Cleaning contractors should never underestimate the power and potential of an active blogging program to help market their services and their company.
As we have mentioned in an earlier blog posting on this site, blogs are nothing new. They have been around for more than 25 years. But because the medium is so old, several studies have been conducted over the years evaluating its marketing potential. Among their findings are the following:
• Eighty-one percent of U.S. online consumers say they trust information and advice found in credible blogs.
• Companies that have an ongoing blogging program in place have 97 percent more inbound links. An inbound link is a link coming from another site to your site. In most cases, this means content from your site has been picked up by a search engine. The web visitor clicks on the link on the search engine, which takes the visitor to your site.
• More than 90 percent of companies that regularly blog report they have acquired at least one customer from their blog postings.
• B2B marketers, which would include cleaning contractors who use blogs, generate 67 percent more leads than those B2B marketers that do not use blogs.
• When posting updates to a website, the first thing to get indexed by the search engines is content, typically in the form of a blog.
• It takes between 25 and 50 blog postings for the blogs to start increasing traffic to your site.
• Blogs do not always have to be words. The average person watches 182 online videos per month. The same content presented in a written blog can also be used in a video. More than 80 percent of online marketers use video content to help market their services.
• More than half of U.S. small businesses use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. What they often do is post a blog on their website and then post links back to the blog on various social media sites.
• Sixty percent of U.S. consumers report they feel more positive about a company after reading a blog that helps them learn something of value.
• Articles with images get more than 90 percent more views. (Be sure and use the ALT text function if posting images on a blog to increase search engine optimization).
• Smaller companies with less than ten employees typically allocate nearly half of their marketing budget into blogs and videos.
This information comes from various sources all deemed credible. Most of the statistics are less than five years old. However, no matter where they came from or how old they are, the bottom line about blogging and web content is that it is one of the most effective marketing tools cleaning contractors have to promote their businesses.
For more information on ways to build your contract cleaning business, contact Ron at contact@seguraassociates.com
