Category Archives: Content Strategy

Content marketing strategy for landscaping business

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Content Marketing Strategy for Landscaping Business

This year I have written content for more than four landscaping businesses so it will be safe to say that people in this particular industry realize the importance of targeted content writing and content marketing. So what should be your content marketing strategy if you want to promote your landscaping business?

In this business people are primarily influenced by the following:

  • Your experience/portfolio
  • The clients you have worked for
  • Personal recommendations
  • Visual collateral
  • Constant communication

If you don’t have a blog then you should definitely start a blog for your landscaping business website. A blog is not just a “trendy” thing to have: it is a top-notch communication channel. If this doesn’t motivate you, a regularly published blog can increase your search traffic easily by 100-200% within 3-4 months (it depends on the frequency and quality of your blog posts).

When we use the word “content marketing strategy” it means you are not simply going to publish content – you’re going to make sure that the content reaches the right audience and then it makes the right impact.

Not all your landscaping clients will be visiting your website. They will be on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on other blogs and websites or simply looking around for a similar service on various search engines. Your content marketing strategy involves using multiple channels as well as multiple content formats to reach your prospective clients. Since I provide textual content, this is my focus.

So in order to launch a content marketing strategy for your landscaping business you need to do the following if you haven’t already done so:

  • Start a blog under your own domain name (something like http://your-business-website.com/blog) and start publishing content on it on a regular basis. Focus on quality but also be regular. In the beginning it will help you if you can post everyday or at least thrice a week. The growth of your blog should be gradual. It’s not a good strategy to hire a writer in the Philippines, for instance, make him create 50 blog posts and then publish them in one go. In a day, publish just a single blog post.
  • Create Facebook and Twitter profiles and start interacting with people over there. Although this might sound like social networking but your content plays a vital role in creating a solid presence for you or your brand. People will recognize you on the basis of the content you regularly post under your profiles.
  • Carry out a content analysis of your business website. Are all the necessary pages there? Do you think all the information the client needs in order to make a decision in your favor is present on your website? Does it have testimonials and the FAQs section? Does it properly explain what sort of landscaping services you provide and what sort of material you use?
  • Set up an account with an email marketing service such as mailchimp. Permission-based marketing, although as old as the contemporary Internet, still rules the roost when it comes to reaching out to your target audience in the most effective manner. You will need high-quality content for your email marketing campaigns.

You must be wondering once you have established these channels (and many more) what you’re going to talk about. For instance, your blog. Of course you will be talking about landscaping. You can start by explaining the various aspects of how you carry out individual projects and what parameters you take into consideration. You can talk about various forms of landscaping, materials, methods and architectural conventions. Once you have started, the ideas begin to come on their own.

Remember that link building must be an integral part of your overall content marketing strategy. Google looks for quality websites and blogs that link back to you. So continuously create content people would like to link to as this will significantly improve your search engine rankings for your targeted keywords – primary, secondary and longtail.

The same holds true for your social networking and social media profiles. Keep in mind that search engines these days list social media content also. So be careful of what you are posting.

The difference between content marketing and content strategy

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Difference between content marketing and content strategy

There was a time when I used to think that content marketing is a subset of content strategy, but now I believe that both content marketing and content strategy can be subsets and supersets of each other.

You cannot have a successful content marketing campaign without a content strategy, and a well-define content marketing campaign is an integral part of your content strategy.

So, if they are intertwined, what are the defining differences between content marketing and content strategy? What are the key differences?

In simple terms, the insights and data that you get through content strategy, you implement in content marketing. Content strategy gives your content marketing the needed direction. Without this direction, your content marketing turns haphazard and ineffective.

If content marketing consists of publishing regular content, content strategy is knowing what content to publish, what audience to target, and which platforms to use for publishing content.

As mentioned above, content strategy is based on the metrics and the insights that you obtain through analytics, observation, experimentation and third-party data.

Content strategy

What is content strategy?

What is content strategy?

As mentioned above, our actions must be well thought of if we want to achieve something. Here is what content strategy involves:

  • Knowing what content to publish and distribute.
  • Knowing who is your target audience and why?
  • Clearly defining KPIs.
  • Knowing how to obtain traffic and engagement data.
  • Streamlining content publishing based on goals and insights.
  • Zeroing in on the platforms that you will use to publish and distribute your content.
  • Establishing an audience engagement policy.
  • Figuring out which content type or format best suits your content marketing KPIs.

First, you need to know what is the purpose of publishing and distributing content and exactly why you need content marketing? How it can serve your business and help you promote your cause?

