Many Outdoor Living Contractors Are Sitting on Unused Marketing Gold
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Outdoor living contractors have a huge advantage over other industries when it comes to marketing, but few notice the gold mine sitting right in front of them—even though it’s built into every amazing project they have ever completed. On every job site, you are creating content—real-world, visual representations of your great work that can be capitalized through multiple marketing channels long after the last paver has been put in place. As a uniquely visual market, the landscaping/hardscaping sector is bursting with the kind of content that is invaluable to advertising, website design, and social media—all the venues you need to be engaged in to attract your ideal customers.
We’re going to help you dig into this gold mine, by showing how to extract every bit of content you can from your projects. You don’t even need an instinct for content (that’s our expertise), but only you have the power to leverage your own projects to create more impactful marketing opportunities.
The Role of Content
Any successful marketing strategy begins with great content. It is the fuel that feeds the complex engine that is your company’s branding, marketing, and sales efforts. The trouble is, a lot of people—especially those who are new to the landscape/hardscape industry—have some misconceptions about what content is and how it’s best deployed.
So let’s simplify it: Content is an access point for people to engage with your customer. Done well, it can carry them through the discovery phase to the purchase phase. It doesn’t have to be pushy, and in fact the best content is not—it lures people to your company by helping them as they research their options, learn about companies, and get answers to their questions as they contemplate making big changes to their property.
Valuable content sits squarely with the buyer, in that it is primarily a tool for her to empower herself. For customers, content is a way to research and learn.
A good content strategy, then, trusts customers while empowering them to make their own decisions. You, as a company owner or leader, simply need to make sure you have something valuable to say—to produce a signal within the noise.
The 79-Days-Online Rule
The idea of trusting customers to come to you is based on a fact of the purchasing experience. People spend an average of 79 days researching their options before reaching out to a company about a potential purchase. More than 80 percent of the time, that research is done online.
To meet these people where they are, when they are in the researching mode, you need to be present online, with content that addresses any of their questions and satisfies their curiosity.
A Changing Industry: Landscape Construction
The landscape construction industry has blossomed in recent years, emerging as a $13 billion player within the all-encompassing $100 billion landscape services industry. As it’s matured, so has the competition. Projects are more sophisticated, processes are more involved, and customers are more informed.
People expect more from landscape and hardscape professionals, because the value of projects and the services on offer are more modern and more innovative. Said another way, customers are less forgiving than they used to be.
If someone is going to spend $50,000 on an elaborate backyard patio with an outdoor kitchen, their expectations are going to reflect that level of investment. They’re going to put more work into understanding what they will get in return for your services. How does the story you’re telling—through your marketing—live up to their potential expectations?
Your Hardscape Projects, Your Content
One of the toughest aspects of marketing your company effectively is determining your landscape company’s differentiator. What sets you apart in this increasingly competitive market?
The solution, you may be relieved to hear, is already available: It’s you and your projects. Every single one offers a unique and bountiful source of content through photography, video, testimonials, project diaries, social media posts, case studies, and blog posts. When you start to look at your landscape projects through the lens of marketing, everything starts to look like potential content. Start to view your jobs as an extension of your marketing, and you’ll begin to add fuel to the marketing engine that drives ideal customers to your doorstep.
You also have an advantage by virtue of existing in a highly dynamic and visually oriented industry. Every product you use or photo you take is an opportunity for content—even if it’s simply an eye-catching Instagram post. And that’s just visual content. Through blog posts and other written content you can tell the story of the work you do and how you do it, and such posts can contribute to your ability to be found online when those prospects are doing their digging around for landscaping companies just like yours.
Show the Journey
Let’s say you’re in the design phase for a new outdoor kitchen and you’ve just rendered an impressive 3D model. That process is fascinating to you, and it can be for others, particularly those who are looking into their landscape design options. You could use your social media accounts to show how sophisticated your tools and processes are, and shed some light on a phase of the journey that is little understood by most people. You are showing them in this way the work and thought that would go into their project.
