Exterior & Pressure Cleaning
Marketing for exterior & pressure cleaning
Exterior cleaning lives or dies on route density. The jobs are small, the margin per hour is good, and the whole thing falls apart the moment your bookings are scattered across four towns. So the point of the advertising is not simply more enquiries. It is more enquiries inside a postcode you are already working in, at a value that justifies putting the trailer on the road.
In short
Marketing for exterior & pressure cleaning in the UK turns on three things that are specific to the trade. Ticket sizes are modest and stack quickly. Gutter clearing on a semi is £60 to £140. This is the rare local trade where paid social genuinely competes with search. The biggest source of wasted spend is machine and equipment buying, searches such as karcher k5 review and best pressure washer, which has to be negatived out before the budget means anything.
The economics that should drive the budget
Ticket sizes are modest and stack quickly. Gutter clearing on a semi is £60 to £140. A driveway or patio wash is £180 to £450 depending on area and whether it is resanded and sealed afterwards. Conservatory roofs sit around £80 to £200. The bigger money is in softwash: a roof treated for moss and algae is £400 to £1,400, and render cleaning on a detached house is £500 to £2,000. Commercial and managed-site work, cladding, car parks and communal paths, is usually quoted at a day rate of £400 to £900 for a two-man team.
Consumables are five to fifteen per cent of a domestic job, so gross margin sits at fifty-five to seventy per cent before you count travel, and travel is the number that decides whether the business works. An hour each way on a £150 gutter job removes most of the profit, which is why radius is a margin control rather than a settings decision. Close rates are high, roughly forty to sixty per cent on quoted work, because the customer can see the problem from the pavement and the sum is small enough to decide without a family conference.
On a £280 average at sixty per cent, each job produces about £168 of gross profit, and at a one-in-two close rate an enquiry is worth £70 to £100. A cost per enquiry between £12 and £35 leaves a solid business, but only inside a tight radius. Widen the map to chase volume and the same cost per enquiry quietly stops being profitable, because you have bought the lead and given the margin to the fuel.
Seasonality
The year has one enormous peak. From March to June the sun comes out, people look at the front of the house for the first time since October, and the winter's algae is suddenly unbearable. That quarter can carry half the annual domestic revenue. A second, smaller wave arrives from September to November as gutters fill and households prepare for the wet season. Rain destroys capacity in a way that budgets have to respect, because a washed-out week means the same crews and no income, and spend that continues regardless simply buys enquiries you cannot service.
December to February is the trough, and softwash is the answer to it. Biocide treatments work in cold conditions where high-pressure work is impractical, roofs and render can be treated through the winter, and commercial sites are often easier to access when they are quiet. Firms that pivot the messaging rather than switching the account off enter March with a diary already half full, which is worth more than any spring bidding war.
What we configure
- Radius set on route economics, typically far tighter than instinct
- Machine, chemical and franchise terms excluded before the spring peak
- Photo-based quoting offered on the landing page for fast turnaround
- Separate softwash campaign protected from cheaper gutter clicks
- Weather-responsive budget rules so washed-out weeks do not overspend
- Google Business Profile stocked with before and after pairs by street
- An annual reminder list built from every completed job with the date
What people actually search, and what it is worth
| Intent | Typical search | Value | How we handle it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Surface-specific domestic | driveway cleaning [town], patio pressure washing near me, block paving cleaned and resanded, decking cleaning | Volume driver, spring-weighted | Ad groups by surface with a stated price band per square metre range, so the enquiry arrives already expecting a realistic figure. Radius held deliberately tight even when volume looks tempting. |
| Roof and render softwash | roof cleaning [town], render cleaning cost, remove green algae from render, roof moss removal | Highest value, best margin | Its own campaign and the one worth defending in the auction. The landing page has to address damage risk directly, because this buyer has read that jet washing a roof or render is a disaster and needs to hear the difference explained. |
| Gutters and access work | gutter cleaning [town], gutter vacuum service, conservatory roof cleaning, fascia and soffit cleaning | Low value, high repeat | Bid modestly and use it as route filler and as an entry product. A gutter clear is the cheapest way to get onto a property, and a large share of roof and render work is sold from a ladder on a gutter job. |
| Commercial and managed sites | commercial pressure washing, car park cleaning contractor, cladding cleaning, block management exterior cleaning | Day rate, schedulable | Business hours campaign with a wider radius and a page about method statements, working at height and out-of-hours access. This work smooths the winter and justifies the equipment. |
Where the budget leaks
Every sector attracts searches that can never become a customer. These are the ones specific to exterior & pressure cleaning, and they go into the negative keyword list before launch rather than after the first invoice.
