What Are Your Internet Marketing Plans for 2015?
Tips and Ideas to Get the Most Out of Your Marketing Dollars
I know that it’s still late August or early September by the time you read this post. And there’s still three to four more months of 2014 left. Yet now is the perfect time to consider your 2015 Internet marketing plan for your landscape or lawn care business.
As you look at your marketing budget, think about how your newest clients found you. Did they find you by a door hanger that you left on their door back in the spring? Do they own an iPhone and found you through a mobile Google search? Did their friend or neighbor tell them about you? Did that reference give those prospects your website address for them to check you out before they called?
All of the above information is vital to determine how much you’ll need to budget for your 2015 Internet marketing campaign. Internet marketing includes Google ads, your website, and social media efforts—especially if you outsource that work to a content writer, a website designer, and a social media strategist.
If you don’t outsource your work to those professionals named above, are you satisfied with your Internet marketing efforts? If you’re not getting the results that you want, you may want to consider setting aside some money in your budget to outsource those social media and web design jobs that eat away at your time.
Finding the Right Marketing People
It can be difficult to find the right people to write your web content, to design your website, and to manage your social media campaigns. So it’s important that you hire the right people to do the job right the first time.
I can’t speak about web designers and social media managers when it comes to quality of work. I do know of some folks who are in these businesses that I would highly recommend.
However, since I’m a professional web writer, I can advise you on some questions that you should ask before you hire that candidate to write content for you.
Before you interview them, check out their websites:
- Read their “About Us” page. What are their passions? What do they specialize in? What’s their business’s mission?
- Look at their portfolio. What kinds of projects have they taken on? Have they worked with small businesses in the trade industries or do they prefer corporate work? You can tell when you look at the companies that they’ve freelanced for as well as their current list of clients.
- Check out their LinkedIn profile. Yes, get on LinkedIn and check out their profile. Read their summaries, see what groups they’re involved in and what causes they support. If they belong to certain environmental groups, they’re probably not going to want to write about synthetic fertilizers and other controversial landscape or lawn care topics.
I’ve heard from various landscape and lawn care professionals about the disappointment that they’ve experienced in the writers that they hired. To avoid having to rewrite your writer’s blog and/or firing them, take the time to get to know them, what they believe, and what they know about your industry. It’ll save you time, money and aggravation in the long run.
Landscape/Lawn Care Ideas to Get You Started
On another note, the end of 2014 is drawing near. You’ve had a busy season and you realized that you want to restart your blogging efforts again. If you choose to write your own content, you may also be realizing that you’ve run out of ideas or need a creative jumpstart.
If the above describes you, please keep visiting this blog. Periodically, I may blog about a list of ideas. When I read about lawn care and landscaping trends, I share them with my Twitter followers. I encourage my followers to use these ideas to blog about informing their clients and prospects about new trends that they should know about. If you want some easy tips, please follow me @LawnNLandwriter.
And as a bonus takeaway for you, here are five blogging ideas:
- You already think in seasonal terms with lawn and landscape; so continue that thought pattern when it comes to your blogs. For example, what do your clients and prospects need to know in March? April? May? Throughout the rest of the growing season?
- Remember, one of your Internet marketing goals is to communicate trust. One way to build that trust is to post content that will solve your clients’ problems or touch on their desires. Keep those thoughts in mind every time you plan your next blog post, Tweet, or LinkedIn discussion.
- What do you do that is unique? Last night, I tweeted a blog idea to my followers about tick and flea lawn treatment. Do you provide that service? Or maybe you design and build irrigation systems. These are the types of information that you need to highlight on your blogs and other social media outlets. You may have people in your service location who are looking for those services.
- Don’t forget to localize. You know that as a green business you serve only a set region unless you’re a franchise. So, don’t forget to include major cities, counties, and states that you serve as some of your keywords. By localizing, you’ll attract prospects from your service area. It helps convert them from window shoppers to paying clients.
- Don’t forget to check your stats. Some people call them audits. This is a project usually done by your web design professional or your marketing consultant will arrange to have it done. An audit shows you where you’re getting the most traction from your online efforts and which ones didn’t pan out. Then, you can adjust your Internet marketing plan to build more in those areas that are getting the most clicks.
What are your Internet marketing plans for 2015? Do you need to perform an audit? Or do you need some blog ideas? Email me your comments and questions at wendy@landscapewriter.com or leave them in the comment section.