Marketing & Sales Insight for the Lawn & Landscape Industry

I’ve been in your seat...scratching my head at meetings with a local digital agency, begging them to just make some sort of sense of it to me. I’m not naturally a “numbers guy”. If you throw too many website analytic figures and percentages onto a report, my brain turns to mush. Give me the big picture then tell me how to fix it!

Although I’ve learned how to understand more of these numbers over the years, I’m still amazed at how many digital marketing experts and landscaping professionals are still content with mushed brains. You should be able to more easily understand what really matters to grow your business.

I have always loved cars. First, there was the surprise ride in a Porsche 911 Turbo on my 13th birthday, driven by the local dealer at about 160 mph on a local highway. Then there was my mom’s 1981 Corvette with the Pete Jackson gear drive, humming and thumping when it picked me up from school.

At 16, I got my own first car, a 1965 Mustang Fastback. And last summer, another dream came true when I got behind the wheel at the NASCAR Experience in Dover, DE.

The sleek clean lines of a flashy car, the screech of tires and rumbling engines, the pump of adrenaline. It’s no wonder I ended up as an inbound marketing professional…

Wait… What??

What do these sweet rides have to do with inbound marketing? More than you think.

If you are a local business with a goal of generating more leads and sales from your website, then this begins with understanding, first, how much traffic you get to your website each month and, second, where these visitors are coming from.

We'll focus on the latter in this post.

I promise to keep this blog post short. In return I want you to spend a few minutes reviewing the graphic below.

These charts are showing the website traffic growth (measured by "visits") for five companies we've been working with over the past three years. Traffic growth is tracked from January of 2014 through what we project for January of 2017. So three full years of data.

Most of you have (hopefully) created a sales goal for your company and expect your team to meet or exceed those expectations.

But reaching your goal isn’t something that happens all at once: You and your salespeople have to work toward it one day at a time.

To know if you’re staying on track, you need to keep up with your leads and prospects throughout the sales cycle, making it vital to have a reliable process in place.

Here’s why and how to set up a sales tracking process for your lawn care or landscape company.

In this article I want to introduce you to a new app and software that I'm really excited about. It's called Describeit, and for full disclosure, I'm an advisor for this startup. I've invited David Marciniak from Describeit to give you guys an overview of their software.

Have you noticed your reach on your company's Facebook page nosedive over the past several months? Trust us, it's not just your page and updates failing to reach your hard-earned fans.

Chances are your "organic reach" — the total number of people you can reach for free on Facebook by posting to your Page — has been on a sharp decline like that of the majority of Facebook pages.

This drop is no accident, as previously acknowledged by Facebook.

Digital consultancy Social@Ogilvy has expertly charted the freefall:

In 2012, Facebook famously restricted organic reach of content published from brand pages to about 16 percent. In December 2013, another round of changes reduced it even more.

By February 2014, according to a Social@Ogilvy analysis of more than 100 brand pages, organic reach hovered at 6 percent, a decline of 49 percent from peak levels in October. For large pages with more than 500,000 Likes, organic reach hit 2 percent in February. And Facebook sources were unofficially advising community managers to expect it to approach zero in the foreseeable future.

Organic reach of the content brands publish in Facebook is destined to hit zero. It’s only a matter of time.