The lament of college professors is that they’re not hired to teach but to publish in journals that will give them and their colleges prestige. They call the process “Publish or Perish.” It’s true for landscape companies too.
Whether landscape companies are aware of it or not, Google is saying the same thing to every business of every size in America: You need to publish or perish. More specifically you need to create content that Google thinks is relevant, publish it on your website, and syndicate it on social media. Then if it’s all done correctly, they’ll consider giving your landscaping firm the ranking and Google organic search that will help you get leads, make sales, and stay in business.
The Old Days of Marketing for Landscape Companies
The purpose of newspapers, magazines, broadcast radio, and television is to make money by selling advertising. That was old media. They created content and syndicated it to the public to find a select demographic group. They then sold advertising to landscape companies who wanted to reach a certain demographic in the corresponding geography. General publications like Life and Look had great circulation but went out of business because they didn’t have a specifically targeted niche. Advertisers used to buy time or space in between the editorial content that the publication or broadcaster created and syndicated.
A New Age for Landscape Companies
The internet has changed all that. The most productive way to generate leads is through Google search. That’s why Google search creates more revenue than all local radio, television, newspapers, and magazines combined.
In order for landscape companies to come up in the Google search, so that their prospects can see them, Google has created a formula and they call it their algorithm. It changes all the time, and companies like ours are always researching to stay ahead — or at least keep up with — the 500-600 changes in the algorithm every year. A constant in that regard has been that Google wants landscape companies like yours that used to buy space in a publication to create content and syndicate it yourself. In other words they want you to be a publisher and a syndicator!
That’s kind of crazy when you consider that you are not in that industry. We have always been at it. We used to be a direct mail and magazine publisher. When we saw that our clients” landscape companies were better served online, we transitioned into the internet. Almost all landscape companies would be better served by hiring a firm that specializes in this kind of work.
Expertise Landscape Companies Trust
Forgive me for being self-serving, but we do particularly well in content creation and syndication because we were doing it before the internet. I had over a decade in broadcasting on both the editorial and advertising side and used to publish a magazine and a direct mail direct response publication. The transition to using this these skills digitally was seamless for us. But you run your business, and you’re best off to have a Google specialist create your contact and syndicate it.