All of this can serve the curiosity and learning process of prospective buyers, while perhaps catching the attention of a past customer who is also contemplating another upgrade. Seeing the potential, you can build off the initial social media post. Any simple image post can become a topic for a blog article, which then contributes to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. If done well, your SEO efforts translate into higher rankings on Google searches, drawing in more prospects who click around your site, and who can then be re-targeted with more design-oriented content—because that was the type of content that attracted them in the first place.
How to Extract the Marketing Gold for Your Landscape Company
Tapping into the content you have at our fingertips can take some time to become a habit. A first step could be to research what our competitors are doing in their marketing channels, like Instagram and Facebook. Another involves setting aside some time to document your company’s work. It doesn’t have to be much—see if you can delegate someone to show the progress of a big project on their phone, or consider experts who can do this for you in a professional, polished way.
Recorded video along the way to show the progress of your projects. Interviewed team members can give their take on why certain materials were chosen or the thinking behind why a retaining wall was built in a particular corner of the landscape. Such content can be edited later on and broken up into interesting tidbits that you share with your followers.
Why the Case Study Matters in the Landscape Industry
Case studies give prospects who find your site something to admire and can give you many tangible details to discuss when meeting with prospects who are about to sign a contract. For these reasons, case studies are among the most impactful marketing projects you can create.
This requires some planning, but the rewards are high, in terms of the many places you can distribute each “story.”
When we talk about how much content you need to effectively document a project, we’re referring to what we call the “Big 3”: pictures, videos, and the written word. Let’s take a closer look at each.
Picture: Professional photography has emerged as a foundational component of successful marketing in the landscaping industry. You can’t expect to communicate with customers who are spending north of $20,000 on a new backyard if you’re not showing your projects in the light that they deserve to be displayed.
Videos: Right now, video is perhaps the most underestimated and misused content channel. It’s critical for any paid Facebook or Instagram ads, as well as website engagement. But you need to use it properly. To create an impactful video, you could invite a crew who can come to your job site with the right equipment and give them the space to interview you, a member of your team, and perhaps even the homeowner.
Written word: The written word is absolutely crucial for communicating any bit of information that you need people to understand fully. Think about it in sales terms: You’re not selling your customers a patio so much as a lifestyle. You’re not selling a retaining wall—you’re selling an elegant solution. You’re not selling an outdoor kitchen—you’re selling a gathering space for families. Marketing is about emotion, and sometimes emotion can only be communicated through language.
For an effective case study, all three of these channels are connected. Ideally, you’re able to wait until space has been lived in—until the grass has come in, the outdoor furniture is arranged, and the plants are more mature. That means you or your project managers need to return to the job site months after completion. At Halstead, when we send video teams to document projects, we often send them to projects that were finished a year ago.
Let’s be clear: A case study is not a link on a webpage called “portfolio.” It is not a repository of poorly edited photos from projects over the years. A case study covers a single project. It includes professional photo, video, and written content, and serves the goal of using media to zero in on the details of your work. You may even want to show “before and after” imagery.
Partnering With Manufacturers and Dealers
You use a variety of products and services to complete your jobs, and the interests of the companies behind those products often align with your own. Why not partner with them? From decking to lighting to hardscaping to furniture design, every component of your project has a manufacturer or dealer that you trust… and they want content too!
You hold the key in that relationship because they don’t build projects. You do. You have the access to the job site as well as the content needed to show off their products.
So what does a partnership look like? You may shoot a job, invest in a quality videographer to tell the story of the project, and in the process mention the products you used. You’ll do so in a way that is useful to any prospective customers watching your content, because they, too, want to know about your processes and partnerships. Remember the 79-days-online? This is all a part of that.
Finally, when you post this content online you could tag the manufacturer or dealer, and use hashtags that they use to promote their products. If those producers then pick up and share your content, then you will begin to see levels of exposure that can draw in the kinds of customers you have been hoping to attract this entire time.
