In order to sell anything, you need demand.
You can’t create demand, but you can channel it.
If you don’t have a market for your cleaning service offer, you don’t have a business.
One reason that your service offer might not be generating sales is that you’re in the wrong market.
It might be a great offer, but that doesn’t matter if your market is not the right one.
When picking a market for your cleaning business to operate in, you have to choose well.
You need to find a market that is in desperate need of your cleaning service.
You want to pick a “normal” market that’s growing at the same rate as the marketplace. An average rate.
For example, office cleaning is a marketplace in a large market of building owners and facilities managers.
In this article, we’re going to look at the four elements for choosing the right market for your cleaning business, based on Alex Hormozi’s $100m Offer framework.
4 Steps to choosing the RIGHT market for your business (cleaning service)
- Find the Pain
- Purchasing Power
- Easy to Target
- Is it Growing?
- Key Takeaways
Find the Pain
Pain can be anything that frustrates people about their lives.
A missed tenancy clean is painful for a letting agent.
Coffee stains on desks are painful for an office manager.
Dust when handing over new-build properties is painful for a site manager.
The degree of pain the customer is in will be proportional to the price you’re able to charge.
When customers hear your solution, they should be drawn to it and imagine what their life would look like without this pain.
If you can articulate this pain accurately in your service offer, customers will almost always choose your cleaning service.
How do you find your customers' biggest pains?
Ask them. And listen.
Here are 3 suggestions that I used in my cleaning business:
- Regularly surveying existing customers for feedback. Find out what they like, what they don’t like, and what needs to be improved. Use the feedback to upgrade your service and craft a better service offer for your market.
- Check the competition. To learn more about your ideal customers, look at competitors who are already serving them. Search Google with keywords of your service and take note of who ranks first. Read their reviews and the comments sections on social media. This will give you priceless insights into your ideal customers' wants and needs.
- Find where your ideal customers hang out and listen. More on this in the Easy to Target section.
Purchasing Power
This is an important point. Your ideal customers need to afford the cleaning service you’re offering them.
They need to have access to the amount of money needed to buy your cleaning service at your set price to make it worth your time.
When I started my cleaning business, I was targeting small, independent letting agents. The trouble was that they were operating on small cleaning budgets for tenancy cleaning. Budgets that were below the price I wanted to charge. It wasn’t a good fit.
Instead, I switched to targeting high-end letting agents in specific areas of North West London. They had high-value properties on their books, which meant bigger budgets for tenancy cleaning and a greater match for my pricing.
Easy to Target
If you don’t have a way to target your ideal customers, it’s going to be difficult to market your cleaning service to them.
You need to find markets that are easy to target.
Search for places where your ideal customers gather together.
To help you determine where your ideal customers gather, create a customer avatar.
A customer avatar will help you answer questions about your ideal customer including:
- How old they are?
- How much money do they make per year?
- What’s the biggest thing they stress over?
- What do they get excited about?
- Who do they follow on Facebook or Instagram?
- What podcasts do they listen to?
The better you understand your ideal customer, the easier it will be to create compelling service offers for them.
Social media is one of the most powerful ways to find your ideal customer.
You can search for Facebook groups, Discord channels, and Twitter lists where your ideal customers hang out.
Social media is also useful for learning about your ideal customers’ pains. Depending on which social media channel you’re using, you can learn a lot about your ideal customer, including age ranges, gender, locations, and refine your customer avatar.
Is it Growing?
Finding the right market for your cleaning business is crucial.
Identifying customers that have a lot of pain, purchasing power and are easy to target matters little if you’re not in the right market.
Growing markets make everything move forward faster.
Declining markets make efforts harder.
Growing a cleaning business is hard enough. Finding a good market for your cleaning business makes the process easier.
The goal is to find a [niche] within that market where customers are in pain, have buying power, and are easy to target.
As long as these three criteria are strong and the market isn’t shrinking, you’ve found a “normal market” and you’ll be in good shape.
If I was to start another cleaning business, I’d focus on providing cleaning services for the senior market. In the UK, there are currently 11 million people aged over 65. That’s 19% of the population. It’s estimated that in 10 years' time this will increase to 13 million people or 22% of the population. The market is growing.
A growing market requires infrastructure - more care homes and retirement properties. There’s an opportunity to provide a range of cleaning services tailored to this market alone, including builders' cleans, and commercial & domestic cleaning.
I'd rather become an A player in a B market where there is little competition because the market is unattractive.
— Matt Harris (@iam_mattharris) October 21, 2022
That's my aim with @TheGrowth_Lab
Commercial cleaning isn't sexy.
There aren't many commercial cleaning SMB consultants.
Even fewer of these are coach-led.
The question is, have you spent time identifying the market for your cleaning service?
Key Takeaways
To choose the right market for your cleaning business, you need to look at four elements:
- Your customer's pain
- Your customer's purchasing power
- A market where customers are easy to target
- A growing (or at least not shrinking) market
As my cleaning business began to grow, I made the mistake of jumping between different markets. I started in the rental market before moving to commercial property, and construction before jumping back to the rental market.
In hindsight, I should have stuck with the rental market and doubled down on my niche of high-end letting agents.
I learned that you have to stick with whatever you pick long enough to have trial and error. Failure is inevitable, and you will fail until you succeed.
However, you’ll fail much longer if you keep changing markets as I did, because you have to start from the beginning each time.
Once you’ve found a market for your cleaning service that has all four elements, it’s time to pick your niche.
Mine was high-end letting agents in North West London.
Read this post to find out how you can pick yours.