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.