Having a clear content strategy in place when it comes to creating content for your cleaning company is key to success.
Without a strategy, your content may seem sporadic, and you won’t be able to maximise opportunities for engagement with your target audience.
With this in mind, we thought we’d share five simple steps to creating the perfect content strategy for your cleaning company.
Creating a Content Strategy for your Cleaning Company
Let’s set the scene. You’re running a small cleaning company that has seen some success so far, but you want to use your online content to spread the word about the services you provide. You also want to begin building an online community – one filled with potential target customers and those who will be willing to engage with what you have to say.
You want to start by creating some content for platforms like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, and you have plenty of ideas. The thing that will be most important now is refining those ideas to determine exactly the type of content you want to put out there and why.
That’s where our first step of the content strategy process comes in…
Step 1 – Determining Purpose
Before you go any further, you need to think about why you want to create this content. Are you looking to provide content that informs? Do you want to share your advice and top tips? Do you want your content to entertain?
As a cleaning company, you’ll likely want to do a mixture of all three. You’ll want to inform potential customers about your products and services, so they understand the value of your business, but you’ll also want to give your content added value by providing your potential customers with advice only you can give.
Your overarching purpose, then, is to provide your potential customers with content that will directly benefit them in some way. Your cleaning services will provide a solution to a problem and potentially and any top tips or advice related to cleaning that you share may improve their day to day lives.
This purpose is something you should keep in mind when creating content. If you deviate from your purpose, you’ll find that your content loses direction and may not be received as well by potential customers.
To find your unique purpose as a cleaning business, write down all the ways in which your service and your content will benefit your potential customers and use this as inspiration to determine your purpose.
Step 2 -Defining your Audience
The most important part of content creation is your audience. Without having them on side, your content will tumbleweed its way into the endless abyss called the internet, never to be seen again.
It’s vital that your content resonates with your target audience, encouraging them to engage (and in some cases, convert!) as much as possible.
To make this possible, though, you need to have a pretty fixed idea of who your audience actually is. Consider things like their age, their hobbies, their wants and needs. How can you create content that appeals to them directly? How can you tap into their frustrations? How do you get on their level?
There’s only one answer: research.
Spend some time researching your target audience. How do they engage with one another? What type of content do they like and share? Pick up on any patterns you notice and include these in your content strategy. This way, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of the kind of content your target audience wants to consume, allowing you to mirror this in your own content.
By determining this and applying it to every part of your content strategy, you’ll ensure that your content is focused and speaking to the right people, rather than shouting into the, you guessed it, internet abyss.
Step 3 – Coming up with Content Themes
Once you’ve determined who your audience is, it’s time to start thinking about the type of content you want to be posting. Now, this may change on a regular basis. One day you might want to post something simple on social media, and the next, you may want to publish an in-depth ‘how-to’ guide on your business blog page. This is absolutely fine and will work wonders to ensure your content remains engaging and varied.
So, while the type of content you post may change, it’s essential that the content themes you refer back to for inspiration remain consistent.
To determine your content themes, consider what your brand is passionate about, as well as what the wants and needs of your audience are. How can you combine the two?
Let’s look at an example:
Your cleaning company is passionate about giving your customers peace of mind that their home is completely clean and hygienic, free from harmful germs.
Your target audience may be looking for advice or top tips on how to deep clean their carpets to ensure their home is as hygienic as possible.
Obviously, there’s some common ground here, so this could be one of your content themes that make up your content strategy. The trick here is to consider your passions, consider their wants and needs and use anything where the end goal is the same for both parties as a content theme. This way, you’ll be able to showcase your passions as a company without wasting time creating content that your target audience doesn’t want to consume.
Step 4 – Getting your Content out There
Now that the key components of your actual content have been determined, it’s time to think about how you’re going to consistently get your content in front of the right people.
Using your audience research, consider where and when you want to post your content. Remember, if your target audience doesn’t use LinkedIn, there’s not much point in posting your content there! Also consider the optimum times of day to post for your target audience. Similarly, if they don’t have time to check their social media until the evening, there isn’t much point in posting content at 8am!
Once you’ve determined where and when to post, it’s vital that you do this regularly. SO you don’t have to constantly remember to post, it’s worth utilising scheduling tools like Loomly or Facebook Creator Studio to do this for you. Simply schedule your posts and they’ll appear at the time and in the place specified.
While this is great, it’s not wise to just crack on and forget about it! Instead, make time in your day to check your social media platforms and engage with your target audience. Like and comment on their posts, start conversations, ask questions. This is one of the best ways to cultivate engagement and build trust between your potential customers and your business. Even just ten minutes a day can make a huge difference – it really does ensure your content gets seen by all the right people.
Step 5 – Analysis
The bulk of the hard work is done. You know who your audience is, and you’ve got relevant content appearing in all the right places. Your audience is engaging, and you’re working on building that online community you wanted.
The fifth and final step in your content strategy should therefore be analysis. Regularly check in with your social media analytics tools. These will tell you what your target audience is loving, and what they’re not keen on, allowing you to make appropriate changes to future content.
The best content strategies are ever-evolving. They move and grow with the wants and needs of your target audience and are regularly updated to ensure they remain as relevant as possible.
By implementing these five steps, you’ll have a complete content strategy to guide your content creation. You’ll be able to refer back to it for content inspiration, and it’ll help to keep your content focused and interesting for your target audience.
Give it a go!
Looking for further support with implementing your new content strategy? Let us know.
We have a range of flexible, affordable content creation packages available, designed to support cleaning companies like yours.
