Take a look at any of the biggest names in your industry, and you can almost guarantee that they started out where you are right now and that they used social media – probably alongside other tools – in order to grow and to become something bigger.

Well good news: social media is indeed a highly powerful tool for building a massive audience and connecting with that audience in a way that many brands and companies never will but before you can start posting media and content, you first need a plan.

We’re going to look not only at how you can go about creating a blueprint based on other highly  successful sites but also how to make sure that you tailor that strategy to suit your brand, your mission statement and your audience. The plan is the single most important part of your entire campaign. So, get ready and let’s do this!

Goals and Objectives
The first thing to do is to identify what the goal of your social media plan is. Just like a car journey you wouldn’t set off on a journey and then wonder where you are going so ask yourself what a successful social media campaign means for your business.

Maybe you’re just trying to make lots of sales quickly?

Maybe you want to establish yourself as an authority within a small sphere of influence?

Or maybe you want to reach a massive audience and be considered a thought leader within the carpet cleaning niche.

Whatever the case, this is going to subtly alter the way you go about things. Likewise, you should also look at your budget, you should look at your timeframe and you should look at the number of hours you can commit to this plan.

If you can build a whole social media department in-house as part of your business then great but in reality you’re only likely to be posting  one or two status updates a day maximum, or more likely just 3 or 4 times a week, then be honest about this fact and build that into your plan. It’s always better to have a moderate plan and to stick to it than it is to have a highly ambitious plan but then give up on day one!

Branding

The next thing you need to think about is your branding and I’m going to be brutal with you now: there’s a very strong chance that your site and business needs a complete rebrand. Sorry!
The fact of the matter is that your social media success is going to hinge massively on your branding. If your branding is bad, then you won’t be able to win over your followers and visitors.

The whole point of your social media is to create positive interactions with an audience so that you build their trust and they consider buying from you in future. If you post regularly and with high quality content but your page has an ugly logo or no real branding to speak of, then you are actually going to repel your visitors. A strong brand will instil trust and authority right away.

People should look at your logo and instantly know what your site or channel is all about and whether or not they’re likely to like it. At the same time, they should see your branding and they should instantly feel that yours is a professional outfit they can trust to produce high quality carpet cleaning work.

That’s why you should hire someone to create a logo for you and then make sure that you use this consistently across all your marketing channels and that this helps to create more synergy between your various accounts.

Target Audience
Your branding should be directly influenced by your target audience.

What do I mean by this? Essentially, every business type of every company in the world has a target audience, and carpet cleaning is no different. Dependent on where you live, you will likely have a target customer profile; those customers who love you and actually want to pay you top rates for your services.

Whoever your target audience is, knowing and understanding this audience is critical to your success. Ultimately, if you try and create messages and branding that is appealing to everyone, then it will unintentionally end up appealing directly to no one.

It’s always better is to go after a small segment of the marketplace and appeal directly to them than to try and appeal to everyone but come across as vague.

We talk a lot about creating target customer profiles at The Carpet Cleaning College and in our various courses so we won’t go into it any more here.

A Personal Brand
Something that more and more businesses should consider is using a personal brand and this is even more important when considering such an invasive service like carpet cleaning.

After all, you are invading someones home so the prospect has got to feel comfortable with you in their home.

A personal brand means that unlike your business brand you’re not going to create a logo in the traditional sense and even your business a name is going to play second fiddle to your own name and your own face, which become your brand.

This can work incredibly well, because by having a personal brand you allow your visitors and followers to feel as though they can get to know you. In return, this then helps to build trust and familiarity.

To illustrate this, would you be more likely to buy carpet cleaning from a friend, or a stranger in the street? Using a personal brand allows you to put yourself somewhere in between those two points.

You could even go live on Facebook Live and more – showing yourself doing the things that your audience want to do, like the correct stain removal techniques. This can be very inspirational when handled correctly and can motivate more people to follow you, to consider following your brand and to buy from you!

Platform
It’s only once you’ve settled on all these things that you can then decide on which social media platform you’re going to use because the best platform is going to depend partly on your brand and the message you want to convey.

Though the list of platforms changes by the day, each platform has been created to serve a particular market. The most popular platforms today (feb 2018) are:

· Facebook
· Instagram
· Twitter
· YouTube
· Reddit
· Google Plus
· Tumblr
· Pinterest
· Snapchat
· Periscope/Meerkat
· And any others you can find!

So what is the best way to get your message across to your target audience? Where are your potential prospects likely to be hanging out? If you target the ladies I would suggest Facebook, and since images are such a powerful force in the carpet cleaning world, it would be worth looking at Instagram too.

Posting a few images to Instagram takes barely any time during a day if you have a good camera in your phone and you genuinely do practice what you preach – but it can build a massive following and gets lots of reshares, likes and more!

Also, don’t forget that YouTube is also a social media platform and is the 2nd most widely used search engine in the world after Google.

Steer clear of those social networking site which the kids are on … Snapchat and other which are designed to appeal to teens since any effort you put into these sites to get more business will almost certainly be totally wasted.

Plan
Finally, you can now come up with a plan. More specifically, you should try and come up with daily, weekly and monthly plans.

In other words, what are you going to do on daily basis to get to the point where you want to be in one year, two years or three? This will usually involve making regular posts of some sort, but in
particular, it will mean doing that in a way that is sustainable for you and that fits into your routine.

In an ideal scenario, you would post as often as possible to those platforms you choose to focus on but realistically this may only be 3 or 4 times a week, just ensure you do it regularly to ensure your brand is seen to be ‘everywhere’ and maximize you exposure and by posting regularly, you will have a greater chance of your posts being seen.

By the way there is a saturation point at which you can start to overwhelm your followers and start to become a nuisance to your followers but I don’t know of any carpet cleaning company who gets anywhere near that point so that’s not really an issue.

Start by focusing on one channel primarily whether that means Instagram or Facebook. Start planning the regularity with which you can post content to your site and where you’re going to  share that.

Again, promoting content on the three big platforms is always a good idea and you could also look at sharing in online  communities like reddit and Google Plus communities.

Finally, look into the different tools you can use to make the posting process easier across all of your platforms, for example Hootsuite or Buffer.

Through the rest of this 8 step program we will go through ways to grow your social media faster and reach an even bigger audience, so stick with it and you should be able to come up with an ideal social media strategy to reach a larger audience!