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In order to land new contracts, marketing is vital for the success and growth of your business. It establishes a presence among your target customer base and allows you to create brand authority, both of which are necessary for the longevity of your operations.
A Marketing Strategy is Vital
Whether you’re just starting your cleaning business or you’re trying to find the right leverage for your existing one, a good marketing strategy is mandatory.
This is because, without any way to spread the word about your business, especially online, you will struggle to compete with other area businesses. You’ll find that short-term success may be obtainable, but over time you’ll struggle to maintain that momentum.
With the online world at your fingertips and the instant gratification of easily accessible information, prospects often seek new services online through a Google Search or they request recommendations from friends and family on social media.
What You Need to Start
Simply put, start with a website.
If your business is not searchable on Google and doesn’t have a reliable and informative website, potential customers will lose trust in your business before they even interact with it.
Next, establish a presence on social media. We recommend securing a handle and profile on as many platforms as possible, though focus on being active on that platforms where you’re more likely to interact with your customers.
Website and SEO
A website doesn’t need to be overly complicated. It only needs to display your services, reasons someone would choose you over another cleaning service, and ways for them to easily get in touch with you.
What makes a website truly successful (besides a purposeful, easy-to-navigate design) is optimized SEO. Search engine optimization (or SEO) is vital to driving traffic to your site and generating authority through placement in a Google search.
SEO relies on a few things; brand authority (through professional and reliable content), targeted keywords, and the efficiency of your site. While this can be overwhelming at first glance, Google and many other platforms will do a free SEO check on your site and will recommend changes you can make to improve it.
You can also outsource your website design and SEO management so that your team can focus more on what you do best: provide great service.
Paid Advertisement
While paid advertisement might be difficult to manage at first and you may not have a large budget to start with, it will be what helps catapult your business into real growth.
Utilizing automation and keywords to strengthen your approach, you can maximize your paid advertisement efforts with minimal spending. The real trick with paid advertisement is time and testing.
Start smaller and work your way up in spend. Allow for time to pass for your efforts to gain traction and to build authority. Unlike with billboards and other physical ad placements (which are also beneficial depending on your region), digital ad spending doesn’t guarantee you a spot in front of the viewer until you’ve proven your relevancy through SEO and your bid.
Platforms like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn prioritize their user experience and thus try to display the most relevant content and ads to them. You’ll also have to reevaluate your ad creative and keywords over time as searching habits and engagement shift and change.
In Conclusion
In Conclusion, start small and build up your marketing strategy over time. Be aware you very rarely ever see instant results and what you’re working towards is much larger than landing a single contract.
Use marketing tools as a way to increase your professional look, reach more people, and communicate your value as a business.
About Our Guest(s):
Stacy Tennyson
Inside Sales Specialist - Janitorial Manager
Stacy Tennyson is one of our sales experts at Janitorial Manager, with a strong background in marketing, SEO, and business growth. We brought Stacy on because one of the first conversations she has with newer business leaders is how to get started with their marketing.
Stacy has owned her own cleaning business and is a rising voice in the jan-san space. We found her episode on the Business of Cleaning March ‘22 episode to be insightful and helpful. If you’d love to get in touch with Stacy to learn about growing your cleaning operations, you can connect to her on LinkedIn or reach out to her at stacy@jantitorialmanager.com.