Landscape Digital Show

Episode 90 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why entrepreneurs Richard Branson and Steve Jobs focus on customer relationships to make peoples lives better. I recently listened to an interview with Richard Branson about his journey to becoming a self-made billionaire. He admits to having lost count of exactly how many companies his Virgin brand owns, though he s sure its somewhere north of 200. When asked where he gets his inspiration for starting or buying into a business, Branson gave this. A business is an idea that makes people's lives better. ~ Richard Branson That mindset of putting customers first is where most entrepreneurs start. It s what powers early innovation. But over time the energy of that focusing vision begins to lose its spark as the business seeks to scale customer relationships. Start with The Customer Experience and Work Backward In a recent article published by Google, a CMO made this statement. People don t just want a product to buy, they want an idea to buy into. ~ Unilever CMO Keith Weed That idea is the brand and customer experience that it represents. And that brand experience is bigger than any product because there are potentially millions of possibilities that it can become. How do you make experiences that unlock possibilities for making people s lives better? You have to start with the customer experience and work backward. What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? If mistakes are made it means decisions are being made, and that s good. Support customers and learn from these mistakes. Some will be unhappy but it s a proven way of getting there. ~ Steve Jobs In business, the debate is whether customers have a relationship with products or the business. Many would say that Apple s strength is its products. However, in addition to product innovation, Apple revolutionized retail by changing how people buy. Did you know that Apple s sales per square foot of retail space are more than double that of any other retailer? That intentional sales intimacy makes Apple better for its customers by understanding how its customers like to buy. Fall in Love with Personas That Become Customers Enterprises like Apple love to accumulate data about customer experiences. Your company can too by mining the data from its customers, and one of the best ways to do this is having one-to-one conversations that generate meaningful information that doesn t necessarily fit into a checkbox. This is how audience or buyer personas are made. According to the Buyer Persona Institute, Many buyers give up because nobody is really helping them. This is the big opportunity for any size business that takes the time to explore these five buyer insights to create descriptive buyer personas that get to the heart of what its customers want. #1. Priority Initiative Determine the most compelling reasons that buyers decided to invest in your solution and develop strategies that trigger these actions. #2. Success Factors The outcomes a buyer persona expects to achieve from a solution like yours, and the risks involved with achieving it, must be clearly understood. #3. Perceived Barriers Every industry has its perceived barriers. Use content marketing to remove obstacles by pulling back the curtain and sharing true and relevant stories that resonate with buyers. #4. Buyer s Journey Buyers seldom make decisions in isolation. Family, friends, and others influence their decisions. Understanding these influences enables a business to allocate resources to address these needs. #5. Decision Criteria What motivates buyers can be a complex process, or a decision based almost entirely on emotion. Decision criteria often surprise companies that are in love with their products and services. More important is to fall in love with the buyer personas that become customers. You want to discover what your customers are seeing, thinking, feeling, and doing at each and every touchpoint with your business. This is what Apple figured out with its unique retail environment that allows consumers to test drive its products, get answers to problems, and face-to-face conversations with trained experts. This human approach on top of exceptional products is what makes Apple one of the most successful companies in the world. If you are going to make people's lives better you have to know what that means from their point of view. You have to ask good questions and record the responses to truly get to the heart of each and every customer relationship. Just remember those customer relationships are a business asset that requires maintenance and care. And when it does everything else in your business works too. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to create descriptive buyer personas by exploring the 5 buyer insights laid out by the Buyer Persona Institute. Then use that clarity to translate those personas into new customers. The post Customer Relationships That Make Peoples Lives Better appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 88 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why recent Facebook News Feed changes are indicators of audience engagement expectations on every platform. The recent Facebook News Feed updates are more than signals to change how you market on Facebook. They are indicators of what your audience expects on every platform. If you speak to live audiences you know people will only wait so long for you to engage them before they start making a path to the door. Asking for a show of hands, by the way, is not engagement. That's the equivalent of a Facebook like, which Facebook has said is no longer relevant. What is? Comments, because comments are deliberate and thoughtful actions, as compared to shares and likes that are passive and less likely to spark audience engagement. Facebook Zero Teaches What Works The most recent batch Facebook changes that will be rolling out over the coming months have been referred to as Facebook Apocalypse or Facebook Zero. I like Facebook Zero because it's easier to spell and it reminds us of the reach our content will get if we don't change our ways — zero. Mark Zuckerberg announced posts that spark meaningful conversations between people will have a prominent place in your News Feed. This will be measured by both the number and depth of the comments. It's necessary to develop a strategy that gets people talking to each other, but without using click bait. For example, if you ask people to comment you are technically baiting them and Facebook is saying they will demote that type of content. In addition to click bait, actions to minimize or avoid completely are posting content from outside links, such as your blog or other news sources. Facebook s rationale for this about-face is apparently to make room in the News Feed for content people really care about, which surprisingly is not video. According to Adam Mosseri, Facebook's Head of News Feed, "Video is primarily a passive experience" because when you are watching it you are not typically talking (engaging) with friends. Interactions between people make memorable experiences whether that experience is Facebook or face-to-face at a live event. To understand why