It’s no secret that the cleaning industry is quite a competitive business environment. As a business owner, it’s crucial that you find a way to differentiate your business in your local market – and your online reputation is the key to do that.
When customers are searching for a cleaning company to hire, they’re looking for signals to determine whether they can trust your company or not. They do that by looking at what other people are saying about your business online – this is called social proof, and it has a huge impact in how customers make decisions:
- 87% of consumers read online reviews when searching for local businesses
- 97% of customers say reviews impact their buying decisions.
- 90% of customers think reviews are more important than anything a salesperson says.
So we know having online reviews and testimonials is crucial – but how can you use it to grow your cleaning business?
The Answer: Reputation Marketing
Reputation marketing is the process of using your company’s reputation to market your business to new potential customers. This means using brand assets from your company’s reputation as advertising and promotional materials.
By marketing your positive reputation, you are able to establish trust with customers before they even call you and ease their concerns by showing them those important trust signals. That’s powerful stuff!
There are two main aspects that define reputation marketing:
- Improve your reputation
To use reputation marketing effectively, you first need to build a reputation worth telling everyone about it. One way of doing this is getting more positive reviews and actively asking your customers to recommend you. Doing this on your own can be time consuming but there’s an easier way!
NiceJob’s reputation marketing software helps you automate the process of collecting and sharing customer reviews. NiceJob easily integrates with other software solutions like QualityDrivenSoftware, ZenMaid and Launch27 – making the process of collecting customer reviews a total breeze. And NiceJob’s customers love it:
- Market your reputation
This is where magic happens. Once you have lots of customer reviews, testimonials and positive mentions on social media—you can use those assets in your own marketing. Here are four ways you use your online reputation to market your cleaning business:
- Add customer reviews on your website
Have a dedicated reviews page on your website where your visitors can find your most recent reviews. Users are 74% more likely to contact a company with customer reviews on their website than a company that doesn’t display reviews.
You can also promote real-time reviews in a discreet corner of your website to capture the attention of website visitors when they’re looking at your offering.
2. Use reviews, ratings and testimonials in advertisements
Adding customer testimonials in your ads is engaging and effective. Showing potential customers the success stories of others who have hired your services before, makes your leads more likely to trust your business and they’ll feel more confident about hiring you.
This is an excellent example of Yelp using reputation marketing in their Facebook ads:
3. Promote your reviews on social media
A powerful way to do reputation marketing is to share customer reviews in your social media posts. This is a great example of how you can do that:
An even easier way to share reviews on social media is with NiceJob’s reputation marketing software. You can use their Stories tool which automatically shares customer reviews with photos to your social media.
4. Claim and set up listings on review sites
Besides Google My Business and Facebook, there are other dedicated review sites where potential customers search for cleaning companies, like: Angi, Home Advisor and Yelp.
This is important because 70% of consumers look at multiple business review sites when choosing a local business. So to strengthen your reputation, be sure to have a presence on as many of these third-party review sites as you’re able to keep track of.
As you can see, reputation marketing is a crucial strategy to implement if you want to differentiate your business in a competitive environment, such as the cleaning industry. Using the power of social proof you’ll be able to instill trust way before your potential customers even reach out to you, which will make them more confident in choosing you over the rest.
By executing these four tactics you’ll be able to make the most out of your reputation, take your cleaning business to the next level and make a splash in your local market.
