Landscape Marketing: 3 Strategies to improve your upcoming year
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Corey Halstead
Owner, HALSTEAD.
The marketing decisions you make right now for your landscaping business can mean the difference between a great 12 months ahead and staying flat. With the average consumer taking almost three months to make a decision, it’s a no-brainer to get started early.
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Landscape Marketing Strategy #1: A Website that Looks Great and Performs.
This is the heart of your sales and marketing machine yet so many landscaping need to improve their online presence—and quickly. That said, and in all fairness, business owners have been hearing about the importance of an effective, modern online presence for quite a few years now. And while this has been crucial since the mainstream adoption of the internet as a tool, it has become even more critical recently.
So, why is now really the time for landscaping professionals to invest in better-looking, more effective websites? Mainly because of a few key changes in both the industry specifically and in the way consumers make purchases today overall.
The first reason is, in part, due to the design/build industry’s rapid growth and evolvement over the last few years. The scale of the projects today is incredible—outdoor fireplaces, poolside cabanas, and outdoor dining rooms are all part of the modern design of outdoor spaces, for instance. Designed and built to be true extensions of the home, these remarkable projects very often exceed the $100K mark.
As a result of this rapid growth, the consumers you’re trying to reach today are demanding more from industry professionals. The time has come for many business owners to play catch-up to the demands of these new consumers by creating an online presence that meets their needs and expectations.
The second reason for the immediate need for online improvement is the major shift in how consumers buy products and services today. The power and advantage is now with the buyer, not the seller. No longer does a homeowner need to contact a salesperson or business owner to gather information about a product or service they are thinking of purchasing. This means that the average consumer in the outdoor living market is now better informed and more knowledgeable than ever, challenging business owners to raise their game.
This “game” happens mainly online and begins with a potential customer’s visit to your company’s website. What will they find when they do? It had better be an information-packed, regularly updated, beautifully designed site that helps them with their research while driving them through your sales cycle automatically. The idea of generating leads through useful content and delightful online experiences—is revolutionizing marketing today. The best part? It actually works.
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Landscape Marketing Strategy #2: Professionally Shot Photos of Your Work.
Here’s a fact: Great works sells more great work. We are firm believers that your catalog of completed work is an essential foundation for effectively marketing any design/build company—100%, hands down. The projects that your company designs and installs are made of you and your team’s heart, soul, sweat, and pride. The easy part is treating this work with the respect of great photography, videography and great graphic design, allowing this work to sell more jobs for your company for years to come.
That’s right, we said it. The cheap “photo book” available from the mass online printing vendor with the “online design software” simply isn’t a high enough quality product for the expectations of today’s consumer.
Enter the branded, magazine-style portfolio of high-quality imagery and engaging, useful content. Think Architectural Digest only focused exclusively on your company’s story, mission, and body of work. Sounds impressive, right? It is. And it’s just the kind of forward-thinking marketing that will win the best design/build projects next season.
So, this is all great but how do you make it happen? There are three main components of bringing a marketing piece like a brand portfolio magazine together successfully.
The first is partnering with the best marketing company for the job. Choose an agency that has a strong niche in your industry. A magazine style portfolio like the one we describe here requires authentic, accurate content that only a marketing company that specializes in the home services industry can deliver.
The second is high-quality project photography. The best magazine or book with the highest quality design and production is completely ineffective if combined with poor images. The days when a landscaping/outdoor living company, for example, could use low-quality photos of unfinished projects to win new clients are over. Even if the company’s projects are stunning while experiencing them in person, one needs to step back and make sure that a project’s quality is being communicated effectively through the photography. It’s a small investment when compared to the effort of building the project in the first place.
The third is format and production of the portfolio magazine itself. Just as crucial as the choice of the landscape marketing company and the proper photography, the integrity of the design and production is what makes the piece connect with the reading consumer. There are many options to be considered including overall trim size, paper thickness, cover finishes, and binding treatments. The right combination of these choices results in dynamite selling tool that is second to none.
Once these project case studies are complete with content development and professional photography in tow, you are also set to take your work online. Websites like Houzz and Pinterest are jam-packed with qualified users seeking landscape professionals to work with. Upload the professional photography of your work and leverage the content of your case studies to help your online presence in a huge way.
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Landscape Marketing Strategy #3: Content-Fueled Blog for SEO.
Content is the best lead generation, and blogging isn’t optional. Content belongs at the center of any successful marketing strategy today. Leads come from SEO-optimized content. What do we mean by content, and why is it so critical to a successful design/build marketing campaign? Content marketing as defined by the Content Marketing Institute is “a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” Simply put, this means that your company should be regularly producing original content that provides real value to your target consumer, while helping them in their buying process and moving them through the sales cycle.
The easiest, most effective method of delivering this content—the core element to an inbound marketing strategy—is through a blog on your company’s website and your social media channels like Pinterest, Facebook, and Houzz. The hardest thing for business owners to understand when it comes to inbound/content marketing is that the content should not be focused solely on their own business. Now is the time to put the customer first, and that is the only way to make the content you produce successful. It’s not “about us,” it’s “about them.”
So, why use inbound marketing, anyway? Inbound marketing is the new, user-focused SEO. In today’s customer-driven marketplace, high-quality, useful content is what drives webpages to the first page of Google.
Being that you have a business to operate and grow, it’s very often the best option to partner with an outside content marketing firm to start seeing the results of great content right away. And since authentic, useful content is paramount in today’s buying environment, niche agencies are surfacing across the county, specializing in specific industries. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the traditional marketing agency of yesterday to create connection-driven content across all industries. General, broad-sweeping content just isn’t good enough anymore, hence the specialization of marketing agencies within niches like healthcare, event production, weddings, and home services (us!).
When executed correctly and produced by professionals who understand how to make a story connect with readers, content truly is king for generating leads!