meaningful conversations are the benchmark for assessing the value of content you only have to consider how algorithms and machine learning drive Facebook s advertising model. Comments are content that makes Facebook increasingly smarter and that makes it more valuable for targeting audiences with Facebook ads. Here are three ways to make encourage engagement to make your business smarter and better for its customers. #1. Social Listening Is Good for Business For more than a decade I've studied how social media influences business marketing. Social media's greatest value is giving people a voice that adds context for people that are listening — and the platform or business that is mining that data. Businesses only need to help their customers feel safe and in control to encourage these conversations. That's what Facebook and YouTube have recently done. When customers feel truly valued they will open up about the experiences they desire most. And that's what businesses want to know. #2. Collaboration Makes Experiences Better Nobody wants to be sold to but everyone likes to buy. For that to happen you have to give them opportunities to test-drive your product or service because everybody makes decisions in her or her own way. This is how content marketing moves people to action. It helps them take intermediary steps that guide them along the buyer's journey with relevant, interactive content. My landscaping business planned for collaboration with our customers because actively engaging them got them to take ownership. They showed up prepared to get the full value of our expertise and experience because we built a process that showed them how and why that works for them. When you make customers collaborators the co-creation process always leads to better outcomes.  #3. Communities Lift Everyone Up Facebook said that its News Feed will favor posts in Facebook Groups because presumably, that is where these conversations are happening. To be clear, a post is a post whether it is on a Facebook page, personal profile, or within a group. But the post most likely to reach that larger audience is the group post. Groups are communities of people getting what they want while helping others too. In addition to Facebook groups, its good business to be active in other communities that support you and your business. Get involved. That s what Facebook is teaching us. Sitting on the sidelines observing is not likely to further your efforts to make friends or earn more customers. My plan is to build systems for reaching people that are personal, human and collaborative. One example is content marketing with a voice and tone that resonates with the audiences my company can best serve. Then I ll use technology like Google Analytics, my CRM, and comments to measure that. If content is king, comments are its most valuable form for helping people think, feel and do more of what they want to do. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to change how you market to your customers to keep them engaged so that your business can help them do more of what they want to do. Let me know if you'd like some help with that. The post Audience Engagement: How to Get Them Thinking, Feeling and Doing appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 89 of Landscape Digital Show reveals a content audit plan for closing the gaps in your content marketing process and closing more sales. We've talked about how to perform a content audit in episode 28. This is something every business should begin right now because depending on how long you ve been in business it may take a while to complete. What should happen next is implementing a content audit plan to make the best use of that content. Your content is a body of work that attracts everything your business needs to thrive, provided it is put to work in the right places. The common perception is that content sells. Some of it will but not in the way that many people think. For example, people don t watch one YouTube video and then say, I want to work with this landscaping company. There are only two types of content, conversion content and intermediary content. Conversion content converts to a sale and intermediary content accomplishes everything that leads up to that. Your content has to attract the attention of buyers and move them along a prescribed path or journey, taking them all the way to the finish line, a sales conversion. Unless you are converting 100% of your leads that path or journey is a process that has gaps in it, but don't worry about that because you can close them by organizing the content from your audit to fix that leaky boat. Here s how that works. Organize Your Content by Intent Every piece of content has a job to do and the more specific it is the better. When companies think about SEO it is because they want to be discovered online, right? So, they seek to rank for keywords and often pay top dollar to make that happen. The problem is they fail to consider the intent behind those keywords. And this is why they have trouble converting those leads into customers. Let s say your website ranks for lawn care services. You need to understand the intent of the people searching for those keywords, what they want to know so that your content delivers on that expectation. This is why you want to study your analytics and test your content. Think about the decisions buyers have to make throughout their journey to ultimately work with your company. Now organize your content to close the gaps along that journey to keep everything moving silky smoothly. You can start by breaking your process into three phases, beginning, middle and ending or conversion. Within each phase there are specific needs your content must address, such as the following. Phase I Attraction Give people ideas List problems you solve Identify who is not right for you Phase II Engagement Show how you solve problems Asks for feedback Offer relevant suggestions Phase III Conversion Profile award-winning projects Explain why investing in quality now pays off later Highlight industry leadership This is how you make your marketing, selling, service and even recruiting better. You close the gaps in your process by putting a theme or purpose to all of your content so that it can be used where and when it's needed, whether that is on or offline. Incidentally, these themes should be represented in your content marketing editorial calendar. Hold Your Content Accountable The value of content is its intent or purpose and you should hold it accountable to that by assigning it a job it can do well. If the intent of your website it to convert buyers into customers, then you want to focus on putting your best converting content on it. You will discover your non-converting or intermediary content is probably best distributed with a vehicle like a newsletter that gradually moves people along that buyer s journey. If you really want to get the most out of your content, especially what you already have now, get it organized so that it can be employed for its best use. Your business hires the best talent and trains them to keep your customers happy. Why not take that same approach to getting your content working together as a winning team too? Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to complete your content audit so that you will have your content organized for fulfilling its intent, what it does best. Hold your content accountable to your customers just as you do your team members because both are part of the same winning team. Let me know if you'd like some help with that. The post Content Audit Plan: Closing Sales Conversion Gaps appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 87 of Landscape Digital Show reveals the recent Facebook News Feed updates and why content with a voice is Facebook newsworthy. As he has done many times before, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped a bombshell on the Facebook community that sparked exactly what Facebook wants from it's 2+ billion active users more meaningful conversations on topics that matter to them. Like every other Facebook update more has gone unsaid than said, and that is probably by design. I agree with Mark Schaefer that Facebook may not be sure about how these changes will play out. But it's our job as marketers to figure them out. Here s What We Know #1. This is a major refresh. Facebook wants to steady the Facebook brand by addressing the top user concerns, such as seeing too many ads in our newsfeed and not seeing more from our family and friends. #2. Person to person interactions will be prioritized. You will see fewer page posts in your feed, but it s not clear if that means fewer ads too. #3. Posts that earn lots of meaningful comments will be moved up in the newsfeed. Longer, more thoughtful replies to posts will give content an even greater boost. #4. Content that earns passive engagement will rank lower. Content that is viewed or read but receives few comments will rank below content that earns active engagement. #5. Engagement-bait content will be demoted. This includes click-bait, vote-bait, and comment-bait. You will have to earn engagement by being an authentic and original voice. In interviews following the first announcement, Facebook acknowledged the challenges it faces, including fake news, accountability to shareholders, and apparently, it s role in society for contributing to a greater good. Putting people first seems to be Facebook s strategy for making everything happen. Mark Zuckerberg's announcement states, Research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long-term measures of happiness and health. This is great news for Facebook users, but how about Facebook marketers? People Before Public Content In a massively popular Facebook live video, Michael Stelzner, CEO of Social Media Examiner calls this statement from Adam Mosseri, Facebook s Head of News Feed the money shot. "There will be less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses." ~ Adam Mosseri This is the heart of the uproar from businesses that have pumped millions of dollars into Facebook ads to target Facebook users. Less publisher and business content clean up our personal news feeds, but since most of us use Facebook to build our business or personal brands, we may have to reconsider our priorities. It's possible Facebook pages are dead for most of us, but weren t they already? Research indicates Facebook organic reach (the people you reach for free) has declined from 26% in 2011 to close to 1% today. This Facebook update may be the wake-up call small businesses needed. What are Facebook marketers planning to do about this? My informal survey from Facebook comments indicates the following. #1. Run more ads. Facebook has not been clear about how ads will be affected, so many are planning to move ahead with business as usual. #2. Reallocate resources to LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and other channels. All of these social platforms can and will continue to change. It makes sense to spread out resources to unlock new opportunities and minimize risk. #3. Go all in on live video. Many businesses are taking this comment from Mark Zuckerberg to heart: We've seen people interact way more around live videos than regular ones. #4. Consider Facebook groups.  Here s another quote from Zuckerberg's announcement: The first changes you ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family, and groups. The one strategy I ve yet to notice is completely giving up on Facebook. Most of us have too much invested in it to walk away. The smart money is either planning to adapt now or taking a wait and see approach. Content Voice is Facebook Newsworthy Now that the impact of the Facebook announcement has been absorbed, the conversation has shifted to what s next. Facebook refuses to call itself what most people consider it to be, and that s a media company. According to COO Sheryl Sandburg, At our heart, we're a tech company. We don t hire reporters. No one is a journalist. We (Facebook) don t cover the news. You are the news when you make status updates that give honest, authentic, and original perspectives about what you see, feel, think and do in your day-to-day activities. This is what Facebook wants from users, more engaging content that keeps people on Facebook. Give them what they want to get what you want. Documenting activities and observations is a valid social media marketing strategy, especially with Facebook, but the people that do it well make it look easy because they have unique voices that engage (and sometimes repel) people. You too have to find your content unique voice that adds value to the news you share. Think of your content voice to be your communication style. Does your style say you are light-hearted or all business? You certainly want to be perceived to be a business authority, but never underestimate likability when it comes to engaging people with a message. Communicating with an authentic voice may feel like a performance because it is. It s learning to leave the baggage behind to only put the best you ve got out there. Clean, authentic, and relatable communication is a practice. Now is the time to make that commitment. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Take the time to check out the links in this show to thoroughly understand these recent Facebook News Feed updates. Now fix your Facebook marketing strategy. To do nothing in the face of these changes is guaranteed to lose whatever Facebook audience you now have. And be sure to check out this article for tactics for finding your marketing voice. The post Facebook News Feed Update: Content Voice is Newsworthy appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 86 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how the web runs on writing and why the right words, voice, and tone will make your marketing better too  When you consider how much effort a business invests in getting discovered on the web, it's surprising that few dig deep enough to understand the essential components responsible for making that happen. People use words to search the web. They may be spoken or typed, but they are words nonetheless. If they happen to be the right words, and they probably are if your ideal buyers are using them, then you need to develop an intimate relationship with those words and discover how to use them in your writing, videos and other content. Of course, there's more to writing for the web than just plugging in keywords. If you want to win with Google you want to aim for the best human experience possible for your target audience. This is why the best copywriters are handsomely compensated for their work. People can tell. They may not know why they know, they just know. Writing copy is seldom easy, but when it works it becomes your superpower.  