To be a successful communicator, you must know whom you’re going to communicate to. You should know your audience, you should know what they want, what they’re looking for, what their concerns are.

Data insight is a great power. When you set in motion your content marketing strategy, you will need to constantly analyze your data so that you can make timely changes.

You need a content writing and content publishing roadmap so that you remain focused and you always know what you’re going to published to cater to your core audience.

Merely publishing content doesn’t help you much these days. This is where content marketing comes in. You need to promote and broadcast your content so that it reaches the maximum number of people. For that you need to shortlist channels that you’re going to use to distribute your content, for example search engines, social networking websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

You also need to constantly engage your audience. Unlike conventional marketing, content marketing involves two-way communication between you and your audience (your customers and clients). Without meaningful and regular engagement it’s difficult to establish a rapport and make yourself more relatable and identifiable.

Content can be of multiple formats and if you have limited budget, you cannot target all the existing formats. For example, you can have written content (content writing, etc.), videos, presentation slides on SlideShare, images on your own blog, Facebook and Pinterest, sketches, infographics and basically, everything that you can use to communicate data and ideas. You may like to do something like content writing or images in the beginning and later on start focusing on other formats of content too.

This basically sums up your content strategy.

Content marketing

Content marketing explained

Content marketing explained

This involves folding your sleeves and actually getting down to the grind.

Whatever steps you have listed in your content strategy document, you implement during content marketing. Interestingly, there is a reason why there is “marketing” in content marketing.

Yes, sure, you publish targeted content. But, merely publishing content doesn’t bring you success. You need to “market” that content – you need to promote your content so that maximum number of people can access it and are then drawn to your website or blog.

Marketing is a proactive activity. You need to take steps so that the visibility of your content increases. You improve your search engine rankings. You broadcast newsletter updates. You engage audiences on different social media platforms. You closely watch and follow trends and publish content to leverage them. You make sure that you stick to your content calendar.

Why is content marketing important? I mean, why not simply advertise and promote your business the way people have been doing for decades?

There is a reason why a greater number of businesses are adopting content marketing rather than sticking to the old ways of business promotion. People these days don’t like being sold to. They want you to gain their trust. This is done through publishing valuable content.

On the Internet (and in real life) it is not physically possible to interact with thousands of prospective customers and clients on daily basis. Your content on the other hand can do the job seamlessly.

Content marketing is also called inbound marketing. Inbound marketing means your prospective customers and clients come to your website on their own after accessing your content or while trying to access useful information. It is their decision. It is they who find your link somewhere, click the link, and come to your website.

Outbound marketing on the other hand is a traditional form of marketing where you interrupt people while they’re doing something else.

You assume that they are going to be thrilled at receiving your marketing message, whereas this is not the case. People are annoyed when you are urging them to buy from you while they want to watch their favorite movie, or read an interesting blog post, or watch an enchanting cat video. You’re interrupting them, and you’re not just interrupting them, you’re also urging them to part with their money on an item or service that they may need, but right now, psychologically, are not prepared to buy.

Through content marketing you are simply there. You solve their problems. You keep them engaged. You seed conversations. They become familiar to you. They become comfortable to your presence in their lives (or on their screens). The more familiar you become, the more they trust you.

Here is a good definition of content marketing from this Forbes article (slightly old)

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly-defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

What should a small business focus on, content marketing or content strategy?

Frankly, there is no use doing content marketing without content strategy. Without strategy, your content marketing is going to be haphazard. It will be like throwing darts in the darkness. You may succeed, or you may not succeed.

Creating a content strategy may seem intimidating in the beginning, but it is not. Even if you spend 3 hours every month strategizing your content marketing, or at least, this is what I think, especially if you’re a small business, it is more than enough.

What is strategy after all? It is being aware of your environment, analyzing your environment, and then controlling your actions accordingly, to reach your goal.

For example, a strategy has a swot analysis – your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You may already have good content you can leverage by reusing and repurposing. There may be many gaps you need to fill. There may be some really good and useful topics you can write and publish content on. How is your competition faring? What can you do to beat your competition?

Using your analytics data is also a part of your content strategy and based on that you can give a direction to your content marketing efforts. If you use Google Analytics, your dashboard tells you the type of traffic your content is attracting. Is this the right kind of traffic or you need different traffic?

If you’re thinking in these terms, you are already using content strategy to make your content marketing effective.

How to keep on creating fresh content for your content marketing strategy

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One of the greatest hurdles faced by content marketing is creating fresh, engaging content regularly. You need more content to cover possibly every topic under your niche and in order to draw attention to that content from people as well as search engines it needs to be highly relevant, useful and well structured.

