The most common mistake people starting power washing businesses make is not taking their marketing seriously. They assume that business will come to them from the limited reach out they do to their friends and other people they know in their town. After some time, they realize that this is a business like any other and business fundamentals matter.

A successful business usually has a killer product, sound marketing, and great distribution. The absence of any of the three can cripple a business. If you master sales and marketing, you can pretty much take your power washing business in whichever direction you choose.

Sales cure all business problems. As long as you have good cash flow, you can weather most of the business storms you will face as a power washing businessperson. Here are some of the effective marketing strategies you can apply today to land clients for your power washing business.

1.  Be the Vehicle of Marketing

People love giving their business to people they like. As a small business owner with a local power washing operation, your clients will mostly be dealing with you directly. Earning a bad reputation early on in your career in this age of online reviews can kill your power washing business before it even starts.

At a minimum, you should turn pro and actually learn to pressure wash well. People expect a certain standard when they pay money for a service. That standard will be much higher than what you would expect of yourself when you are cleaning your own property on a Sunday afternoon.

Luckily, you can learn how to pressure wash for cheap by watching instructional videos on YouTube. You can rent a pressure washer and clean your own property for a few days until you have the whole process down. You can also apprentice with a local pressure washing company by working for them for free.

2. Run PPC Ads Targeting Your Area

The beauty of advertising on the internet is that you have lots of options to target your advertising as much as you want. You can schedule ads to run at a specific time of day, to display for a particular gender and to run in only one particular town. There are so many targeting options and you can use these variables to specifically target the ideal customer you know is likely to give you a call if they see the ads.

3. Take Advantage of Local SEO

Search engines aim to serve the most relevant web pages to their customers. How many times have you done a general search and saw listings of stores near you in the organic search results? Google depends on Webmasters of local businesses to tell them where they are located and their operating hours. Not many local businesses know this. By deliberately optimizing your site to rank for local searches, you will be giving Google an incentive to show your power washing deals and packages in local searches.

4. Hand out Cards to Get Referrals

Referrals can be a pretty amazing source of new business. You don’t spend any advertising dollars getting the business and the prospect already trusts that you can do a good job.

If you do a good job and have a respectful relationship with the people who hire you, they won’t have any trouble recommending you to their friends and families especially when they are asked who cleaned their property so well.

5. Inspire Trust and Credibility

Don’t make the mistake most small business owners make of thinking small and so staying small. You want to run a professional operation with clean and well serviced equipment. If you can afford it, invest in new or relatively new pressure washing equipment and a decent clean truck. Good equipment gets the job done well and makes you look good when you pull up.