You can achieve that goal by respecting your brand story and finding that signature voice that best communicates it. Hold on, there s one more detail that trips up many marketers. Every piece of communication must have the right tone for the platform and the audience it is targeting. That awareness is key. Words Tell a Story The words your business uses to tell its story in many ways is the story because words reveal a great deal about who we are and our communication preferences. For example, whether your marketing copy says landscaper or landscape company matters to your audience just as much as if it says y'all or you guys. What s right is what connects with your audience. The right words are like magnets that attract customers. That's why your most valued keywords should be in the headlines of your content, as well as the subheadings and the body content. The same is true for your social media postings. In addition to understanding how to use keywords to optimize your content, always take a step back to study the promise of your words, that is, the story they tell. ~ Does your headline make a promise that matters to your audience? ~ Does the copy that follows deliver on that promise? ~ Are there examples and anecdotes that make the story interesting? ~ Is there a call to action to bring that audience closer? ~ Does your company have people prepped and available to guide those relationships? Once again, people can tell. They intuitively know if there is a real person behind a social media posting. And they get a sense of his or her age, background, and personality. ~ What is said when your business telephone is answered? ~ How does your company reply to emails? ~ How about angry emails from unhappy customers? ~ Or social media comments from engaged customers that are ready to do more? The holy grail of web copywriting is to sell people before they call your office or walk into your business, but there are many other touchpoints along their journey where words can make or break the deal. All of it tells a story, and that story should be part of a grand plan. Words are The Voice of The Business SEO attracts attention with words. Voice makes that communication human by describing who you are as a company, your core values and how you go about helping customers. Think of your voice like fashion style. Does your style say you are light-hearted or all business? You certainly want to be perceived as professional, but it s hard to deny the fact that most people want to work with companies that make the experience enjoyable. Make a list of words that express your business culture and style. They will help you discover your writing voice. It may include words like these. Smart Friendly Innovative Established Easy Certified Discounted Guaranteed Words Also Set the Tone or Feeling One of the tricky things about writing is that you can be technically correct but wrong at the same time. The difference is the tone or feeling your words express. There's a big difference between the tone of these expressions. ~ Sorry about that. ~ I'm sorry. ~ I am soOOO sorry. ~ I m sorry about this and will get to work fixing it. Writing that is tone deaf usually is too formal. It lacks the emotion that is necessary to show customers they are in a safe relationship and that they have control too. As you may have imagined, it s usually best to write to show not to tell. This is one of the outcomes of a world of social media, and it means that sometimes you are writing your message first to then record that message with an engaging video. Your tone can be brave, confident, or edgy. You have to decide what's best for your business. Make a list of words that capture the tone or feeling of your brand too. When you get serious about understanding and using the right words your marketing will begin to spark — because it will be more consistent across all channels. If you stay with it that spark will ignite customer relationships. Imagine your sales, marketing, administration, and production staff all using essentially the same — and right words all of the time. That will be a symphony to the ears of your customers that need the reassurance that everyone is on the same page. Isn't it time to build your system of words that is the backbone of your sales, marketing, and service communications? Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, it would be nifty if you Liked the Landscape Digital Institute page so we can stay in touch. Call to Action You probably have a lot of systems in your business, but you need to add one more. Take action to build your system of words that is the backbone of your sales, marketing, and service communications. If you would like to know more about how we can help let s have a conversation. You can contact me here. The post The Web Runs on Writing and Your Marketing Should Too appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 85 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how buyer personas are used to create laser-focused marketing that connects a business with its ideal customers. This is our final Landscape Digital Show episode of the 2017 calendar year and the first in which I interview a subject matter expert – but don't worry, this is far from my 1st expert interview. This content is an update of the 51st episode of This Old New Business podcast that was previously published at JeffKorhan.com. You can expect more expert guest interviews in the future right here at Landscape Digital Show. We have discussed buyer personas a great deal on this show. Now you can take a deep dive into how they work to create laser-focused marketing with Adele Revella, the CEO, and founder of The Buyer Persona Institute. Adele is also the author of Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business. She offers a compelling strategy for marketers seeking the confidence to say: This is what really matters to our buyers. So here s the plan. What Do Your Buyers Really Want to Know? Adele Revella contends that marketers and companies, in general, are too isolated from what their buyers really think about as they are going through the customer experience. She suggests interviewing buyers one-on-one to gain insights from their stories that can become case studies. 