When you initiate your content marketing strategy as a serious business it is given that you’re going to pursue quality no matter what. It’s regularity you need to worry about. Some businesses publish new content every day, some prefer it twice or thrice a week, some make it a weekly affair and some even do it once or twice a month. The frequency primarily depends on where you are publishing your content. You might be publishing it under your regular business website, on your blog, on other blogs (guest blogging, for instance), news and analysis websites (Washington Post, Huffington Post, Techcrunch, etc.) or social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Listed below are a few ways you can get a ton of quality content on an ongoing basis.

Maintain an editorial calendar

An editorial calendar keeps you focused and it also helps you know which topics you have already covered, which topics you need to improve upon and where you have to publish more.

As already mentioned a well-managed content marketing strategy requires you to publish content on varied platforms. Just focusing on one publishing platform might not be a good approach. For instance, if you are just publishing high-quality content under your own website it may not get the kind of attention it deserves. You need to spread your content so that it also becomes visible at other places. It means you have to generate content for other blogs (it is called guest blogging), niche publications, article directories, wikis and social networking websites.

Without an editorial calendar keeping track of all these platforms can prove to be a gargantuan task and unless you have a team you won’t be able to focus on all of them on a daily basis. On Facebook and Twitter you will need to be pretty regular as visibility matters a lot there. You can allocate certain days to your own blog and others for external publications. Accordingly you can create topics for your own blog as well as other blogs. You can use an Excel sheet to create your editorial calendar. Some also prefer Google calendar.

Use your existing content to create new content

You can get lots of interesting ideas from your existing content. For instance, I can write a completely new blog post (300-500 words or more) on this very topic – How to create new content from your existing content.

Whenever you cover a topic there are many subtopics that you simply touch upon. They may need further elaboration but it might not be within the scope of the current topic. There might be some bullet points that need blog posts and articles exclusively for themselves. This is also an added advantage. Once you have created content around those words, you can hyperlink to this newly created content from existing articles and blog posts and improve your SEO.

Update and improve your existing content

There is always some scope for improving your existing content and once you have updated it, it is as good as new. Suppose you wrote a blog post in the times of MySpace that might not be relevant today. Either you can mention this in the blog post or make necessary changes.

Maintain an ideas file

Ideas are hard to come by especially when you are sitting and thinking about them. They are random dust motes that need to be captured as soon as they manifest. You can maintain an ideas file to do this. As soon as you get an idea for a new blog post or a new update on Twitter and Facebook, quickly jot it down in your ideas file.

My personal favorite for this is Google Docs because you can access them from any device. This way you don’t necessarily have to be in front of your computer or laptop in case a new idea strikes you. You can use your mobile phone or your tablet to save the idea.

If writing seems to be a problem, you can record your ideas using audio, video and photographs.

Make regular content publishing a part of your thinking process

The more you think the more ideas you get. It’s like building a particular muscle in your body. If you keep using your arms, lifting weights with them, they grow stronger and stronger. In the same manner, if you keep on thinking about different writing topics for your content marketing you will keep on getting new ideas.

Track conversations on Facebook and Twitter

Most of the time it is just gibberish on Facebook and Twitter so you might have to use some tools to track relevant conversations. You can use hash tags; for instance if you want to track conversations on content marketing you may try following the hash tag #contentmarketing. Similarly you can join dedicated pages on Facebook. Pay close attention to the sort of questions people ask and out of those questions try to make new articles and blog posts.

Look for questions and issues in various question/answer forums and websites

Have you ever seen the “Answers” tab in LinkedIn? Similarly have you been following questions on Quora? Try to find out what sort of questions people are asking in your particular niche and then create content around those questions.

Engage your audience

You will be able to engage your audience through your blog as well as social networking profiles. Initially it may take some time but if you post relevant content for a sustained period gradually you will build an audience you will be able to engage with. Ask them questions. Request them to let you know what they would like to read on your blog and what sort of issues they would like you to address.

Follow other blogs and websites

This is an oft-repeated advice. You can get lots of content writing and content publishing ideas from other blogs and websites. Just as you can use your own pre-existing content to create new writing ideas, you can also get ideas from others’ writings.

As already mentioned above, quality as well as persistence is required for a successful content marketing strategy and generating new content writing ideas is as important as having a content strategy in place.

Creating content for mobile devices

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Browsing the Internet via mobile devices no longer remains a fad of the geeks. With more and more people using smart phones and tablet PCs to access the Internet and browse websites, creating content for mobile devices no longer remains an option – it is a necessity.

There are two ways you can create content for mobile devices: formatting existing content so that it looks good and presentable on various mobile devices, and creating new content from scratch specifically for mobile devices.