| Category | Example searches | Why it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Machine and equipment buying | karcher k5 review, best pressure washer, petrol jet wash for sale, surface cleaner attachment, hot water pressure washer price | Consumer and trade shoppers researching kit. It is one of the largest waste categories in this sector and it swells every spring alongside your genuine demand. |
| Chemicals and DIY method | how to remove moss from a driveway, homemade patio cleaner, sodium hypochlorite ratio, bleach on block paving, moss killer | People planning a Saturday with a borrowed machine. They are reading, not booking, and the searches look deceptively close to your service terms. |
| Hire and adjacent trades | jet wash hire, pressure washer rental, window cleaning round for sale, car valeting near me, gutter repair and replacement | Hire counters, round buyers and unrelated services sharing your vocabulary. Gutter repair in particular arrives constantly and is a different trade entirely. |
| Franchise, training and employment | pressure washing business start up, exterior cleaning franchise, softwash training course, window cleaner jobs | Aspiring operators and competitors. It converts at nothing and it teaches automated bidding to chase the wrong audience if it is allowed to accumulate. |
Want this checked against your own numbers?Two minutes on the phone is usually enough to say whether the arithmetic works for a exterior & pressure cleaning business your size.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppWhat the buyer is actually checking
The dominant fear is damage, not cost. Anyone researching this work has seen photographs of render blasted off a wall, pointing washed out of brickwork, block paving stripped of its jointing sand, or roof tiles broken by somebody who put a lance where a biocide should have gone. The firm that explains the difference between pressure washing and softwashing, and states plainly which surfaces get which treatment, has answered the question that decides most enquiries before a price is ever mentioned.
After that they want speed and certainty. A large proportion of enquiries now arrive as a photograph sent by message with an implicit request for a number, and the firm that replies with a fixed price within a couple of hours usually wins without a site visit. Insurance for working at height, and evidence of tidy work on properties that resemble their own, do the rest. Before and after photographs are not marketing decoration in this trade, they are the specification.
Which channel wins here
This is the rare local trade where paid social genuinely competes with search. A before and after image of a blackened driveway or a green render wall is inherently arresting on a phone, the purchase sits close to impulse, and a tightly geofenced campaign can produce enquiries at a lower cost than the search auction for driveway and render work. It works because the customer did not know they wanted it until they saw what it should look like.
Search still owns the problem-triggered half. Gutter clearing, roof moss and conservatory roofs are things people go looking for on the day they notice them, and the map pack takes a large share of those clicks, so a well-stocked Google Business Profile is essential rather than optional. Local organic rankings are achievable within a modest radius because the competition is fragmented and mostly neglects its websites. The thing to avoid is a broad automated campaign with no geographic discipline: it will happily buy you a £90 gutter job forty minutes away and report it as a cheap conversion.
Why keeping them matters more than winning them
Everything in this sector rebooks, and almost nobody asks. Gutters are a genuine annual. A driveway cleaned this spring wants doing again in eighteen months to three years depending on aspect and tree cover. Roof and render treatments last longer but have a definable expiry. A simple dated list of every job, with the surface and the month, mailed or messaged at the right interval, produces a stream of work at effectively zero acquisition cost and it is the single most valuable asset an exterior cleaning firm owns.
Clustering is the second lever, and it is unusually powerful here because the work is performed in public. A driveway transformed on a residential street is an advertisement watched by everybody who walks past, and the neighbours have the same housing stock, the same aspect and the same problem. Knocking or leafleting the nearest dozen houses while the kit is still out converts at rates that no digital channel matches, and the travel cost has already been absorbed.
Commercial and block management accounts finish the picture. They are scheduled, they are invoiced, they fill the weeks when domestic demand disappears, and they let a firm keep good staff through a winter instead of rebuilding a team every March. The day rate is less exciting than a good softwash job; the predictability is worth more.
Questions from exterior & pressure cleaning
Why does my exterior cleaning advertising stop being profitable when I grow?
Almost always because the radius grew with it. At a £280 average job, an extra hour of round-trip travel eats most of the gross profit, so leads from the edge of a wide map are worth far less than identical leads nearby. Tighten the targeting, measure profit per booked day rather than cost per lead, and expand by adding density, not distance.
Does Facebook advertising really work for pressure washing?
Better than for most trades, yes. The before and after imagery is genuinely persuasive, the price point is low enough for an impulse decision, and the customer often did not know the service existed at that quality. It suits driveway and render work particularly. Search still wins for gutters and roof moss, where the customer has already spotted a problem and gone looking.
How do I sell softwash to people who ask for a jet wash?
By explaining the damage risk before they ask about price. Most customers use the phrase pressure washing to mean cleaning, and have no idea that high pressure on render, roof tiles or old pointing causes expensive harm. A clear page describing which surfaces need a low-pressure biocide treatment converts enquiries upwards and positions you against whoever turns up with a lance and enthusiasm.
What should I do in January and February?
Change the offer instead of stopping. Softwash biocide treatment works in cold weather where high-pressure cleaning does not, so roof and render campaigns can run through winter, and commercial sites are frequently easier to access when they are quiet. It also means March arrives with bookings already in the diary rather than with a bidding war against every operator who went dark in November.
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Tell us your average job value and the area you cover. Two minutes is usually enough to say whether this is worth doing and what it would realistically produce.