5 Rings of Buying Insight Using The Five Rings of Buying Insight, Adele Revella lays out a predictable structure for creating experience-driven marketing that helps buyers that often feel lost. She says:  Many buyers give up because nobody is really helping them. This is the big opportunity. ~ Adele Revella Insight 1 – Priority Initiative Determine the most compelling reasons that a buyer decides to invest in your solutions and develop strategies that trigger those actions. Insight 2 – Success Factors The results a buyer expects to achieve from your business and the risks involved with achieving it must be clearly understood. Insight 3 – Perceived Barriers Every industry has its perceived barriers. Using content marketing to remove obstacles often involves pulling back the curtain and sharing true and relevant stories that resonate with buyers. Insight 4 – Buyer's Journey Buyers seldom make decisions in isolation. Family, friends, and others influence their decisions. Understanding these influences enables a business to allocate resources to address those relevant needs. Insight 5 – Decision Criteria What motivates buyers can be a complex process, or a decision based almost entirely on emotion. Decision criteria often surprise companies that are in love with their products and services. More important is to fall in love with the buyer personas that become your customers. Show Notes Learn more about Adele's work with buyer personas at Buyer Persona Institute Connect with Adele on Twitter at @buyerpersona The buyer persona is not the ideal customer. Listen in to learn more. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action This is your last chance to take action before we close this special offer. If you are a landscaping industry professional in the United States or Canada, I m offering a limited number of free 30-minute telephone consultations. You can use this link to schedule that call. You'll get a lot of ideas and maybe we'll decide to work together or not. There's no risk – only upside potential. The post How Buyer Personas Create Laser Focused Marketing that Connects appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 84 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to create marketing that moves a target audience to take action.  The purpose of marketing is to move an audience to action. That's marketing's job. It starts with attracting an audience. And that requires a deep understanding of who its members are, what they want, and everything that influences their experience of acquiring it. Describe Your Audience in Writing Start with the end in mind before you start investing in marketing. Nearly every business has more than one audience. There are customers and future customers you wish to attract. Those two audiences have different needs. To serve these customers your business must attract team members, some of whom are leaders and others followers. That's at least two more audiences, and there may be more, such as potential investors or business partners. The trick is making marketing that shows you know them better than they know themselves. That's not easy to do if you are casting a wide net. So segment your larger audience and create marketing for each group within it. You have to figure out how to sneak into your customer's mind. So segment your larger audience and create marketing for each group within it. Describe each audience in detail so that it feels like a real person. This is what's known as an audience persona, and it should be committed to writing so everyone instantly gets it.  The truer to life that audience persona is the better your marketing will attract the people it represents. What Are The Outcomes Your Audience Wants? Now consider what gets these humans to take action. Some buyers want a landscape company that is experienced, certified, and guaranteed. Others prefer edgier ones that are innovative and technology-based with exciting new offerings. Which are you? People today are doing their homework and checking you out from head to toe. Like you, they are fishing deep for exactly what they want. Nobody is going to buy a product or investigate a job opportunity if it s not clear what the benefits are for taking action and what the risks are for not doing so. This means your business has to be attractive. It s dating 101 that starts with intimately understanding the target you want to attract. That must be reflected in all of your communications. Of course, there is more to marketing than websites, so you have to break down your message so that it plays well on social media and the other marketing channels you use. How do you want to be perceived? That is your business persona. Your business persona is the counterpart to an audience persona and is better known as your brand. That brand is everything that is said about your business, including and especially what your customers are talking about. You ve probably heard that people don t buy products or services, but the outcomes they promise. Ah, now we get to the brand promise and how that aligns with the outcomes your audience needs and wants. Making a sale is one outcome, but there are many others that must happen to pave the way for it, such as estimates, proposals, and presentations. This is where content marketing enters the picture. Does Your Marketing Make Customers Happy? Let's keep this simple. Anything that promises to improve one's life or lifestyle gets people to take action. Happiness is the way. If you care about people and put that ahead of what you want you'll get what you want too. That's why content marketing is such an invaluable marketing practice. Content marketing is the practice of consistently delivering marketing content that establishes authority, likability, and the capability to solve relevant problems, ultimately with products and services that earn profits. For most landscape industry business, that content resides on its website. When the right people visit your website you want them to take one of five actions before leaving. Buy Try Call Email Follow Only a small percentage of your audience is ready to buy now. It s your job to continue nurturing relationships with the rest by using content marketing to build your brand story in their minds with case studies and other stories that sell. I'm now going to mention the word strategy because that's what we are talking about here. I've waited until now because it's a word most people associate with work and deep thinking. Marketing is work, but it s also a path to getting what your business wants by helping enough other people get what they want when they want it, and in the way that works for their budget or lifestyle or whatever. Get to know your respective audiences and what they want and design a marketing experience to help them get it. If you take anything away from this recipe for business growth I hope it is the idea that marketing today is more than attracting leads and pushing them down a sales funnel. Marketing nowadays is getting people to take an action that is right for them. Some people are afraid to take a leap, so just help them close a small gap and they ll appreciate and remember you for it like a friend that did them an unexpected favor. Marketing tools, such as CRM systems can help with this if you teach those systems how to guide the process that keeps people happy during their journey with your business.   Planning to make customers happier doesn t have to be complicated. Make some lists. Prioritize everything. Get a few easy wins. Stay in there to get your share of the big fish. I know you'll get the job done. