Content Marketing's Role in the Lawn and Garden Industry

 

Here are three tips that landscapers can use to grow revenue through content marketing.

Localizing Content for Targeted Traffic

Lawn care is inherently different by geography. Different climates and soil types make it so that the best practices for lawn care in one city may differ dramatically from those in the next town.

This presents an excellent opportunity for a landscaping company. If you’re trying to show up for ‘how to plant grass,’ you will most likely not succeed because there are already hundreds of websites that are far more authoritative than yours. However, if you write an article targeting ‘how to plant grass in the sandy soil of Virginia Beach,’ you’re going to have far less competition, and you’ll be reaching your target audience.

Here are some topics that you can write about that are relevant to your region:

• Watering restrictions in [region]

• How to plant grass in [region]

• Common lawn pests in [region] and how to deal with them

• A year-round lawn care calendar for [region]

Writing about these topics will also tell Google that you are an authority about lawn care in your region. Consequently, Google will likely rank your website higher in the search results and in the local pack, bringing you more leads and customers.

Maximizing Impact by Repurposing Content

As a landscaper, you are most likely pressed for time, and creating brand-new content is likely not at the top of your to-do list.

No need to fret. You can simply repurpose and recycle your content to minimize effort while maximizing effectiveness. Say you write a blog post on planting grass seed in your city. Sure, it might bring in SEO traffic from Google, but you can also share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. If you have a great picture you took for that blog post, you can put it on Instagram.

You can also send the content directly to your existing customers via email to engage them. Which brings us to our final tip.

Educating Customers to Upsell Services

Landscapers make most of their revenue by upselling existing customers. This is for a few reasons. One, it’s far less expensive to upsell a customer than acquire one. Secondly, you are already going to be at that customer’s property, so you save on drive time. Finally, upsells are generally a value add; customers generally prefer to be given recommendations on how they can improve their lawns. It reduces the amount of thinking they have to do about it.

Using content to educate your existing customers about lawn care can really help you increase your upsell rate with minimal effort. All that is needed is a few short but well-written articles and an email sequence to deliver those articles.

The goal of the articles is first and foremost to educate. Take complex concepts and distill them into layman’s terms so that even someone who knows nothing about lawn care will understand them. Topics can include ‘When to water your lawn’, ‘how to deal with fire ants’ and ‘how do you know if you have a grub infestation?’

By writing about these topics, you are educating your customers about what they need, but also demonstrating your authority on the subject. Generally speaking, your customers will not know a whole lot about lawn care so they will start to defer to your opinion.

Finally, you’ll need to include a subtle call to action within some of your articles. This might be letting your customers know that you have a solution, or can get them a free estimate, or can simply answer questions related to the topic of your article. This is how you get customers to buy.

However, don’t be too aggressive - you don’t want to come across as a salesman. Make sure your article isn’t overly leading and that it doesn’t appear biased. Be straightforward, and add a polite call to action. Something like ‘If you think you might have fire ants, we’d be happy to give you a free diagnosis and recommend a treatment plan.

’Ryan Farley is the Co-founder of LawnStarter Lawn Care, an online and mobile platform that connects homeowners with lawn care professionals for care-free and efficient services!

Showcasing Successful Content Marketing Examples in the Lawn Industry

And here are some great examples of implementing a content marketing strategy in the lawn industry.

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