As you’ve grown in your lawn care, tree service, or landscaping career you probably have some “blunders”. I know I have my own tales to tell.
A "blunder" refers to a careless or serious mistake, typically one that is made as a result of a lack of attention, judgment, or skill. These unintended, sometimes significant, negative consequences could have been avoided with more careful planning or consideration.
Most (if not all) green industry companies have blunders when it comes to creating content.
So what is sabotaging the content marketing strategy for your lawn care, tree care, or landscaping business?
(🎙️Listen to the Audio Version of this Article)
Image Source: High Prairie Outdoors
Foundational Info
Let’s get some definitions and important facts out of the way first before I give you insights.
Important Facts
- 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine (Brightedge).
- 76% of marketers report that content marketing generates demand/leads (Content Marketing Institute).
- 70% of people rather get information from blogs than traditional advertisements (Demand Metric).
- Over the past 16+ years, Landscape Leadership has created thousands of blog articles for dozens of green industry companies (landscaping, lawn care, tree service, pest control).
- I’ve personally written hundreds of blog articles over the past 15 years. This has taught me a lot of lessons (which I’m happy to share with you).
Definitions
- Content Marketing: I am referring to written content in the form of blog articles, case studies, guides, and other long-form written content. These principles can also apply to your website copywriting, video scripts, and social media but are not the focus of this article.
- Strategy: Content marketing strategy begins before ever typing a word of a blog post or other written content. The strategy will be implemented within your creative concepts and processes, but we are staying higher level in this article.
Now that we have that squared away, let’s dive into some tips to help you succeed in your content marketing strategy.
1. Goals & Guidance
Many green industry companies embark on their content marketing journey without clear goals, as if wandering down a maze, not sure of where they'll end up.
The absence of specific objectives to grow particular divisions of your business means your content strategy may lack focus, diluting its potential impact.
For instance, if you create 48 articles per year and try to divide topics into 6-7 service departments, it slows progress. Focus on 1-3 main service divisions and have your content marketing strategy reflect that.
The Fixes
- Embed Content in Your Culture: Content creation should be integral to your company's ethos, championed by leadership, and embraced across all departments.
- Brand Content Identity: Aim for your brand to become synonymous with helpfulness and quality, positioning yourselves as a useful resource for your audience.
- Recognize Limitations: Your team has limitations in time and expertise. This is why seeking specialized external support from a lawn care and landscaping marketing agency can provide the guidance needed to craft an impactful strategy.
[RELATED READING: 5 Reasons Why Your Salespeople Need to Start Blogging - Like Yesterday]
2. Audience Ambiguity
A common pitfall is a vague definition of who your content marketing is for. This ambiguity leads to marketing efforts that miss the mark, failing to connect with any group effectively.
The Fixes
- Develop Buyer Personas: Create detailed buyer personas (semi-fictionalized characters) to guide your content from topic choice to tone. There may be several personas to address potential commercial landscaping prospects. Likewise, your residential audience may have a couple of different buyer types.
- Create Messaging Guidelines: Utilize frameworks like "StoryBrand" (as Landscape Leadership has done since 2019) to create engaging content and establish a brand voice that resonates with your audience. A clear understanding of your audience informs not just what you write about, but how you present your information. It also helps you create content marketing that is recognizable and unique.
[RELATED READING: See How Easily You Can Use These 5 Elements of Storytelling to Sell More Work]
3. Investment & Inconsistency
Many lawn and landscaping companies attempt DIY content creation or employ freelance writers who might lack strategic insight. Or (worse), they see content as a commodity to buy on “the cheap” by unqualified writers or spit out crap AI content marketing.
This often results in sporadic output or superficial "thought-ish" content that fails to deeply engage readers.
[RELATED PODCAST: Thoughtful vs. Thoughtless Content & How to Leverage It Internally]
The Fixes
- Consistent Creation: Aim to produce 3-6 articles monthly, supplemented by larger content marketing resources throughout the year. Stick to your deadlines!
- Create Atypical, In-depth Content: Aim for 800-2,000 word articles. There is evidence that suggests that short content doesn’t perform as well (SEM Rush). Make it your goal to create the best possible resource that trumps what your competition is churning out.
- Promote Content: Recognize content as a chance to connect and leverage evergreen pieces for ongoing engagement on social channels. Don’t just post them one time and never reuse them. When sharing, add unique context in your intro text in social posts.
- Enhance Written Content With Multimedia: To create more engaging content, add 5-10 professional photos that illustrate points and feature your team and clients. Likewise, adding relevant professional videos can help clients spend more time on your content marketing assets (a great signal to Google).
- AI as a Tool: Only use AI to improve the quality of your strategy, not replace the nuances of a human-guided approach.
[RELATED READING: 10 Things Landscaping Salespeople Shouldn’t (& Should) Do on LinkedIn]
4. Sucky SEO
Understanding your audience is one thing; making your content easily discoverable online is another.
Many companies neglect lawn care and landscaping SEO best practices, undermining their efforts to establish "topical authority" in the eyes of search engines.
Video Source: HubSpot
[RELATED VIDEO SERIES: SEO for Lawn Care & Landscaping Companies]
The Fixes
- Incorporate SEO Intelligently: To create topical authority, develop “content clusters”, centering around a larger “pillar page”. These content marketing assets will likely be 3,000-4,000 words, serving as an overview and linking to the cluster’s “spokes”, detailed blog articles that dive deeper as well as other pages on your website.
- Link Back to Pillar Pages: Likewise, your blog articles and pages should link back to these pillar page resources. This helps Google understand the interconnection of various pages and articles on lawn care and landscaping websites.
- Use Location-Based Terms: There are times to naturally integrate geographic references into your content marketing. Using local terms in some articles and case studies can enhance local SEO.
5. Metrics & Modification
Many lawn and landscape companies have a lack of understanding regarding content marketing metrics. This oversight leads to missed opportunities for optimization and improvement.
The Fixes
- Identify Content KPIs: Seek to understand how many views and what level of engagement is considered a success.
- Get the Right Tools: Utilize tools such as HubSpot and Google Analytics to track how content is performing.
- Re-optimize & Re-write: Regularly revisit content. Re-optimizing content (slight changes) can significantly boost its performance. Acknowledge that not all content will excel; some may require rewrites. Submit these changes to Google Search Console.
[RELATED READING: 5 Meaningful Website Metrics to Understand & Track]
Learning From Your Blunders & Mistakes of Others
I hope as you start to face your content marketing blunders, you give yourselves some grace. Heck, I do this for a living and I have plenty of hard lessons and mistakes that have taught me these principles.
The goal is to use your failures (or inaction) to propel you forward. This is what it takes to develop a successful content marketing strategy.
Image Source: Landcrafters Florida
Set great goals. Find the right partners. Get to intimately know your audience. Invest in quality and consistency. Understand SEO best practices. And measure and adjust your strategy as time goes on.
You’ve got what it takes!
If you enjoy in-depth resources like this to grow your lawn care or landscaping business, join over 5,000 of your industry peers and subscribe to our blog. And if you’re ready to find a partner that’s invested in your content marketing strategy, request a consultation with us.
