One of the most difficult things about starting a new business is getting people to pay attention to the fact that you’re on the market. This can be because of various reasons: your business can be new or novel or people simply have no idea that you exist. You don’t have to go the traditional big-bucks advertising route. A little creativity is all you need to promote your cleaning business.

If you think that for your business to be successful, you’ve got to have the same advertising budget as big restaurant chains or hire a promoter, think again! Here are some tips that can help promote your cleaning business.

1) Start promoting even before you open your doors – if you’ve decided to open a cleaning business and are knee deep setting up, set some time aside to tell our contacts that you’ll be opening a cleaning business. Tell your friends and relatives, they might have someone who they’d love to recommend to you. They even might want to take advantage your services! It can never hurt to get a good recommendation from someone you know.

Hand out flyers or printed business cards. This helps get the word spread that you’re opening doors soon. Post bills in your local community center or even your local gym. Anywhere where people frequently go is a great place to put up small ads. These might seem small, but if you just enumerate your services and give a number, you will open your business to a good amount of clients. Think of this part as your movie trailer-you’re testing ground and building hype for your business.

2) Continue promoting even after opening your doors – Having steady or new clients doesn’t mean that you should slack off with your promotional efforts. You must always try to lure new clients and keep them. If you do a great job, you should have no trouble keeping the ones you’ve already made. Ask your current clients for feedback-it will improve your business and keep your clients happy. Test new types of advertising and marketing that you think could help you get more customers.

At this point, don’t be afraid to stop methods that don’t work for you. If that ad that plays at your local radio station, ask yourself (and perhaps the station manager or whoever handles ads) why you think it’s not working. If it’s not making the waves that you hopedmy company, give yourself the leeway to pull the ad. This means that you can focus your efforts on your promotion efforts that really work.

3) On the other hand, never be afraid to explore – Remember that media is an ever changing world and that you may need to change tactics as the years go by. This comes as part of your company’s growth. For example, if you start as a part-time work-from-home business, flyers and word of mouth are definitely the way to go. The high growth potential of cleaning services may lead you to go from part-time to full-time sooner than you think! At this point, you’ll need to supplement your flyers and word of mouth with bigger, better ads.

4) Never underestimate the power of sales, discounts and promotions – A surefire way to drum business up is to have a sale or promotion. There are many ways to set up sales or discounts for your customers. You can always do the buy one, get one free tactic. For example, if you’ve cleaned their house 20 times in the last two months, why not throw in a free house cleaning. This will give your customers something to look forward to and ensure that you keep some sort of steady business, if only for that one free day. Why not give half-offs or percentage discounts on your fee on special occasions?

This is one way for you to not only attract new customers but keep old ones because you’re giving them something that they can benefit from. Not only do they get professionally cleaned houses or offices, they get something for it. You also gain a lot because this goes a long way towards ensuring customer loyalty-something that any business longs for.

Finally, 5) Don’t be afraid to shake things up. Don’t be afraid to rotate or add new promotions. Renew your ads once in a while. Change your business card or flyers. This will come with the changes that you’ll be making as the years go by-after all, why continue to advertise a home cleaning service when your company has grown to a full-time commercial cleaning service? You will know when it is time to change.