6 Content Marketing Strategies for Landscaping Business

Landscaping business owners in Ontario for the most part follow the same cycle of  working 12-14 hour days in the spring summer and into the fall depending on the weather, and then spending the late fall and winter months figuring out how they are going to implement marketing for their landscaping business to create momentum and revenue growth for the next season.  Sound familiar?

There are tons of marketing strategies for landscaping business owners to use, including direct mail, flyers, print display advertising, Yellow Pages, etc.  The problem is that these  ”outbound marketing” strategies don’t work anymore.  Landscapers that have been around for longer than 10 years can remember the days when the Yellow Pages was their best source of lead generation.

Unfortunately, in 2012 Yellow Pages is barely hanging on because their print directory advertising model is no longer viable and they are investing tremendous resources into trying to reinvent themselves as a digital marketing avenue.  Sadly, they are way too late in the game to compete with massive search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to name only a few!

Most savvy landscaping business owners know that their best bet for effective marketing strategies these days include a professional website design, a form of traffic generation through search engines and an effective traffic conversion process to generate more leads.

In this article I want to focus on traffic generation.  I will assume that your landscaping business has already invested in a beautiful website that does everything necessary to entice your visitors to contact you and become a sales lead.  So what is a great, inexpensive way for you to send droves of visitors to your website that you can incorporate into your 2013 marketing strategy?

Content Marketing Strategies for Landscaping Business

Here are the 6 key things you need to incorporate into your marketing strategy for your landscaping business.

1. You need a blog.  If you don’t have a blog on your website, you need to get one.  WordPress is an excellent blogging tool that we would recommend.  WordPress is also a website CMS which allows you to build your entire website and blog within the same platform.  It is simple and easy to use for non-technical people and Search Engines love it!
2. You need to spend some time blogging.  Blogging is an imperative aspect of your content marketing strategy.  I would recommend posting 1-2 blogs per week when you start.  It should be consistent so pick a schedule you can stick to.
3. Write about things people want to know.  It’s OK to spill some of your candy.  The point here is that you are giving valuable information to people searching for it and as the source of that knowledge you are becoming a thought leader!  When it comes to spending tens of thousands of dollars on a landscaping project would you rather spend it with someone who follows what the thought leaders are suggesting or someone who is a thought leader?
4. Don’t forget to use the right keywords!  You can easily figure out what users actually search for that relates to your topic.  How?  Did you ever notice that when you search for something onGoogle, it actually starts to complete your thought by filling in words as you type, almost as though it knows what you are thinking.  Well, Google does know what people are thinking because they have billions of pieces of data from actual search queries from real people.  So they are suggesting phrases to you that are from that database of what people really search for.  So it’s as simple as using those words in your blog title, headings and sprinkled throughout your blog post, just like this one about content marketing strategies for landscaping business.  Here’s a tool that will help you: http://ubersuggest.org/.  There will be so many suggestions you won’t know where to start.  That’s OK, just start.
5. Most landscaping business owners are excellent landscapers and pretty good business people but they may not have the best ideas when it comes to creating valuable content marketing.  Here’s a resource you can use: Top 10 Mind Mapping Productivity Tips for Content Marketing Success.
6. Just creating the content is NOT ENOUGH.  Google likes links.  When you have links pointing to your website from other sources, it’s like adding fertilizer to your soil in a garden.  It grows bigger and quicker!  So if you want to get traffic to your website, the more links the better.  But these links should be from credible sources and now more than ever, with the Google Panda Penguin updates, links from social media shares and comments are critical to your success.  So when you blog, share it to your social networks.  Post it on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter, share it on LinkedIn and be sure to include a pretty picture and pin it on Pinterest!  Once you’ve built up a list of people following you on these social media channels that LOVE what you are saying, they will also, post it, tweet it, share it and pin it!  And you will be bragging at the nextLandscape Ontario get together about how you spend next to nothing on advertising and generated tons of new business because you created and stuck to a content marketing strategy for your landscaping business.

I came across this excellent case study the other day about a company that created over $400K in revenue through content marketing.  Do you really need more evidence that you should be dong this?  Case Study:: Content Marketing: McGladrey’s 4-step process increases content production 300%, Web traffic 100%

This article is an original contribution by Jason Gervais.

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