With an uncertain economic future and a threatening recession ahead, consumer spending habits change, and many lawn, landscape, and outdoor living businesses hunker down and make massive budget cuts in an attempt to survive the financial storm. Except, this effort of preservation becomes more harmful than beneficial.

With the average buying cycle for landscape projects lasting almost 80 days, now is the time to strategize and start executing to ensure an efficient and profitable season ahead. Here are nine actionable ways that top landscapers prepare for the next busy season now and how you can too.

Professionals in the landscape industry who excel at SEO recognize that the keywords they might search for are likely not the keywords their target customers are searching for. They see the importance of keyword research to ensure their content creation efforts land their web pages on page one of the SERPs. 

While all successful landscape construction companies tend to have a blog, not all landscape construction companies with a blog are successful. You need an inbound marketing strategy for blogging to be an effective component of your marketing plan.

There’s never a convenient time for a business slump, but it inevitably happens. When it does, many landscape contractors scramble to find a quick win. While quick solutions may work in the short term, inbound marketing is a long-term solution that will create stability in your business and create a consistent flow of traffic, leads, customers, and potential recruits.

More than any job position, the sales rep position has a notoriously high attrition rate. It’s time for the building product manufacturing industry to stop this cycle and start recruiting and retaining top-performing sales reps, but knowing where to start can be a daunting task.

If you set up a booth at home and garden shows expecting high-quality leads, you’ve likely had your fair share of disappointment. Deciding whether it is worth it requires taking an honest look at your numbers and deciding if the cost of going still belongs in your marketing budget.

If you are always scrambling to find work when cold weather arrives, you don’t have an effective marketing strategy and likely aren’t investing in one. Competing in the landscape industry means budgeting for marketing, even during slow seasons.

If your landscaping or pool building business is using generic text-based estimates while trying to close sales rather than interactive, digital sales proposals with visual appeal, you're leaving money on the table. With content overload in the digital world, your business needs exceptional sales proposals if you want to close more sales faster.

If you live in an area with snow, welcome to the slow-season cash flow slump. Many people think it’s an inevitable part of running a landscaping or pool building business, but is it? It’s possible to enjoy cash flow stability despite the weather when you’re strategic in marketing all year round.

Standing out from the competition and selling more pools requires an effective and scalable digital marketing strategy that encourages potential customers to set their hearts on a custom pool built by your firm in their backyards—but how is that achieved?

Our living spaces, indoors and out, form the backdrop for our lives. A quick look at the home goods and interior decorating market demonstrates the mass potential to expand this trend into the outdoor living space. The relatively new field of exterior design offers the opportunity for landscape businesses to scale by providing expertise and services to an underserved market with high demand.

Leading commercial landscaping companies consistently look for ways to improve their businesses—it’s a practice that has gotten them where they are. Today, more often than not, they’re finding success by leveraging technology, getting more creative in their business development efforts, and eliminating inefficiencies.

One of the biggest challenges that landscape industry pros face with social media is creating engaging content that also converts. Properly managed social media accounts both engage customers and help keep a business top of mind, drive traffic to its website, and spread the company’s word to their target audience.

Building product manufacturers in the landscape and outdoor living industry face specific challenges when it comes to content marketing. In this jam-packed field guide, we take you behind the scenes of the exact framework that empowers our clients to produce industry-specific content at scale.

While the world has become more digital than ever before, there are many aspects of the landscaping industry that still depend on meaningful offline business relationships. Dealers are in a position where they interact with numerous manufacturers, designers, installers, local contractors, and homeowners on a daily basis.

With the highly competitive state of the landscape industry today, you know that your company is just one of many that a prospect is scoping out. Knowing how to stand apart from your competition is essential, and it takes an intentional effort to develop a strategy.

Leading landscape firms—both those with commercial and residential focuses—prioritize professional photo shoots every year because they experience firsthand the incredible positive impact it makes on their business. Our team pulled together this 101 to address some of the common concerns we hear from landscape professionals.

Undoubtedly, anyone in the landscape industry could learn something from a landscape contractor that has been in business for over 80 years, especially when it’s a company that is ranked number one on Lawn & Landscape’s 2021 Top 100 list based on revenue. So how exactly is BrightView getting these outstanding results? We’ve identified four key strategies that have led to their massive success.

Prospects today are far more informed and empowered than those of the past, and the buying process has completely changed. This is true for every industry, and landscape construction is no exception. Here are a few key areas of our industry that have changed dramatically.