Creating content for mobile devices is totally different from creating content for laptops and PCs. For that you have to understand why people would go to your website via their mobile device?

The “why” in the above-mentioned question can also be divided among two types of devices: cellphones and tablets PCs. Whereas tablets like the iPad can be used to read lengthy articles, reports and even complete novels and books (I do that), it is difficult to read long streams of text using mobile phones due to their size. The screens are smaller compared to tablets and people might be doing scores of other things while using their mobile phones.

According to a 2011 Nielsen study around 86% people in the USA watch TV while using their mobile phones for various activities. Just observe people around you carrying their mobile phones and you will notice that there will be very few people who specifically sit down somewhere and use their phone. They are always in the midst of something else. They are conversing with somebody, travelling in train or bus, waiting for their turn in a restaurant or a clinic or waiting at the airport, to name just a few. What does this tell you?

Although people might be visiting various websites using their mobile devices, they might also be doing scores of other things simultaneously. That needs to be kept in mind. Long chunks of text or indirect references will definitely confuse them or distract them. No paragraph should be more than a sentence or at the most a couple of sentences.

When people are visiting your website through their mobile device they are not interested in the nitty-gritty of what motivates you and how you feel about your business. They simply want to know what you can deliver, how you can deliver, by what time and at what cost. They’re looking for information that can help them decide in a clear-cut manner.

Does it mean the information needs to be totally drab? Not necessarily. You can engage your reader through your mobile content but you just need to keep in mind that there should be less text and more message.

Winning the SEO Race By Creating Content With Your Competitors In Mind

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One of the most common conversations that I have with my customers surrounds the idea that they need to create content with their competitors in mind. Common reactions include:

  • "I don’t want to help my competitors!"
  • "Why on earth would I do that!? My competitors will never link to me!"
  • "Why do I even want my competitors to link to me?"

You may feel this way as well. It does sound kind of strange. After working in this industry now for about 13 years, I have learned something extremely important. If you can get a small majority of the people that currently rank in the search engines for the same keywords that you want to rank for, Google often considers you the expert.

Search Engines Want Authorities Appearing In Their Search Result Pages.

Think about the logic to this. Google wants to show its users the most relevant search results. Therefore, the pages that currently come up in the top 100 or so of the search results, are the sites that Google feels are the most relevant. So, if 10 of those 100 sites link to your website, with specific anchor text that contains the keyword you want to rank for, Google is obviously going to consider your website an authority on that topic.

Creating Something Great For Your Industry.

As an example, in 2007, I opened an Internet marketing agency with my business partners. We knew, that because the website was so new (brand-new in fact), we were going to have to do something really impactful if we were going to rank well for keyword phrases related to "Internet marketing agency". Obviously, there would be a large number of websites that had a lot of great links already because of us being in the seo service industry. We looked for "holes" in the content currently available… needs that maybe we could fill and we created a list of well linked to resource pages in the industry. We determined, through all of this research, that there was a great need for a link building chart. So, we created a visual representation of the methods in which you can use to build links into your website. We allow the people to download a high-resolution version of this in PDF format. Then, we actually put a price tag on it and allow people to purchase the chart in printed form.

Spread The Word About Your Awesome Stuff.

Next, we put together a list of websites that commonly talked about link building. We found their e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information and simply reached out to them. We said things like, "I hope all is well with you. We just wanted to reach out quickly and let you know that we have created a really cool chart that breaks down all of the different ways in which your customers can build links into their websites. We think that they’ll probably find it pretty useful and it could be a really great resource for you to be able to share with them in a graphical manner how you build links. Feel free to use it as often as you like. All that we ask, is that you mention it on your website and give us some credit. Have an incredible day!"

Within a week, we had hundreds of links pointing into our website. Today even, if you Google "SEO link building," you’ll find the chart somewhere on the first page of Google. Not positive, but I’m pretty sure we have not built a link to that page since we created the chart.

Make It Unique Or Better Than What’s Already Out There.

Now, you don’t have to spend the money or time creating and infographic, a laboratory, or anything like that. But, as long as you create something that is better or more unique than anything else that’s out there, you can have a winner!

Think about this! If you’re in the insurance industry, and you’re really great at sales, why not make a guide that contains information and links to every single insurance sales related resource on the Internet? Then, go to forums and comment on blogs that a lot of insurance salespeople read and tell them about it.

Help And Be Helped.

But don’t forget this. If you sound overly promotional and not very helpful your not going to get the results you’re looking for. Zig Zigler said it best, "if you help enough people to get what they want, you’re sure to get what you want."