Advertising Your Maid Service: How we generated leads for $4.48

So you want to advertise your house cleaning business...

With so many advertising avenues to go these days, paid and free, it can be overwhelming deciding which platform to market your business is the best for you.

There is no such thing as "one best" marketing platform, however Facebook and Instagram is likely where you can find many of your candidates.

Sitting at over 2 billion monthly users, these social media channels are very promising for paid advertising!

Once you have a Facebook business page set up for you cleaning service, it's time to get started...

1. The Offer  

As with any high converting campaign, an individual is far more likely to become a lead if the offer is dang close to 'too good to be true.'  

In this case, we were offer “3 Lucky Winners a Chance To Win a Free Kitchen Clean with Their In-Home Estimate!” We had users submit their contact information (name, email, phone number) to enter into the raffle.  

This was effective at generating leads quickly and for cheap. If you put yourselves in the minds of a typical homeowner, most do not want to pay for a service until they are absolutely sure it will benefit their lives.  

This free kitchen clean was our version of a “free trial” for business: They got to witness who the actual cleaners were, the effectiveness of the process and build a new relationship.

2. Campaign Set-Up

We set this campaign up within the Facebook Ads Manager.  

If you have a Facebook business page for your maid service, you can jump right into this strategy. (If you don’t, I would recommend searching the web for one of the many articles or tutorials on “How to setup a Facebook business page,” otherwise this strategy won't work.)  

The campaign type we selected is “Conversions.”

It’s important to note that this is not the only campaign objective that would work. For example, you could select “lead generation” which provides a lead form to capture people’s information all within the Facebook platform (meaning you don’t even need a website or any software to get started!)  

Conversions optimizes for your prospects to enter their lead information. Ultimately, your goal is to send them to a website page or landing page and secure them as a new lead, making this objective ideal. 

We kept the targeting to a cold audience as the owner did not have a very big customer file to create “lookalike audiences” from; an advanced yet very effective strategy for ensuring your campaigns are profitable (more on this later).

The ad itself? A photo of the actual cleaning team is highly recommended.  

It amazes me how many advertisers use the same stock photos as their competitors and wonder why their ads are not converting. An authentic, average quality photo will outperform a professional grade, stock photo 9 times out of 10.  

Here is the ad we created:

 3. Landing page (Lead Capturing) 

The goal is to drive traffic to a designated web page called a landing page.  

Notice that I did not say website? (In some rare cases, a website page will suffice as a landing page.)  

In this scenario - and likely yours, too - our house cleaning website was not optimized for conversions. Too many tabs, paragraphs, certification badges etc. increased the likelihood that visitors would bounce off the page.  

We are promoting a Free kitchen clean with an in-home estimate and that’s it! 

A proper landing page houses your offer and makes the selling process very straight forward which is why they are so effective at capturing leads.  

As a tip, you should have some scarcity involved on your landing page text. Human beings hate missing out on offers, and having limited availability is an effective marketing tactic to get visitors to take action right away.  

Results  

This campaign strategy was very effective at capturing leads on a budget. 25 leads (one did not register in the Ads Manager) were obtained for a spend of just over $100.  

Final Thoughts

Surely, spending 1-2 hours to clean someone's kitchen for free may not sound like fun. In fact, this business owner insisted we try something different when I first proposed the idea to her.

Look at those couple of hours of sacrifice as a little investment into your foreseeable future. Guess who those luckly winners will think of right away when they actually do need to schedule a house cleaning?

Not only this, the rest of your leads can, and should, be nurtured through a string of emails, text messaging, chatbot automation, and Facebook re-targeting ads. This way you can ensure you stay top of mind for everyone on your newly generated list!

"Are you currently generating house cleaning leads for under $5?"