Ignoring the importance of online marketing would be a costly setback for your growing design/build company and so would failing to evaluate the effectiveness of your chosen marketing strategy. So, what is the best way to approach marketing your landscape or remodeling services online?

Do landscape design/build companies really benefit from using the popular home services marketplace Angie’s List? The website is popular with some consumers who view it as an easy search solution for finding landscape contractors, and some contractors think they can establish a legitimate presence for those homeowners simply by having a listing.

For this outdoor lighting company, we researched high volume, low cost keywords that are correlated to the their lighting services that are also representative of the end of the sales journey, meaning not research-like keywords, but rather ready to buy keywords. For each keyword, we created a group of ads to test out which one would work best. In the Google ad world, this approach is called Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGS). And then we built or used existing landing pages that are optimized for the keyword that is in the ad - all translating to lower cost click and higher performing ads.

Speaking of conversions - the purpose of these ads, over the six month period, this company received 66 “conversions.” In non-technical terms, this includes people who submitted a form on the website and also click on the telephone number to call in the mobile-only ads. It does NOT include people that called the website after reaching the website as a result of the ads. Most design/build companies we speak with have about 2-3x as many phone calls as they form submissions (often much more).

Home improvement review sites like HomeAdvisor and Angie’s List are not a necessary fact of doing business in the digital age for landscape or design/build companies. If you will choose to live on there, it may not be in your best interest to put all of your marketing dollars into these platforms. There are be better ways to generate leads and build your business, such as SEO or Facebook/Instagram Advertising.

For the 2018 FY, the cap for the first half was met on December 15, 2017 and the cap for the second half was met on February 28, 2018. This is the earliest these caps have ever been reached by a significant number of days, demonstrating the high demand for seasonal laborers. Prior to 2016, workers who had previously been employed via the H-2B Visa were exempt from this cap, but when the federal budget bill recently expired, the cap exemption expired as well.

What happens when you take something that seems (ok, it is) so complex and apply it towards your specific business? Or perhaps even towards your line of work? Today, Corey will talk about predictive analytics - to deeply understand your current and potential customers. How does it fit in? 

Want your events to last longer? The power is in your hands. In this intro-to-the-topic video, we introduce spreading the wildfire event approach with widgets that encourage people to take photos, using branded items, and share them on their social media. The return? People are posting images of themselves, happy, with your brand. Magic. Watch for more and tell us how you've done it!

Just stop it already with the wet pavers in your project pictures! A couple of summer rain drops on select pavers and natural stone - yes, that can be beautiful. But a hosed down paver patio or paver walkway? NO!!! Stop it. It's not stylish. It doesn't look good. Let them dry and then take your phone or camera out to snap a pic. 

No matter how much you're investing in advertising - online or offline, every business gets the best leads via referrals. There is no denying that. So how do you - as a landscape design/build company - get more referrals in the digital world? Anna shares her 5.5 ways to help you take some huge steps in growing your referrals - tomorrow.

In this video, Corey talks about the collision of experience driven purchasing and video marketing = drone. Team them up with still shots for an immersive experience . And remember - Buying a camera doesn’t make you a professional photographer. Buying a drone doesn’t make you a professional videographer. 

Yelp is a powerful website and app. As the 10th most popular website - it gets a lot of action from visitors. Surely, you've used it to read reviews and maybe you have your free profile setup on there. Does this mean you should be spending money on this platform - as a landscape design build company (or anyone really!)? Watch now.

What happens when you begin to look at your landscape projects through the lens of a camera? You start to see things you know the camera will capture. In this video, Corey talks about the four basic steps of getting winning photography - all by yourself! 

As long as landscapers have been landscaping and hardscapers have been hardscaping, we have also been, in our own ways, marketing. Over the last score of years, however, the introduction into the “age of technology” has vastly warped design-build marketing. Businesses, regardless of industry, can barely function on simple word-of-mouth anymore. To show our design-build pros just how far we’ve come in the last decade-and-a-half, and our predictions of the next few years, we’ve developed an “evolution of design-build marketing” timeline.

Put that thing down! Don't do it! Don't you please still use the analytics from five - or even three years ago! People over the age of 50 aren't as non-web savvy as you think. Almost 3 out of 4 of them are on Facebook. That's just Facebook - think about how many of them search online (even on their smartphones!). Things have REALLY changed with marketing effectively to this age group. So don't get suckered into outdated traditional marketing techniques and then wonder why they're not working!

…you need to read this. Cutting-edge web design, excellent SEO, and an active social media presence will do very little for your business if there is no foundation for these strategies to build upon. You need professional etiquette, marketing basics, and conceptual ideas before you can dive into digital marketing.

Anna talks about how to apply the still-very-true approach of growing your design/build business with referrals - except this means to expand your definition of what a referral really is today. And it's not just people sharing your info with one another while they're visiting someone's home. Referrals are indeed - online reviews! So stop skipping this part. ASK FOR REVIEWS!

Online reviews are one of the more subtle arts of inbound marketing. Business owners are often confused and disappointed about the lack of reviews they receive from happy clients. Many times the initial reaction is simply to just shrug and move on, assuming that there isn’t anything that can be done to bolster their online reviews.But it’s not true! We've compiled some useful rules to help you understand why you need to work on getting online reviews and who are the best customers to ask.

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, refers to a type of online advertising which targets the people who have visited your website but haven’t made a purchase, signed up for a free trial or completed any other ‘conversions’. This group is known as ‘bounced traffic’ and consists of approximately 98% of a website’s total traffic. Retargeting campaigns anonymously follow these users to other sites and advertise your brand to them again, ensuring that you maintain their awareness and encouraging them to revisit your website and become a customer.

Now at the top of pay-per-click advertising, Google AdWords has been undergoing a lot of changes throughout the past couple of years. Specifically, the media marketing giant made some alterations not just to their site layout, but to advertising capabilities. These are the ones that could help your business the most. We’re going to lay out the three big ones for you, and show you how these changes benefit your landscape design/build, architecture, or other type of home improvement company.