If you run a small or medium-sized security guard company, chances are that you have considered starting a blog. If that’s true, stop thinking about it and just do it! Although blogging started off in the late 90’s as a way for people to share their thoughts, feelings, and opinions, businesses have embraced blogs in a big way. In fact, everyone from Fortune 500 companies to small family owned businesses have begun blogging. The driving force behind this adoption of blogging was that companies’ wanted to acquire new customers and they knew they could do so by increasing their digital footprints. So if you are trying to find new customers for your security company, try starting a blog.
There are many ways to find and reach new customers online, including social media and email. But even if you are focusing your outreach on social and email, your blog should serve as the foundation for both efforts. That’s because your blog should be the central repository for the content that you tweet, Facebook, and email to your potential customers.
If your business website doesn’t have an active blog or “Learning Center” that is updated frequently, you are missing a huge opportunity to increase your brand’s visibility, reach, and authority with prospective customers. As an example, let’s take a look at how G4S uses its blog. On the G4S website you will see a section called Security Resources. Although the section is not labeled “Blog”, for all intents and purposes that is essentially what it is. As you will see, their Security Resources section has an extensive amount of information that G4S’ potential customers might benefit from reading. It is this ability to create and distribute informative content that helps companies with blogs, like G4S, establish themselves as authorities with their prospective clients.
So in addition to increasing your company’s authority, you might be wondering what are some of the other benefits of starting a blog? In my opinion, there are 3 primary reasons that any company should start blogging.
First, blogging helps build trust with potential clients. It has been my experience that many security guard service buyers have had bad experiences with security guard companies in the past. If they haven’t personally, then they probably know someone who has. As a result, many will harbor some level of distrust for security guard contractors. Luckily for security guard companies research shows that a blog with truthful and helpful content can help bridge the gap between trust and distrust. That’s because blogs allow potential customers to connect and get to know you and your organization on a more personal level.
Second, having a blog will help drive traffic to your website. Most security guard company websites don’t have many pages and are not updated very often…if ever. Unfortunately, a small number of pages and a lack of updates both result in very few potential customers finding their websites. Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems. Each time that you write an article on your blog, that is one more page that Google and other search engines will find, index, and display to searchers. The more often that your website is displayed to searchers, the more often people will visit your website and find out about your company. Additionally, Google also tends to reward active websites with a higher ranking in their search results as compared to less active sites. Again, driving more traffic to your website.
Lastly, blogging drives more awareness of your company than cold-calling can. If you and/or your sales team use cold calling as a marketing technique, how many leads can you generate in 1 hour? Maybe 1 or 2? Well consider sitting down for an hour to publish a really good blog post. On the first day that the article is published, your current followers and network might generate 50 views and 4 leads. On the second day you might get 25 views and 2 leads. After a couple of days the post is less interesting to your immediate network and interest dies, but you’ve generated 6 leads with 1 hour of work. That’s great, however the lead generation doesn’t stop there. Once your blog is ranked in the search engines, the blog can continue to generate leads for days, months, or even years as searchers continue to find it. All that for just 1 hour of work.
So in addition to increasing your company’s authority, you might be wondering what are some of the other benefits of starting a blog? In my opinion, there are 3 primary reasons that any company should start blogging.
First, blogging helps build trust with potential clients. It has been my experience that many security guard service buyers have had bad experiences with security guard companies in the past. If they haven’t personally, then they probably know someone who has. As a result, many will harbor some level of distrust for security guard contractors. Luckily for security guard companies research shows that a blog with truthful and helpful content can help bridge the gap between trust and distrust. That’s because blogs allow potential customers to connect and get to know you and your organization on a more personal level.
Second, having a blog will help drive traffic to your website. Most security guard company websites don’t have many pages and are not updated very often…if ever. Unfortunately, a small number of pages and a lack of updates both result in very few potential customers finding their websites. Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems. Each time that you write an article on your blog, that is one more page that Google and other search engines will find, index, and display to searchers. The more often that your website is displayed to searchers, the more often people will visit your website and find out about your company. Additionally, Google also tends to reward active websites with a higher ranking in their search results as compared to less active sites. Again, driving more traffic to your website.
Lastly, blogging drives more awareness of your company than cold-calling can. If you and/or your sales team use cold calling as a marketing technique, how many leads can you generate in 1 hour? Maybe 1 or 2? Well consider sitting down for an hour to publish a really good blog post. On the first day that the article is published, your current followers and network might generate 50 views and 4 leads. On the second day you might get 25 views and 2 leads. After a couple of days the post is less interesting to your immediate network and interest dies, but you’ve generated 6 leads with 1 hour of work. That’s great, however the lead generation doesn’t stop there. Once your blog is ranked in the search engines, the blog can continue to generate leads for days, months, or even years as searchers continue to find it. All that for just 1 hour of work.
