Learnings that taught me more than my Marketing Masters

Hi,

When I moved to Australia almost five years ago, it was a blank jump into the unknown: my entire family came on my student visa, I had limited working rights, I had to study for my Marketing and Innovation Management Master, I didn’t have any local work experience, and my English was quite bad (not that it’s perfect now, though :).

Finding a job in these circumstances took really hard work. So my husband and I did the only thing we could do without any employer hiring us — we started working as cleaners.

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These three years of our cleaning business were an enormously rewarding experience. I might have learned more about business and marketing than during the Marketing study I was doing at the time. That job required significant marketing skills; I almost needed to become a Marketing unicorn.

So, here are the most valuable marketing and business lessons I picked up from my cleaning business:

3. Nothing beats a happy client’s recommendation

We started with zero knowledge about the cleaning business, so we approached it from the only perspective available: what would I like to have if I were the client who needed a good home cleaning or a vacate (end-of-lease cleaning)? So, we cleaned thoroughly, used the checklists and worked until we were happy with the results, as it was our home.

That business mindset resulted in numerous happy clients, keen on recommending us to their friends.

Sure, we made that extremely easy and used email marketing to ask for reviews on Gumtree, our Facebook page, and our website. Two years after we closed the business, I’m still receiving emails and calls from people asking for our cleaning services!

2. Price is a vital component of your marketing mix.

When you price your product or service, it’s not only essential to calculate all your costs and profit to reach a viable price. You need to keep in mind the perceived value of your product.

What is perceived value? It is not how much it costs but how much your potential customer is willing to pay.

A brand communicates a set of expectations associated with its products or services. If those matches match the customers’ perceived value of those products or services, you’ll fuel your brand’s growth.

Despite my marketing knowledge, we were making a mistake by providing too low prices and quotes for our services in an attempt to make sure we would get a job in a very competitive environment. That way, we ended up underpricing our services and dealing with people whose only criteria was the price, not the quality of the job.

3. Do not focus (only) on paid advertising.

When it comes to local business, the community is everything. If you build your community and use every opportunity to promote your offer, you can spend less on paid advertising to grow your local business.

We used organic search on our website, Facebook and Instagram page posts, and we were on all local online directories. We also advertised in the local Facebook groups Marketplace and Gumtree.

Although I’m a big fan of digital marketing and prefer its transparency (you get heaps of data, and you know what and why you’re spending), sometimes you need to consider offline marketing, and you might be surprised. For example, magnetic business cards for the fridge worked perfectly for our small business.

To summarize, knowing your ideal customers, their profiles, and their habits, and crafting your marketing approach based on this data, is the most critical part of a marketing strategy for your cleaning business (or any local business). And if I have to put it simply:

Do not overpromise, but do overdeliver with your product or service. Simple as that.

If you have any small or local businesses, I’d like to hear your most valuable marketing lessons, as they can be invaluable for any entrepreneur or business owner who has just started their business journey.