Landscaping is undoubtedly one of the most service-oriented businesses in horticulture. Many owners wear assorted hats: owner, designer, and marketer for their landscape company. When you wear the marketing hat, you have a demanding role of promoting your landscape service, while still keeping track of the day to day business of your landscape company. It’s important to stop and put on the marketing hat and think about your marketing stragety and how best to promote your business. One way is through content marketing.
When it comes to content marketing, you must handle a wide variety of tasks, including formulating and implementing a content strategy. You also need to manage and monitor the strategy to ensure success. The organization’s business model and overall marketing plan shape the strategy.
The role requires strong analytical skills to identify market trends and the content needs of target audiences. This makes it easier to deliver great content that helps generate sales leads. From publishing creative landscaping ideas to posting in-depth how-tos, each content piece should be relevant to your audience’s interests.
1. Importance of quality content
Content marketing is widely regarded as an art form and each published piece must meet minimum quality standards. Doing so enables landscaping marketing owners to set achievable goals for the content. Some of the key targets include making the content shareable, generating a discussion on landscaping topics through reader comments and generating leads or sales.
However, individual pieces cannot meet all targets. Setting such content marketing goals leads to a failed strategy. The ideal content provides a great way to connect with the audience. To meet this and other targets, each piece must be of high quality.
The articles should be readable for everyone and showcase expert knowledge about various aspects of landscaping. Online audiences trust authoritative sources. For this reason, landscaping companies need to make a good impression and establish themselves as a reliable source of information.
It is vital to demonstrate consistency and passion about the topics. Quality content builds a captive, loyal audience, thus allowing marketing managers to reach specific content goals.
The content marketing strategy should address the big ideas (or solutions) that the landscaping business represents. These ideas help the brand stand out from the competition. They portray the overall experience or level of service that potential customers can expect.
Once the development process of the company story is complete, owners need to establish strategic channels. Identifying the ideal channels simplifies the delivery of content to the audience. The channels should match the context in which the readers view the content. This process requires the formulation of a channel plan.
Some of the key factors to consider in the plan include identifying all suitable platforms for publishing landscaping content. The plan will also set channel-specific goals that complement the overall content strategy.
Access to analytics is a key benefit of engaging existing customers and prospects through content marketing. This enables you to make informed decisions or tweak the strategy in response to the content performance. From bounce rates and referrals and social media stats, the metrics make it easier to improve performance and meet specific content goals.
However, analyzing metrics can be time-consuming. Hence, it is important to prioritize specific aspects of the data. The measurement activities should reveal content strategies that work and provide solutions for the ineffective aspects of the approach.
Understanding these basic concepts of content marketing enables landscape owners to deliver powerful, engaging content on various landscaping topics. However, the online marketing landscape, pardon the pun, is constantly evolving and there is a need to adopt dynamic strategies that respond to the changing needs of audiences. If you are interested in learning more about how an inbound or content marketing stragety can benefit your landscaping business, contact Neon Goldfish today.
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By Ken Franzen
President / Co-Founder of Neon Goldfish
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