertising mistakes that cleaners make.
However, if you avoid them and follow the steps in this post, you will see Facebook ads that actually convert.
Before you run Facebook ads for a cleaning business
1. Define your Ideal Customer
Research may not be your favorite thing to do, but doing some prep work to understand your ideal customer can make a big difference in the world. If you don’t yet have an ideal customer avatar for your cleaning business, defining one should be a priority. For example, key points to consider include the needs, desires, goals, and problems of your ideal customer.
They also want to know what hobbies and jobs they do, what they watch on TV, what they read, and other demographics. Understanding these things will make your copy more compelling, your ads more effective, and your message reaching the right people.
It’s also useful for targeting when you don’t have a large list of clients to upload to Facebook. You can also use multiple variations of customer avatars when dealing with different customers. For example, a cleaning company might be a home cleaning company, but they might also clean Airbnb listings.
These two target markets require very different messages to be effective.
2. Pixel your website
If content is king, data is queen. With so much progress in data analytics over the past few years, there are some amazing things you can do to grow your cleaning business. Optimizing Facebook ads for cleaning businesses is one of them
If you haven’t already, you’ll need to install the Facebook pixel on your website.The sooner you do this, the better, as the data can be collected on the website. If you don’t know how to install the Facebook pixel, check out this post from Facebook
This is a step that cannot be skipped. If you skip it, you’ll miss out on some of the most valuable data you can get. If you’re spending money on his Facebook ads for cleaning companies without keeping track of what’s going on, there’s no way to optimize your ads.
Effective advertising requires testing, tracking, and improvement accordingly.
You may think your ad looks great and will generate lots of leads and sales, but you won’t know until you actually start running ads.
3. Set up free quote page and thank you page
These next 2 steps will help you to generate more quality leads for your cleaning business. If you don’t already have one you should make a separate page that people visit to get a free quote for cleaning services.
This is important because you can pixel that specific page and start building an audience from it for running Facebook ads for your cleaning business. In addition to a specific page for getting a free quote, you also want to make sure that once someone does become a lead, that you redirect them to a thank you page.
A thank you page is important because you can also pixel that page. This will open the door to build a highly targeted audience and set up conversion ads down the road.
4. Set up a lead magnet on your website
Another way to generate leads in Facebook ads in general is to use lead magnets. A lead magnet is something you give away for free in exchange for anything you want, such as a name, email address, or phone number.
With your ideal customer’s avatar in mind, you can create a lead girlfriend magnet based on what your ideal customer is likely to be interested in. For a house cleaning company, for example, it could be a product buying guide, cleaning tips, or other ways to save time or money on cleaning
Commercial cleaning companies follow the same concept to create carpet care guides, floor care guides, or other cost-saving guides for building owners and managers
Whichever you choose, make sure your lead magnet matches the cleaning company you use, and make sure to hire a cleaning company as the next logical step after downloading your lead magnet
5. Get employee photos
Before you can run a cleaning business Facebook ad, the next thing you need is high-quality employee photos.
When you hire a cleaning service, you need to be able to trust the people who let you into your home or business.
Unfortunately, most cleaning companies that market online only use stock photos on their websites.
Some of these photos look professional, some look fake.
This means that these photos create resistance to hiring a cleaning company instead of building trust.
Luckily, smartphones make it easy to take photos, which can go a long way in building trust with your website visitors.
You want to use photos of your employees cleaning or looking happy and friendly.
These photos will help you stand out from your competitors and reduce the friction when hiring a cleaning company
Using these photos in your Facebook ads and across your site can increase your conversions.
6. Gather Customer testimonials and Reviews
Another kind of effective Facebook ad for a cleaning business is using customer testimonials and reviews. There are two effective versions of this type of ad.
One version is simply taking screenshots of various written reviews and combining them into a video. Another version is getting video testimonials from customers.
Both options can work well and are equally powerful because they utilize social proof. Social proof is when you have an outside source or sources confirming the quality of your cleaning services.
This is a great method of promoting a cleaning business because it’s not just you saying how your company is great, it’s other people. Social proof can help establish trust, and credibility for your cleaning business, and can be a great focal point in your Facebook ads.
Using a video Facebook advertisement for a cleaning business also opens up more targeting options you can use in the future.
7. Upload your customer list and create a lookalike audience
There are many targeting options you can use for running Facebook ads, but one of the best ones you can use to start is based on your existing customer list. Most people think that running Facebook ads for a cleaning business means that you just pick demographics of who you might think is interested in a cleaning service.
While that method could give you a starting point, there are far better methods of running Facebook ads for a cleaning business. Your goal should be to attract more buyers for your cleaning service.
To do this you want to show your ads to people that are likely to be similar to your existing customers. One way to do that is by creating a lookalike audience. A lookalike audience is when Facebook uses some kind of criteria of your choosing such as site visitors, watching a video, or a list of emails you upload and then creates an audience based on that.
This can work very well when you build a lookalike audience based on your existing customers by uploading your customer list. A lookalike audience based on your customers will often perform much better than choosing random demographics. Starting with a lookalike customer list can help you increase conversions and lower ad spend initially.
8. Set a goal for Facebook ads
As you can see in the picture above there are quite a variety of goals you can have for your Facebook ads. For a cleaning business, the Facebook ads you’ll likely use most often are traffic, video views, messages, and conversions.
