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5 Questions to Help You Get the Most Out of Your 2015 Marketing Plan

It’s nearly the end of 2014. Can you believe it? Where did the year go?

Things are probably winding down at your lawn care or landscape company’s office with finished projects and a sense of well-being from another successful growing season.

Yet, it’s also time to start thinking about 2015 and next year’s marketing plan. In 2014, you may have invested some money in Internet marketing. Now’s the time to look over that decision and evaluate how successful your Internet marketing plans were. Since many of you still incorporate traditional marketing methods with Internet marketing, I’m going to include some pointers in the following list. Here are a few things to check before turning off your office lights on December 31, 2014:

  1. How’s your website? Is everything up to date? Check your About Me; FAQ’s and Home Page. And don’t forget to go through your Contact Us page. Do you still offer all of those services that you have listed on your Contact form?
  2. What are your marketing plans for 2015? How much more of your marketing dollars are you going to invest in Internet marketing?
  3. What types of traditional marketing worked for you in 2014? Did you get your expected return on investment from your mailers, brochures, and door hangers?
  4. What Internet marketing outlets worked for you in 2014? Did you start a blog, and did you keep posting regularly throughout the year? Did you get more people contacting you because of your blog? Look at your Facebook page. You may have 1,000 likes, but who has contacted you from those likes?
  5. What are you planning on keeping, adding, or changing when it comes to traditional and Internet marketing?
  6. What is your marketing plan for 2015? Where are you now? Where do you want to be in six months when your busy season is just starting? Where do you want to be next year on December 31, 2015?

These are the types of questions that you need to ask yourself in order to move forward. After you’ve discovered your answers, then decide how much money you can invest in marketing and how much will be designated toward Internet versus traditional marketing.

Time is running out! If you’d like to invest in adding a blog to your website, call now. I have limited spaces available for 2015. You can call me at 717-381-6719, visit my website at www.landscapewriter.com or email me at wendy@landscapewriter.com.

How to Get Inside Your Customers’ Heads to Meet Their Needs

A few months ago, I met a marketing consultant who belongs to the same networking group that I do. He took a look at my tagline and essentially said—“The tagline should not be about you, but about your client. What you have here is how you see your business, not how the client sees it.”

Light bulb moment!

Then, this gentleman asked me a series of questions to get me thinking from my clients’ perspective. First, who are my ideal clients?

They’re you: Business owners in the landscape design/build, lawn care, and outdoor living businesses. In other words, this seasoned marketer asked the kind of questions that put me in your shoes.

I took that business person’s questions and used them to brainstorm a new tagline: Growing Your Business, One Word at a Time.

Through my tagline, I’m trying to communicate that I’ll help you bring in more business and elevate you to expert status in your region through the use of my words.

In today’s business world, it’s imperative to have a website. Yet, not only do you need a website, but you also need to regularly add fresh content in the forms of blogs, case studies, white papers, etc. to keep Google happy.

So, it stands to reason that you may need a writer to consistently communicate your message to homeowners, retail managers, and other prospects about the value that you bring to them through professional lawn care and landscape design/build, as well as outdoor living products like BBQ’s, outdoor kitchens, and fire pits.

How about you?

Do you step in your ideal customer’s shoes and find out what motivates him to invest in your services or buy your products? And if you did walk around in your client’s shoes, did it help you better nail down your marketing message?

Here are some questions to get you started on your tagline:

  1. Who is your ideal client? How do you solve those problems?
  2. What are his or her landscape or lawn care problems?
  3. If you’re an outdoor living manufacturer or in sales, how do you meet your clients’ dreams for an outdoor pizza oven, fireplace, or patio furniture?
  4. Finally, how are you going to let your ideal clients know about the problems you solve or the dreams you design?
  5. Do you know what keyphrases people are putting in Google, Bing, or Yahoo to find you?

Think about these questions—have a brainstorm session with your sales force or your web designer, and see what all of you come up with, and then narrow it down to its simplest terms to create your tagline.

If you want to know more about taglines, here’s an article I wrote about a similar topic, Unique Selling Proposition, for TURF magazine: http://bit.ly/1aCLH5S.

3 Ways to Come Up with Landscape/Lawn Care/Outdoor Living Blogging Topics

Are you running out of blog ideas?

If you’ve been following this blog for the past 18 months, you’ll be able to pick out some recurrent themes:

  1. The importance of beefing up your landscape/lawn care/outdoor living website with compelling content. And not just web copy (written words), but also videos, photos of before and after projects (with happy clients in them). And I’ve encouraged you to effectively use social media to build your green business’s platform and get the news out when you’ve something new online to share.
  2. The importance of localizing your website and blogging to gather interest among readers who’ll call you for business. My biggest push: Even though the Yellow Pages might’ve gone the way of the dodo bird, don’t forget about your geographical audience.
  3. The importance of keeping a consistent web and social media presence to garner trust and bring more people to you.

Yet, after you or your writer have been blogging awhile, you may find that your landscape/lawn care/outdoor living ideas are drying up. You’ve done everything I recommended, plus more. And the well is running dry.

So what do you do?

Here are three places to find new ideas to get the blogging ball rolling again:

  1. Look up keyword searches on Google Trends. How do people find your blogs? Ideally, if you’ve hired an Internet marketing agency that specializes in localization, they probably supply you with this information. If not, you need to do it yourself.
    I’m not an expert in Google Trends, but this is what I figured out by plugging in the keywords “build swimming pool:”
  • Under regions, I got this
    UnderRegion
  • Under queries, I got this
    UnderQ
  • Under rising, I got this
    UnderQ2

So now I have some keywords to work with even if my pretend pool business is not located in the top subregions. You can use “build a pool (which was the most popular keyword search);” “inground swimming pools;” “natural swimming pools.” Additionally, you can write about “cost of a swimming pool;” “swimming pool design;” and “building a pool.”

  1. Check out your blog’s statistics. What were your most popular blogs? Can you write more about those subtopics? What about comments? Use comments to write new blog content.
  2. Look at the junk mail that’s delivered to your home’s mailbox. Last week, I got a mailer from a big box store. They had three pamphlets labeled: “Welcome Home,” “Backyard Living,” and “Curb Appeal.” In the Curb Appeal pamphlet there were “Tips for Tender Loving Lawn Care.” Have you ever written a blog about giving your readers’ lawns TLC? Play around with it—just don’t copy someone else’s work because your Google rankings WILL drop and you could get in trouble for plagiarism (now I’m sounding like an English teacher!).

As you can see, you have a lot of options when it comes to digging for new blogging ideas.

Have you tried the above? Or if you have other techniques for finding fresh landscape/lawn care/outdoor living blog topics, please share them here!

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