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Now, how about a call to action? Set up some time for us to chat after the holidays. If you are a green industry professional in the United States or Canada, I m offering a limited number of free 30-minute telephone consultations. You can use this link to schedule that call. You'll get a lot of ideas and maybe we'll decide to work together or not. There's no risk – only upside potential. Thanks for being here. The post How To Create Marketing That Gets The Job Done appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 83 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why communities love brave marketing that takes the risk of standing out to be known for something bigger. This is the time of year when you should be wrapping up the planning of your editorial calendar for the coming year. How exactly is that happen? Do you essentially use same monthly categories as this year and freshen up the content a bit? That s what I ve observed at several companies with whom I ve consulted. January is focused on trends and new services, February is for landscape design, March is when you make special offers to load up the sales pipeline, and so on. That's alright if you are happy with business as usual, but if you are planning to grow you have to your content has to be best in class because that is the only way it will inspire people to take action. You Have to Take Marketing Risks Let be clear about one thing. The most powerful marketing you can have is word of mouth. That's how it has always been. Long before anyone talked about going viral with digital media there was word of mouth. Word of mouth should be a top marketing priority. As the business owner or leader of its marketing, your job is giving people a reason to talk up your company. The trick is to create media that gets your business inserted into the conversations that are happening right now. In other words, your job is to be newsworthy. The question is simple: If you were one of your customers would you publish your content? That is, would you share it with a spouse, friend or colleague? If not then you need to take bigger risks. There is a hotbed of young innovators and risk takers making their presence known on YouTube, and they are being handsomely rewarded for it. This week I read about a 6-year-old boy whose YouTube channel netted 11 million US dollars during a 12 month period. What does he do? He shows everyone how he uses toys – better known as unboxing. This is entertaining for other kids and that obviously attracts sponsors that want him to unbox their toy. The truth is we tend to notice and talk about risk takers because we secretly admire them and want to be like them, at least a little. Or we may dislike or fear what they do or represent. Either way, they get our attention. Brave Marketing Takes a Stand If you were free to publish a message on a billboard for your entire community to see, what would it say? You probably have to think about that for a while. That's one of the problems with marketing. People want to be known but they are not always sure what they want to be known for because that requires taking a stand. This is how marketing gets watered down to a lifeless message that hopes to appeal to the widest market segment possible, such as, and we ve all heard this: Anyone that has money to spend. Ask yourself if you would take that approach if you were marketing to attract a spouse or business partner. No way. You would speak to the ideal customer or person that you have in mind, and that should be written down in detail if you truly want to get it right. Have the intention to be brave enough to truly stand out this coming year. Even if you back off of that ideal you ll still push your marketing ahead of a few of your competitors. According to marketing icon Seth Godin, you have to learn to see the world for what it is. You can t expect a little effort to attract a lot of business, so give up your dreams of going viral and get to work. Learn to tell a story that's true, one that resonates with other people and that helps them to make good decisions. That s what people are scouring the Internet for and when they find it they ll know it instantly. To make that happen I suggest mining three areas of your business for ideas, its culture, collaboration, and community. What is it about your culture that will get people interested in your business? How does your business collaboratively work with customers to help them make life-changing discoveries? What can your business do in the community that is truly meaningful, that solves relevant problems that are important to people right now? Become Known for Something Bigger Here is one idea for how this can work that you can adapt to your business. Make a list of what people are talking about in the community. Then discuss with your team how your company can help. For example, what if your crews were trained to pick up debris in the neighborhoods where they work and those random acts were caught on camera and shared on your social media? That's notable because landscaping companies are expected to beautify the environment, and there isn't a community out there that couldn't use a little extra tidying. This is the kind of positive, can-do behavior that the mainstream media wants to share with their audiences. Recruit friends to share those photos from your Facebook page that document your culture of caring about the community. With a little coaching to craft a compelling story, you will have something worthy of putting advertising dollars behind to really get it moving, possible earning the attention of the mainstream media. You get the idea. Instead of just one annual "giving back" project that is forgotten days later, try to be known for something people will talk about every time they see it happening.  This is very much like Nordstrom being known for accepting returns of products that have been seriously used, or that Nordstrom has never sold. Going viral lasts a short period of time but brave marketing can build word of mouth that last forever. Let s be honest, bravery could result in an embarrassing failure, but not really because most marketing barely gets noticed anyway. Isn t the extra effort worth the risk? Communities love brave marketing. Give them some that's worth talking about. