Winter is Coming: Find the Customers NOW Before They Hibernate

As summer winds down, orchards are picked clean, and the first leaves start to fall, your customers will begin to spend more time indoors. Fall and Winter are exactly why indoors was invented, after all.

Now is the time to market to them.

After an active indoor-outdoor season, dirt has been tracked into the house in concentrations it won’t see again for another year. A Fall cleaning of carpets and soft furnishings sets up a house to provide a winter of clean, healthy comfort, and not-incidentally makes Spring Cleaning much less of a chore.

Look at doing a marketing push after the kids have gone back to school and pitch it as properly setting up for the dark winter months, when everyone comes into more contact with carpets, drapes, sofas and the rest. Of course they want it to be clean!

There are many, many Fall Cleaning Lists online, and every one of them recommends having the carpets properly cleaned. Why not make up a list yourself and include it in your marketing materials? If customers find it useful it can hang around on the fridge or in the filing cabinet for years, remind them of you every time they see it.

We’ve gone through a number of the lists that are available online. If you’re truly hardcore, the list in the book Home Comforts approaches 100 items.

Somewhat less extreme is Martha Stewart’s sensible yet thorough 27-item list. Auditing a pantry is not something that would ever occur to me, but now that it has, it’s clear what a good idea it is.

Realsimple has a really simple list without Martha’s professional photography, but it is still a good basic indoor/outdoor list, and easier to stick on the fridge.

This one bills itself as the “Mother of all Fall cleaning lists” although it’s not a patch on Home Comforts.

Consider putting a list on the back of your flyer, checking off those services that you offer. If you have a strategic alliance with another service provider, team up and double the boxes you can tick off (and what you can charge).

Last modified: December 13, 2016