You may use a lead generation ad, but that requires extra steps to add those leads to your lists, and also limits you on some of the custom audiences you can build. With that being said, we won’t talk about those in this post.
Now if you are looking to optimize for leads and have Facebook pixels in place on your thank you pages, conversions or messages ad would likely be best. If you want to start to build custom audiences, lookalike audiences, improve your targeting, and drive traffic, you should use a traffic ad.
Finally, if you want exposure on your review or testimonial videos, and want to create highly targeted lookalike audiences as well as create a good audience to retarget other ads to, use the video views ads.
Whatever your goals are for running Facebook ads for your cleaning business, likely there is an ad type that fits your goals.
9. Choose who to target with your cleaning business Facebook ads
The next part of creating a Facebook ad for your cleaning business is to choose who and where to target. Most likely you’ll be targeting your ads locally unless you are a national cleaning business.
Facebook ads allow you to drill down to the specific zip code you want to target. You can also choose to market in specific cities or a radius around a zipcode or city. You can also exclude cities and zip codes if there are specific parts of town you don’t want to advertise in.
This applies to ads aimed at getting customer leads, but for employment ads and hiring, some of the targeting features are not available. As mentioned above, if you can start by targeting a lookalike customer list audience do that first.
If you don’t have that you can put in your ideal customer avatar demographics and build custom audiences based on visitors of specific pages. A combination of both your existing customer lists and visitor behavior will create the most targeting audience, but that does take time to develop.
The first few weeks of running Facebook ads for your cleaning business will be paying for data. You can certainly still get leads during that time, but over time as you fine-tune your targeting, your cost per lead can go down.
10. Writing your Facebook ad for your cleaning business
Writing Facebook ads for cleaning businesses can be tough if you have the wrong mindset. Most people tend to write and ad focused on the features of their cleaning services, and that doesn’t really work.
You need to write your Facebook ads in a way that highlights what’s in it for your potential customer and that solves their problems. Facebook ads are different than Google Ads because they are demand generation and not based on search intent.
When someone on Google searches for a term like “cleaning services near me” you can pay money to have your ad come up. With Facebook ads, people aren’t searching for cleaning services.
Instead, you are creating demand for your cleaning business by promoting your ads in front of people that are likely to be interested in a cleaning service. This is why you can’t just list your features and expect people to buy, like you may be able to get away with on Google Ads.
With running Facebook ads for your cleaning service, you need to sell the benefits and why someone should hire your company. A general outline to follow for an ad could be broken down into 3 steps.
- List a problem or pain point for your ideal customers
- Highlight the benefits of your cleaning services and how they solve the problem in step 1
- Use a call to action telling the viewer to get a quote or to learn more about your services
11. Build audiences that are targeted with Facebook ads for your cleaning business
We mentioned it some above, but as you run Facebook ads for your cleaning services, you’ll want to also build audiences of people who visit specific pages on your website. The main audiences you want to build are any site visitor to your website, people who visited your free quote page, people who visited your free quote thank you page, and people that engaged with specific content.
The idea behind this is you want to build audiences of people performing a behavior you want to happen. This is why you start with a lookalike audience based on your customer list.
You want more customers, so you should base an audience on people who look like them and act like them online. The reason you don’t only use this customer lookalike audience and nothing else because there could be other audiences that perform better.
When you use a lookalike audience based on people who visit a quote page, thank you page, or watch your testimonial videos, for example, those are all good audiences to likely contain potential customers.
12. Run remarketing Facebook ads for your cleaning business
For those unfamiliar with Facebook ad remarketing, Facebook ads serve ads to people who have previously interacted with your content or ads.
This type of advertising is very effective as it is not aimed at a cold audience.
Most people work with a cleaning company they trust and like.
For this reason, most people probably won’t buy a dry cleaner the first time they hear about it.
Remarketing ads are effective because they’re like you’re advertising to a warm-her list of contacts you already know.
Think of remarketing Facebook ads like preheating the oven. Remarketing ads can also be highly targeted.
For example, you can only show your ad to users who have viewed at least 50% of her Testimonials ads.
You can also use remarketing to make your message more targeted.
For example, let’s say you run a cleaning service at a car dealership.
You can create a blog post about auto dealer cleaning and retarget all visitors to that post with a Facebook ad promoting your auto dealer cleaning offer.
Test, track, and monitor your cleaning business Facebook ads
Another thing to keep in mind when you are running Facebook ads for a cleaning business is that they do require continual monitoring. Some weeks one ad set will crush it, but other weeks it will jump up significantly in costs, and then go back again.
This is why it’s beneficial to have multiple ad sets you can use in order to cycle through them when certain ones may underperform. Also, some ads you may think will do great, but when you run them you’ll find that they don’t work at all.
Other ads you think will not work that great, but end up performing amazingly. Overall, when you follow the above advice you’ll have ads that can perform very well, but it still comes down to testing, tracking, and then adjusting accordingly.
If you want to tackle running Facebook ads on your own, this post will help, but if you’d like our help that’s an option too. Part of what we do for our clients is to help them set up, and manage their Facebook ads to help them get the best results.
Click here to learn about our Facebook advertising services.