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Are you ready to get serious about content marketing? Excellent. If you are a green industry professional in the United States or Canada, I m offering a limited number of free 15-minute telephone consultations. You can use this link to schedule that call. The post Why Communities Love Brave Marketing appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 82 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to do content marketing right by making it a standard business practice. If you are not hearing about content marketing, you should be. If you are, much of it is probably wrong because just like social media, it s effective use is determined by one's understanding of it. The difference between social media and content marketing is that content marketing is a practice, just as accounting is a practice. That is, there are conventions that dictate how it should be consistently practiced. Accounting happens to be a regulated business practice, and that gets most businesses doing it right. This is not true with content marketing, and that is why people are free to use it as they wish. There s nothing wrong with that, but it does get confusing when people represent what they are doing as content marketing when it isn t because doing anything wrong compromises the expected results. In this episode of Landscape Digital Show, we ll fix that by showing you how content marketing really works, and how to do it right. You will discover that a better understanding of how it works will greatly improve your results while also streamlining your workflow and saving time. Content Marketing Starts with The Audience Most sporting events are games of strategy and tactics. And most of us get that use it to get more wins. Why then do some people invest more time planning their weekend golf outing than the marketing that determines their business future? At least when it comes to content marketing, I believe it is because they do not know how it truly works. So, let s start by defining content marketing. Here s how the Content Marketing Institute currently puts it. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. If there is a phrase in that definition that should jump out at you it is this: Attract and retain a clearly defined audience. The attention of a clearly defined audience is everything because content is pointless without an audience to receive and consume it. It s like the proverbial tree falling in the woods and whether or not it makes a sound if nobody is around to hear it. It doesn t matter. On the other hand, if you understand your audience and consistently give them what they tune in for you will be heard. They will honor you with their attention. Now you can sell your products, rent that attention to sponsors, or do practically anything you wish that is appropriate for that audience. This is the magic of content marketing. Once you ve earned the trust of an audience the possibilities are limitless. Your Content Must Be The Best ESPN doesn t broadcast the same football games as the national networks because to do that would be a dumb, me-too strategy. That s what makes the games they do broadcast the best content for their fans you can t get that content anywhere else. By selectively serving segments of their audience, ESPN is the best content for a targeted audience on any given day. This is a key reason why you want to segment your audience too by tagging your subscribers interests with your CRM systems and marketing automation. What makes content marketing so interesting is that it combines aspects of sales and marketing to get results. That is, you can go big or small, depending on the audience and your business objectives. It s your choice, but to make it happen you need a strategy that is carefully planned and implemented. How to Make Content Marketing a Practice Let s take a step back to clarify what content really is because I ve come to learn that many people think it s exclusively social media and websites, when in fact it is far more than that. Content is media that can be consumed in many different formats, including text, audio, and visual, such as podcasts, videos, and images. And content does not have to be digital. It can include hardcover books, postcards, the wrapper or graphics on a truck or landscaping trailer, or a business card with a message scribbled on it. The only rule is that the content should be created with the audience of potential buyers in mind. That s the starting point. Step #1. Start with the audience Why does your business exist? Who are you trying to help? You have to define "them" in detail or you will fail to attract them. What services do they need and why? What problems does your business solve for them? Why should they choose your business over another? And my favorite, what makes you the ONLY choice? The answers to these questions will give you your strategy, but more important is they will create clarity for the content and the products or services that your business should focus on creating. When you get to where content and product solutions start to become one and the same, at least in your mind, you are on the right track because they are. Content is usually free, although it can command a price if it s really good. And that makes it a product. This is why you can and should think of content adding value to your products. If content helps the buyer to get more value from a product it adds value to it, plain and simple. Step #2. Write out your content plan This is your reality check. If your plan is not written down you do not have a plan. And that s why most people fail with content marketing and social media because to write it out you have to understand it. How are going to create content while taking care of day-to-day, revenue-producing activities? Start by identifying and listing the content that is working for you now to attract, engage, and close customers. Now repurpose that content to other channels to extend it or make it more powerful. One of the secrets of content marketing is not putting all of your eggs in one basket. When you update your website you should also be updating your social media profiles to be consistent with it. Make a list of all of your online profiles so that it s easy to update them when you have  moments of inspiration that can make your content better for its targeted audience. And content repurposing applies equally to all of your content. For example, if you do a printed postcard campaign you should considering also budgeting for Facebook ads to support it. And if you have a pop-up box on your website that too can be temporarily adjusted to match the campaign. The idea is that everything should be integrated to achieve the desired result that is bigger than just attracting leads. While leads are the lifeblood of every business, content will convert only a fraction of them into revenue. This is why most companies give up on content marketing. The truth is that fraction is enough if you are in this for the long haul because unlike traditional advertising content marketing is cumulative. Legendary marketer Seth Godin has been building his audience with a daily blog for almost 15 years and he admits that not one of those posts has ever gone viral. But oh how his audience has grown during that time, both in size and in loyalty That s how this works. Content marketing is a long game, but it can be broken down into repeatable actions that can be simplified and automated. You just have to make it a practice. