Content Marketing: Generate & Nurture Ideal Leads - The Edge from the National Association of Landscape Professionals

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Content Marketing: Generate & Nurture Ideal Leads

Tony Ricketts, owner of Lawnline Marketing, presented in a webinar how content marketing can help generate and nurture ideal leads.

Content marketing can help with the problem of having no leads, or only bad leads.

“In a digital world, content is king,” Ricketts says. “Content is everything. They’re going to only see your content before they speak with you, before they learn more about your business. Your content is everything.”

Content Types

With content, it sets the foundation for getting found on search engines and also prequalifies visitors as they directly associate your services with your content. It also can guide your client through the landscape buying journey.

Ricketts breaks the content down into five different types: main website pages, project case studies, targeted blogs, press releases and cultural insights.

Of these five, he says your main website pages, project case studies and targeted blogs are the most critical.

  1. Main Website Pages – these are service pages, area pages, other pages on your website like FAQs. These pages help with search discovery and should be detailed.
  2. Project Case Studies – these are dedicated to one single project. Include photos and videos of the project and give in-depth details of the process.
  3. Targeted Blogs – these can be educational, cover trends & ideas or cultural insights like who works for your company.

Ricketts says blogs should answer common questions and these should be detailed posts. He advises posting at least once a week on your blog. You can also provide your opinions on trends and ideas, create lists and comparisons. These build your authority as an expert and creating evergreen content can help with various marketing strategies.

Content for Each Step of the Journey 

Ricketts compares the customer’s buying journey to a story where they are on a quest to design the perfect landscape and you are the guide helping lead the way. As the guide, you provide a map for the customer and help them complete their quest.

The story chapters of the journey are ideas, research, estimates and execute. The ideas and research chapters are the lead generation phase while the estimates and execute chapters are the lead nurturing phase.

Ricketts says it’s important to create content for each chapter of the customer’s story. Make your website the hub that presents this content and create content that solves internal problems.

In the idea phase, use content like project case studies, gallery pages, and trend & idea blogs to get found on search engines and attract potential clients. In the research chapter, content like the main website pages, educational blogs and project case studies all help answer the customer’s questions about the landscaping process.

During the estimates phase, project case studies, educational blogs and cultural insights can inform the client about your ethics and reputation, how responsive you are, and how you complete projects on time.

Once a client is in the execute chapter the main service pages and trends & idea blogs guide the customer in what they can do the following year and let them know they have a company they can trust. Ricketts suggests sending monthly upsell e-newsletters as well.

Ricketts acknowledges that content marketing is a lot of work and advises hiring a marketing agency to help plan, create and distribute your content.

Jill Odom

Jill Odom is the senior content manager for NALP.