Inbound Marketing with Social Media

Finding new ways to market your business with out breaking the bank is one goal almost every small business owner wants to find.

During this month I plan to give you some suggestions, links to resources and hard facts to try and help you reach this goal.

Social Media is the new way to reach old and potentially new customers. Inbound Marketing is the future of small business. Outbound marketing may become all but extinct in the next 10 years. It is necessary to have more than a web site these days and to try and find customers via direct mail, e-mail and other media campaigns. Customers are tuning out and avoiding traditional methods business use to use to sell their products and services. New prospects want to find you when they need you, not you find them and interupt their day. They want real value and information even before they are willing to contact you about a service you could provide for them.

As we know most web surfers will make a decision to stay on your site in less than 3 seconds and many web analyst’s are saying that it has moved down now to less than 2 seconds.

So how can you make your web site be the one a service surfer will find and then stop and take a look at?
I will give you a list of 5 key elements here and then elaborate a little for you under the list.

1. Quality information above the fold and on the left 1/3 of the web page.
2. An obvious offer and call to action.
3. Examples of how to solve their problems (the reason they have searched)
4. Include visuals (especially video)
5. Ways to continue to be educated or engage if they want too.

With #1, it must be immediately clear to the viewer that they have found a site that matched their search no mater what it was; example seeing a house being washed for house washing, a painter painting a room for a paint company, etc.

Your business name that corresponds with the work you do: Bill’s Pressure Washing and House Cleaning. You can even use multiple names and have multiple sites if your work is strongly divided, such as All Kitchen Hood Cleaning and Bill’s Pressure Washing. You can still use one phone, just have two separate numbers that are forwarded to a single phone, most phones now will let you know where the number was forwarded from so you will know how to answer the call.

Or you may need to have multiple landing pages added to your web site, designed toward each part of work that you cover. It no longer smart to have just one main page of your web site listing everything you do. You must have that plus a page for your deck cleaning and repair, roof washing and gutter cleaning, house washing, concrete cleaning, Christmas light decorating... any job you do can have its own page which in turn can all link back to one contact entry page.

And with so many new searchers using their phones, iPads and other smaller screen devices you will need to revise your pages to give those viewers information in the way they will see it, only the left top 1/3 of the page.

Ok on to point #2. Now that your surfer has stopped you need to grab them with an offer and call to action. Do you offer same day free estimates? Free gutter cleaning with new roof cleaning? 20 sq ft free concrete cleaning with each 100 ft cleaned?

What ever the offer is, make it stand out, be clear and then have an obvious button to click on for them to take action with. I could write a complete blog just about how to do this, and I will, but for now just know this is what needs to happen to get the contact.

Point #3, to be able to give examples of how you can solve their problem, you first need to know what that problem is! This is where creating pages within your web site with Meta tags and key words to specific words and long tail phrases people to search are become very important. You want some one that searches for “lowest priced house washing in Fulton county” to find your page on house washing, not to be taken to someone else’s page or even to your web site to a page about deck washing or roof cleaning, even though you may do all three, that surfer will have clicked off your site before you can blink. I will expand on this in a future blog post.

#4 - visuals. Visuals are becoming more and more important to surfers; they don’t want to have to read everything they want to know, they want to see it. Pictures tell the story many times much easier and faster than words can. The brain can process pictures over 10 times faster than when reading information that the picture is showing. For example:

These Before and After photos of removing rust from a concrete patio is understood much faster than reading the statements. “We can clean your concrete patio, walk way or drive way from rust, dirt, oil, and tire marks.” or “We can remove rust caused by patio furniture, so on and so forth.” Not that you should not still make the statement, but understand that people scan information, especially text and photos catch the eye. Videos are even better. You can improve the time spent on your site tremendously, sometimes by more than 20% with video. For example if your average page view is currently 6 seconds and you add even one 1 minute video, when it is watched you have increased your view time over 10%. Have multiple videos available that are shorter like 20-30 seconds and you will increase the number of videos a single person will be willing to watch and you can reach view rates of 20-40% higher than your starting 6% rate. Be sure to state near the video how long each one is to increase the chance of even the first view. People will not click on videos they feel are too evolved or will abandon one once it starts if it is moving too slowly or does not start to answer their problem or question.

Lastly give your surfer the option to learn more and engage with you in the future. Offer them newsletters, future discounts if they leave you their email, links to other information they may want to learn about, etc. These are opportunities to be able to contact these people in the future even if they did not click over and fill out your free estimate or contact form. They may just be price shopping and would like the opportunity to try you later if you sent them a discount offer and would be willing to just leave you their email address but not their name, so don’t require it.

I know this has been a little long but I hope you will come back and view the follow up posts that we will have. To be sure you are included, you can join our e-mail list by going to our web site www.soapwarehouse.biz then you will receive newsletters or you can go and like our Facebook page's or subscribe to this blog and you will know when new posts are added. You can even follow us on Twitter.
Thanks for reading.

National Cleaning Expo Events

The National Cleaning Expo’s are events for the Pressure Washing Industry that are held across the country. Since their beginning in 2008 these events and round table discussions have increased in size and popularity in bringing contractors together to discuss their business, meet with suppliers, to improve networking and to improve the industry as a whole.


