How to Get Landscaping Leads With Backyard Design Templates and Pricing Information

A successful inbound marketing process is critical to attracting and converting potential customers for your landscaping business, and it begins with generating valuable content that is tailored to their experiences and needs.

Content plays an integral part of inbound marketing in numerous ways. It improves the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website. It gives you something worthwhile to share on your company’s social media accounts. It establishes you as an industry authority and a trustworthy professional. It improves your brand reputation and demonstrates that you care about property owners in your community—whether or not they’re customers.

In order for content to be an asset to your inbound marketing process, however, it must be informative, engaging and high-quality.

The Heart of Inbound Marketing: Value Creation

Before creating content for your landscaping or exterior home improvement company, it’s good to come to terms with the reality that there is no shortage of information on the Internet. In fact, there’s an overwhelming amount, and it’s readily available to any casual browser.

While that might seem a bit daunting at first, you can use it to your advantage by producing valuable and compelling content—including videos, blog articles and content offers—that sets you apart and offers true value to users, while also attracting individuals to your website who are likely to convert into customers, now or in the future.

To start, content should be tailored to the unique experiences, concerns and challenges that impact property owners in your state and region—or even particular neighborhoods. For example, if you do landscaping design or outdoor remodeling in Arizona, you are more likely to connect with local property owners by focusing your content on xeriscaping and materials that hold up well in a dry, hot climate. If you work on the coast, your content would need to be different, since the rain, humidity and mild climate impact how people enjoy the outdoors and maintain their exterior living spaces.

However, the more localized you can make your content—in terms of keywords and subject matter—the better. In a large state such as Texas or California, your specific region or locality can significantly influence the type of vegetation that thrives or the questions homeowners might have when designing and completing a landscaping plan for their property.

When working on content development and creation, approach the process by providing answers, ideas and solutions from a professional perspective, even if that means giving advice to DIYers in your area. You will be rewarded for this strategy with local search traffic. Plus, when homeowners attempting DIY landscaping projects find themselves in over their heads, they will already be familiar with your company and have a positive association via your content. In short, that initial helpfulness that you extend often breeds reciprocity through lead conversions.

Another type of content that is popular with property owners is design templates, such as “Shrub Bed Design Templates” and more general “Backyard Design Templates.” There is a high volume of search queries for these terms, which gives your company an opportunity to step in, provide valuable content and attract your target audience.

Why Gate the Content for Your Landscaping Business?

Content creation is a great start for local inbound marketing, but you can take it a step further and glean more value for your landscaping company by implementing a gated content strategy. The whole point of gated content is to build up your email list, which can be utilized in the next phase of informing, converting and delighting prospective customers.

As the name implies, gated content encompasses any publications or posts that are only accessible to users when they provide something in return. For the most part, companies use gated content to motivate prospects to fill out a form and provide an email address minimum before they can see a particular article, design template or landscape design pricing guide. Some companies have also started offering certain content in return for likes or follows on social media, but that strategy is less popular.

You first attract people by being visible on search engines, local directories and social media; engaging them and answering their questions; and driving them to your website with internal links in your content. Then, you entice them with high-value, localized content in exchange for basic contact information, such as their name and email address, which gives you what you need for the next phase of the inbound marketing process: nurturing your leads to convert them into customers.

That’s where email marketing comes in. Add the email addresses you gather on your website to your subscriber list and continue to disseminate helpful information, like maintenance tips for plants commonly used in your landscaping designs, special offers or even current events or industry developments that could impact property owners in your area. The focus of your emails should be 80-90% educational and only 10-20% promotional.

However, the question remains: what type of content will casual website viewers prize enough to give out their email address? A few popular—and effective—types of gated content include professional design templates and pricing guides.

Pricing guides, in particular, are useful for gathering leads for a couple of reasons. First, if prospects are at the point of wanting price estimates, the purchase intent tends to be higher, whereas general tips and ideas are more likely to appeal to DIYers or those simply in the research or dreaming stage. Additionally, a lot of pricing information on the Internet is fairly generic. If you can provide premium content that incorporates localized pricing details and addresses different tiers of landscaping designs, you’ll draw in local and qualified homeowners who are preparing to start working on their own property and willing to exchange an email address for truly helpful information. Plus, chances are they’ll be looking to hire a company for all or a part of their project in short order.

Gating pricing information on your website is also ideal for qualified leads before they they your sales team’s time by helping set expectations that there are differences between what you can get as a $20,000 project versus $120,000 project, and that the DIY Network on TV is not usually giving fair pricing assessments for work completed.

Improving Your Inbound Marketing Process

If you’re not using content creation and development for your local inbound marketing strategies, now is the time to jump in. Optimizing your content with an SEO strategy is an effective way to attract and engage the right clients for your business by delighting and empowering them with valuable information that can enrich their life. Our team at Third Angle can help you get started or refresh your current inbound marketing strategies to ensure they’re producing results for your landscaping company and efficiently drawing in soon-to-be customers.