Where to Spend Your Digital Marketing Budget as a Green Industry Business
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
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Nearly half of marketers expect to increase their marketing budget in 2023. Combine this insightful stat with the fact that there has been a 5% growth in marketing investment over the past decade and it’s clear that ramping up your continuous marketing efforts is essential to staying competitive. A seasonal start-and-stop marketing plan is no longer an option if you want your business to succeed.
In the lawn, landscape, and outdoor living world, where impeccable aesthetics and customer demands intertwine, strategically allocating your marketing budget is crucial to propelling your highly successful business toward even more significant growth and brand recognition. Marketing is an investment that builds upon its success over time.
To quote HALSTEAD co-owner Corey Halstead during a recent webinar for small businesses, “The marketing you are doing now is not for now; it’s for down the road.” Your actions today will affect lead generation, nurturing, and conversion in the future.
Even if you started your business on word-of-mouth marketing, it’s not a strategy that will help you scale your business and reach your big goals. Word-of-mouth marketing is a good sign that you’re doing a great job with customer service and producing excellent work. However, you need a good digital marketing strategy to fuel the fire you’ve built and accelerate your business growth.
Building a Strong Marketing Foundation as a Lawn, Landscape, and Outdoor Living Business
The customer journey is a process and requires keeping your funnel flowing consistently with incoming leads. It’s more complex than a Google search and form conversion, and requires a system, frequent research, application, and evaluation to see what works and what doesn’t.
Ten years ago, Google reported approximately nine customer-company interactions on average, while today, companies provide anywhere from 20 to 500 touchpoints. This massive change results from lower costs, more accessible marketing capabilities, and the opportunity to take an omnichannel approach with a marketing system.
Components of an Effective Digital Marketing System
Top landscape industry firms have a marketing system where all components work together to meet leads and customers with the right messaging at the right time in their customer journey. Each system component works differently to target your customers.
A well-rounded digital marketing system generally includes the following:
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Paid ads
Website design
Content creation
Online reputation management
Email marketing
Social posting
While there’s a tendency to want to go all in on every component of your marketing system, your marketing budget allocation will frequently change and evolve, as it should. Where you’re at in your business will determine which areas you focus on. Initially, creating brand awareness is critical, so you may allocate more of your budget to redesigning your website and making your brand recognizable. At another time, a large portion of your budget may be assigned to SEO, while later on, it may lean more toward social posting—depending on your goals and marketing strategy.
Considerations When Developing Your Marketing Strategy
You have to know your destination in order to create a plan to get there—and this is true in marketing, too. Knowing exactly who your target audience is and determining what action you want them to take is the first step in creating a marketing strategy.
Market research and industry insight help you identify your target audience, including their needs, pain points, and where they can be found online. With this information, you can develop a strategy to put into action. Measure and evaluate your progress, pivot your marketing strategy as needed, and repeat the process again.
While it may be tempting to mimic competitors, you don’t know if their strategy is working or how much they’re spending. With a large selection of channels to allocate your marketing budget, the best way to make informed decisions is to rely on performance analytics for each channel.
The marketing budget tends to be the first thing cut when times of uncertainty loom ahead. However, it’s a bad move—your business needs a realistic, consistent, and sustainable marketing budget to stay competitive. The analytics help connect the dots between revenue and what you’re spending on marketing and determine budget allocation.
Allocating Your Marketing Budget as a Green Industry Business
Leading landscape industry firms spend approximately 2%-5% of their top-line revenue on marketing, and that’s on the low end of the scale. On average, small businesses invest 8% of their revenue in marketing. The rule of thumb is to allocate 70% of your marketing budget to proven strategies, 20% to new strategies, and 10% to experimental strategies that could be opportunities for future growth. There’s a direct correlation between marketing budget allocation and revenue growth.
Your marketing budget should increase as your company grows, the more revenue you bring in, the more you need to invest in marketing to continue to grow. While working with a marketing agency may not be within the budget when you first start your business, working with people you trust as experts is essential as your business grows. Their expert insight can have a massive impact.
Investing in lead generation is always a solid plan. Keeping the top of your sales funnel filled with new leads is excellent for longevity—just remember conversion doesn’t happen overnight. Focusing on bottom-of-the-funnel marketing increases ROI by targeting leads who are close to conversion, so you may see results faster, but only because these leads are further along in the customer journey. Each marketing system component and channel are important in the customer journey.
Social Media Marketing’s Role in the Customer Journey
Allocating a portion of your marketing budget to social media initiatives helps drive meaningful interactions and engagement with your target audience, usually within the early stages of the customer journey. Compelling visuals, engaging content, and targeted paid advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram capture the attention of users and introduce them to your brand and build brand awareness.
Once potential customers know your brand, social media plays a role in nurturing their interest. By consistently sharing valuable and relevant content, your green industry business educates and inspires its audiences. Social channels are a great platform to share content from your website that establishes you as an industry expert.
Written Content Creation
After creating brand awareness, content creation comes next. Content marketing builds upon itself, and when your content is evergreen it’ll keep working for you 24/7/365 indefinitely. It serves as your front-line sales team, helps qualify prospects, nurtures leads, and educates your audience.
According to a recent study, companies spend approximately 46% of their marketing budgets on content creation. This number includes strategic planning, organic SEO efforts, resource allocation, writing, and more.
Blogs are among the top three media formats with the highest ROIs, partly because the content can be repurposed throughout various channels. While first appearing on your website, you can share them on social media, in email campaigns, and even throughout the sales process when your team needs to share information with a customer.
Most consumers have already researched extensively before reaching out to your business, so providing answers on your website to frequently asked questions and solutions to common pain points will help qualify for your leads, ultimately saving you time. The sheer volume of content needed to be successful requires strategy and significant investment, but the ROI is worth it.
