"Thank you! These are great. I really appreciate the solid writing."
Wendy Komancheck is The Landscape Writer where she provides content writing services for lawn care, landscapers, and outdoor living companies.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.”
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!