How to market a cleaning business

Market a street, not a city

The profit in cleaning comes from short drives between long visits. As the margin breakdown shows, drive time is paid time and mileage is a real cost, so a new client two streets from an existing one is worth more than the same client twenty miles away at the same price.

Notice what is missing: paid ads aimed at a whole metro area. They can work later, once you know your cost per recurring client. Early on they mostly buy you clients in the wrong places.

Referrals: the channel you already own

A happy recurring client knows their neighbours, their colleagues and their parents. Ask directly, after a visit that went well, for one name — not “if you know anyone”. Offer something simple for a referral that becomes a recurring client, and say so on the invoice where they will see it.

Property managers and letting agents are referral sources too, with a different shape: they send move-out cleans and turnovers on a schedule, and they remember the cleaner who sends photos without being asked.

Google Business Profile for a cleaning company

A cleaning company visits its customers, so Google treats it as a service-area business: if customers do not come to your address, remove it and list your service area instead. Google allows up to 20 service areas, about 2 hours of driving from where the business is based.

Google Business Profile Help, read 2026-10-18

List the areas you actually want to work, not every town in range. Fill in the services in the words customers use — house cleaning, deep cleaning, move-out cleaning, office cleaning — and add photos of real work. Your business name on the profile should be the name you trade under; the naming guide covers picking one that works there.

Asking for reviews without breaking the rules

Reviews sell cleaning better than any advert, and the rules on them tightened. The FTC’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule bans no incentives conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment, and no fake reviews.

Federal Trade Commission, read 2026-10-18

Never offer a discount for a five-star review, never write reviews for yourself, and never pressure a client to change a bad one. The review platforms set their own rules on incentives too, so the safest habit is to ask every client the same way and accept what they write.

Ask the day after a visit, with a direct link, once. Reply to every review — a calm reply to a bad one tells the next reader more about you than ten good ones.

Door hangers, Nextdoor and the street you are on

The cheapest density marketing is the street outside your current client’s door. A door hanger that says “we clean number 14 every other Tuesday” and offers the same slot works because it is specific and because the neighbour can ask number 14. Post in neighbourhood groups in the same spirit: a real slot on a real street.

Put a clear starting price on everything you hand out. It filters out enquiries that were never going to book, which saves you an evening of quoting; work it out with the house cleaning price calculator.

Marketing to commercial clients

Commercial cleaning is not marketed, it is sold: a list of buildings, a contact at each, and a reason to call at contract renewal. The guide to getting cleaning contracts covers that list, and public buildings are posted openly on the free janitorial bidding websites. What marketing does for commercial work is make you look like a company when the facilities manager checks you out: a profile, reviews, a proper quote and an insurance certificate on request.

A 30-day plan

Print this and tick it off. Then keep the two channels that brought in recurring clients.