Finding Your Niche: How Marketing to a Smaller Audience Can Help You Grow Your House Cleaning Business

At some point in your life, you may have heard the old adage, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. ” It sounds like a quotable quote from the 1970s, but was actually first written by John Lydgate, a monk, and poet who died in 1451.

It turns out that Lydgate knew what he was talking about; in fact, he could have been a modern marketing guru. It is indeed impossible to please all of the people all of the time, and when you are marketing your residential cleaning business, you would do well to remember that.

If you cast your marketing net widely and deal in general platitudes, it will be ineffective. It is far more efficient to market to a smaller audience, one that you have researched and know inside and out. That way, your knowledge of your ideal clients will enable you to reel them in with specific appeals.

Buyer Personas:

One way of marketing to a smaller audience is to create buyer personas. These are semi-fictionalized characters based on demographics and other details about your existing customers. If you are just starting your residential cleaning business and don't have clients yet, you could base these personas on your competitors' clients, or on statistics about the community that you live in.

For example, suppose you find that many of your clients are married women in their mid-thirties who work from home but who also have 2-3 children. Now let's give this persona a name, like Superwoman Sally. Through surveys and responses, you can find out a lot more about her (and remember – she is representing a particular subset of your clients). Why did Sally hire a residential cleaning service? Because she doesn't have enough hours in the day! She's frustrated at her lack of free time and wants her weekends to be reserved for family time and activities instead of for catching up on housework.

Here's another sample buyer persona: Frugal Fred. Fred is a lawyer who is all about convenience and who despises cleaning his condo more than anything else – except for spending money. If you are marketing to him, you will focus on how cost-effective your services are – and you will make sure that your advertising includes testimonials from self-described “neat freaks” who are incredibly impressed by your business's super cleanliness.

What comes next?

It's not enough to know who these potential clients are and what they want. You also need to know where they are and how to reach them. You won't reach Sally in a broad advertising blitz; she hardly has time to read anything besides work and school emails. You won't reach Fred with a flyer left on his windshield at the supermarket; he has his groceries delivered!

However, once you know that 75% of parents use Facebook (81% of mothers), you know exactly where (and how) to target Superwoman Sally. And once you know that 90% of US lawyers are on LinkedIn, you have a strong idea where to market to Frugal Fred.

If you find that much of your business comes from two-income couples with no children who spend time at the gym, perhaps it's time to get down to the gym and arrange to leave business cards with complimentary bottles of water. Or if a lot of your clients have children who play soccer, maybe you should consider sponsoring a team through the rec center to advertise to other parents who haven't hired you yet. Use statistics, research, and creativity.

Obviously, this is vastly simplified. You still want to take advantage of blogs, customer reviews, and videos on your company's website, and Google My Business, as well as many other marketing opportunities. But by focusing on a smaller audience and using what you know about them, you are far more likely to grow your business than if you try to please everyone all of the time.