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SHOULD YOU USE AI TO PRODUCE YOUR LAWN, LANDSCAPE, OR OUTDOOR LIVING BUSINESS CONTENT?
If your business is new and you don’t have the budget for professional content writers, an artificial intelligence (AI) solution such as ChatGPT can be a helpful tool. However, because it can provide unreliable information it should be used with human oversight to ensure it meets your brand voice and provides relevant and accurate information. There’s no replacement for human ingenuity, but AI can be used to make the content creation process faster. Keep in mind your strategy will need to change as your business grows in order to elevate your brand.
Visual Content Creation: Videography & Photography
Video, followed by images, has the highest ROI of any media format. It outperforms all the others by far, explaining why 91% of marketers plan to increase or maintain their investment in YouTube within the next year. Video has maintained its place as the most popular and effective media format for four years in a row.
There is no better sales tool than your finished projects. Investing in professional photos and videos elevates your content and helps you stand apart from the competition. This visual content can be used to create case studies or used as they are on your social media channels, website, blogs, email campaigns, and even printed materials like sales brochures.
The Power of Email Marketing
Often overlooked, email marketing is effective in the middle and later stages of the customer journey, during the consideration, conversion, and loyalty phases. Targeted and personalized email content helps nurture potential customers, drive conversions with compelling calls to action (CTAs), and helps retain and engage (and re-engage) customers.
Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system will help you fully leverage the power of email marketing. It provides a centralized platform for managing customer data, segmentation, and automated email campaigns. Integrating CRM with email marketing efforts provides valuable insights into the behaviors, preferences, and interactions of your leads and customers.
Email is an owned channel, meaning no outside forces control your reach. Unlike social media platforms, your email reach isn’t dictated by an ever-changing algorithm. Part of your budget must be allocated to owned media channels, including email and your website.
SEO Basics for Websites & Google My Business (GMB) Listings
No part of your marketing plan works in a silo, rather they’re all connected and support the other. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for your target audience to find and engage with your brand by being present in the places they hang out online. The more optimized content available online, the more likely your ideal customers will find you and eventually convert.
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WEBSITE DESIGN FOR GREEN INDUSTRY BUSINESSES
The user experience (UX) is the most important aspect of any website. It needs to be visually pleasing, up-to-date, and easy to use. With over 50% of website visitors leaving a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, it needs to be fast, too. Plus, 65% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, making investing in a responsive website design essential.
Your website serves as a touchpoint throughout the customer journey, especially because it is a hub for your content. Since your content reaches leads at every journey stage, visitors will view different pages at different points.
For example, a combination of website SEO efforts and paid Google Ads might bring a lead to your blog post about paver patio design ideas. From there, they may click on your About section to learn about your company as part of the research process. A while later, they may see a paid Facebook Ad promoting a recent customer testimonial that’s featured on one of your case studies, so they click to see the case study. Eventually, they click on the Paver Patios service page, fill out a form for a phone consultation, and officially convert—all from your website content and paid ads.
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OPTIMIZED GMB LISTINGS
GMB listings are essential for lawn, landscape, and outdoor living industry businesses because they help target locals. 84% of searches for businesses are discovery searches, while only 16% are direct searches. Google is known to be one of the highest-converting channels because prospects are generally at the end of the funnel when they search, they’re ready to buy.
Ensure your GMB profile is complete with your location so you appear in local search results. Your description should include applicable keywords that will help your target customer find you in a search. Having a GMB helps you keep your ranking steady and helps boost your URL positioning. Think of your GMB profile as your website homepage, it’s one of the first impressions your potential customers will have of your business.
One of the most influential components of your GMB profile is the reviews section. Reviews can make or break a business as they are highly visible.
Online Reputation Management
Nearly 90% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. Online reputation management helps you control your business’s image online, turning negative reviews into positives with a steady flow of incoming reviews and timely responses.
By allocating a portion of your marketing budget to online reputation management, you can take control of your business’s image online, a strategy allowing you to effectively address negative reviews to build trust and credibility with potential customers. Ultimately, it boosts your brand reputation and helps drive more business.
Paid Ads
Great quality SEO-optimized content combined with ad spend equals effective marketing. Knowing which platforms your target audience is already spending time on helps direct your ad spend. Hypertargeting capabilities help you reach the right market.
There’s a risk of diluting your budget too much by focusing on too many platforms, but if you can dial into where it will be most effective—this is where you should invest the most. However, don’t stop ad spend across other channels, keep diversifying your channels but invest more in the ones that produce the highest ROI.
Making Data-Driven Decisions for Your Landscape Design, Build, and Maintenance Business
The important thing is that your marketing budget accounts for touchpoints throughout each phase of the journey with an omnichannel approach, and metrics should be a part of your process. With systems like CallRail’s attribution modeling, you can see exactly what the customer’s touchpoints were throughout the journey and their transitions from one stage of the funnel to the next—helping guide your marketing budget allocation.
Using a platform with identity resolution allows you to recognize people across channels and devices to get a clear picture of their actions throughout the customer journey. Analytics show you what your customers actually want, so your decisions don’t have to be based on what you think they want.
Making data-driven decisions follows a series of steps that are repeated in a cyclical pattern. Set your digital marketing goals, create a marketing plan, allocate your marketing budget towards channels and platforms, track your progress, and evaluate the results. Use the results to make any changes to your current marketing plan and begin the cycle again.
Remember that the ultimate goal is revenue. While you may have KPIs for clicks, form submissions, email open rates, and more, tracking your spending back to revenue ensures your marketing budget allocation is well-informed.