The next few events this year will be on July 30th and 31st in Tampa, FL being held at the Crown Plaza Westshore, located at 5303 West Kennedy Boulevard, Tampa, Florida 33609. And then in September on the 29th and 30th in Charleston, SC held at the Embassy Suites Hotel Airport/Convention Center, 5055 International Blvd, North Charleston SC 29418, immediately following the CETA show that ends on the 28th. Contractors are not normally allowed to attend the CETA show since it is a manufactures exhibit. But this year contractors are being invited to view the CETA show the last day, on the 28th for a small fee of $25-$45 depending on how soon you register, so plan to come a day early to the National Cleaning Expo and take advantage of this great opportunity. To visit the CETA web site go here http://www.ceta.org/ or to register to attend on the 28th go here http://www.ceta.org/documents/PC2010_industrial_users_reg.pdf to print and fill out their form.


Information for the National Cleaning Expo events can be found at http://nationalcleaningexpo.com/. Every event is different and pricing changes for each location depending on venue and speakers. Some events are free or have industry organizations that come and put on their own additional classes that enhance the NCE events them selves. For instance the RCIA (Roof Cleaning Institute of America) will be sponsoring a free social at 6 pm on July 29th as a prelim to the start of the show on Friday. And the PWNA (Power Washers of North America) is hosting a Pressure Washing Boot Camp and classes during the NCE, $99.00 for members with the following subjects and speakers: Fleet Washing- Eric Clark BOD (PWNA Instructor) and Wood Restoration- Mike Hilborn ED (PWNA Instructor).

There will also be other classes costing $59 each with special speakers such as Tony Shelton-Residential Coil cleaning “are you missing $$$$” 1.5 hours, Mike Kriesle – SEO “Getting the Phone to ring” 1.5 Hours, and Mark Belyan- (property Manager) “How to get my business?” 1.5 Hours.


The main show of this National Cleaning Expo will include for free the following speakers; Daryl Mirza- “Taking your business from one to four hundred employees!!!”, Mike Hilborn- Getting to the next level. “Implement systems”, Ron Musgraves- Trouble getting in the door? “Selling Commercial property managers advance Techniques”, A.C. Lockyer- Popcorn Marketing. “Residential Marketing for the Overwelmed”, Joe Crowder- Interior Floors cleaning instruction “Work all year round”, Michael Tessaro- “Are you making money in your business? Learn how to analyze your bottom line” and Chris Tucker – “Talking about Roof Cleaning Today”.


Organizations, distributors and suppliers also come to these events to find members, show their products and sell products at special promotional prices to the attendees. There are also fun and games for the attendees with prizes given way, product demos and presentations put on by the exhibitors as well as door prizes and the main event prize of a complete washing “skid outfit” to be given away at both of these events.


Soap Warehouse http://www.soapwarehouse.biz/ will be a sponsor at these events with $250 prize certificates, bucket games prizes, products being demoed and monetary support being given to the National Cleaning Expo organizers to help further these events and the pressure washing industry. If you attend please check out our brochure with our event special offers for attendees.

The complete speaker line up for the NCE Event in September has not been finalized but may include many that will be at the Tampa July event.



Keep checking the NCE web site http://nationalcleaningexpo.com/ for updates. And remember you need not be a member of any organization to attend a National Cleaning Expo event or round table, just be engaged in business activities related to the pressure washing or mobile cleaning businesses such as; pressure washing, fleet washing, exterior maintenance, commercial or residential cleaning, kitchen exhaust cleaning, flat work, carpet cleaning, etc. Please support your industry.

Clean Across America. How you can help.

This year the dates for the campaign are July 24 -31. And as stated on their web site:

"Clean Across America is a volunteer effort that started with one local contractor in 2000. With growing support from organizations like the Power Washers of North America and the Take Pride In America Foundation, CAA has grown into a national effort with support from pressure washing contractors across the nation!"

Over the years Clean Across America has donated over $250,000 worth of services of time and chemicals.

Soap Warehouse has wanted to participate in the worst way but besides just sending in a donation, which we have in the past, we would like one of our customers to donate their time so we could donated the chemicals. But so far in the last three years no one as stepped up and volunteered. So I hope with this post and more awareness that we can find at least one of our very many customers that would be willing to do some project no matter how small for this great cause. We understand that the majority of our clients are fleet washers and truck wash operators that don't do any kind of exterior washing, but all we can do is ask, to see if even one among the less then 20% of our customers, that we might find someone.

If you would like more information please visit their site Clean Across America.

To fill out and participate please get a form at Clean Across America, but if you are also a PWNA member and want to participate there is a different form to fill out you can find here; PWNA form.

"The individual contractors select which projects each wants to get involved with. Some contractors prefer large, highly visible projects requiring lots of hours to complete but most participants opt for projects that can be completed in a single day." Many drive across the country as was the case when some of the monuments in Washington DC where cleaned a few years ago, but you can chose something right in your local town or community.

Ideas would be; to clean the side walks of the town square, clean a historic building, clean a shelter weather for human or animal, or a food bank. Any thing that would be a benefit to the community at large is a worth while project.

Read the Cleaner Times article about the PWNA's Clean Across America campaign project here!

You can also find videos of past projects at the CCA site as well. You too would be able to contact local media; newspaper, radio and television a like to ask them to cover your donation work, giving you more than enough publicity to pay you for your efforts. Plus if you contact us and you get your chemicals for free you get even more value for the time that you volunteer.

I hope to hear from someone in the coming few weeks so Soap Warehouse can play a larger role in this worth while effort to give back to America the Beautiful and have a Happy 4th of July!