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Are you ready to get serious about content marketing? Excellent. If you are a green industry professional in the United States or Canada, I m offering a limited number of free 15-minute telephone consultations. You can use this link to schedule that call. The post How To Do Content Marketing Right appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 81 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why business leaders are teachers at heart and how that mindset empowers their organizations. Business leaders bring diverse experiences and a variety of talents to their company, but there is often one talent in particular that drives its success. You may be good with numbers and understand how to make budgeting work. Or you may have a knack for creating workflow systems that create amazing efficiencies. Yet it's likely that you share an attribute with many great leaders, and that is the ability to teach your business building philosophies to others. It s possible to have incredibly innovative ideas or the most brilliant vision but none of it will amount to anything if you cannot teach people how to put it to good use. When I launched my landscaping business I was able to sell my big ideas to our first customers because that s what I had been doing for the previous ten years. Making the leap from enterprise sales and marketing to take my shot as an entrepreneur was scary and exciting, but the need to grow beyond sales and marketing to build a business helped me discover my true talent. It was and to this day is teaching. Make Teaching Your Superpower Making the shift from whatever you consider your superpower to that of a teacher of it is empowering because the act of teaching demands that you acquire a deeper understanding of it. Starting a business or taking it to the next level requires educating and inspiring people, including partners, employees, suppliers, and customers. Depending on the relationship, you may normally think of that responsibility as training, selling or hiring, but at its core its all teaching. Think back to your days in the classroom. What were the qualities that made certain teachers your favorites? They cared about you, were patient, forgiving, smart and probably made you smile every now and then. Most important is that those teachers somehow inspired you to think bigger, and that s what all of us should be doing. Bigger can be translated to business growth, greater community involvement, or more meaningful working relationships. In other words, it can be anything you want it to be. Teaching Adults is A Collaboration If you have ever taken the stage before an audience and bombed you have discovered that adult learning is different from what many of us may have experienced in the classroom. In fact, I m told that nowadays college students will walk out of a lecture if the teacher does not engage them from the start. It turns out the key to effectively teaching any group of people is backing up whatever you are teaching with why. This is what sparked my interest in using storytelling throughout the customer experience. Real stories are transformative because they demonstrate not just how our solutions have changed people s lives, but also why. It s a fact that getting and holding the attention of an audience is challenging, but a compelling story can make that happen. This is why experienced business leaders are known to answer questions with a story. Let s take buyers as an example, though the same is true in hiring situations. Impactful stories are about the changes people want to make, that is, getting from here to there, from where they are to a better place. Our goal with our landscape design process was to take buyers further than they even thought was possible. And the secret to doing so was really pretty simple involve them in a collaborative process that gives them a feeling of being in control. Note that I didn t say control but the feeling of control. There s a difference. Teachers do this well. They guide students to learn at their own pace so they are not overwhelmed or bored stiff. Of course, before that can happen they have to first design a curriculum that adapts to the respective needs of each and every student. Organize Your Teaching Curriculum All business challenges can be fixed by shifting your approach to a teaching model. That may be teaching customers how to buy from you or teaching talented people why your organization is the one that will have the greatest impact on their career. To make this happen you have to get organized by taking your current approach and examining it for improvements. This should start with listening to the audience for which it is designed. Talk to your customers, employees and business partners. You can also and should talk to complete strangers because the insights can be enlightening. Then take what you have learned and test it. Like stand-up comedians, I m always testing new ideas and stories with live audiences. It s the only way to discover real improvements that will make what I m teaching better for the next audience. The same is true for your business. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to take one of your systems, the one where you may be experiencing the most pain, and start rebuilding it into a teachable system that promises to produce bigger outcomes. Leave a comment to let me know how this is working for you. Or send me a personal note.  I d love to hear from you. The post Why Business Leaders are Teachers at Heart appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 80 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to build meaningful customer relationships and transformative experiences. Getting to the heart of customer relationships starts with understanding and then ultimately discovering what really makes them tick. It requires listening and having consistently meaningful conversations. Not much of this may be new to you, but ask yourself if you need to hear it again? We all do. We're human beings and that's what makes customer relationships such a slippery slope and an amazing opportunity at the same time. Every day we need to be thinking about what we can and should be doing next for our customers because somebody else just may we waiting to take our place. And they may be smarter, faster, younger and tech-savvy, or more experienced and wiser. Most of us have been in business for a while and the one thing that is on our side is the skills we have developed over years of serving customers, making them happy, occasionally letting them down, and yes, sometimes even irritating them. Everyone eventually makes a mistake, it s part of life and that's why it's vital to get so close to the customer that they not only know, like, and trust but love us so much that they give us the opportunity to make things right. 3 Pillars of The Customer Experience Getting and never squandering the opportunity to serve and make things right in my mind is what it means to truly get to the heart of customer relationships. Here s my model for making it happen. Business is personal Selling is collaborative Customers are community Let's break down these 3 pillars or principles because they are the foundation of relationship selling, that process of working with customers to ensure they not only get what they need and want but ideally more than they expected. That is the goal in my mind – taking people to a better place than they had imagined was even possible. It starts with being personal because no matter if your business is B2B or B2C you are working with people. That fact should guide your efforts in so many ways. It should give you clues about personalizing your messaging so that your customers feel that you have customized everything just for them. The trick is designing a customer experience for your ideal customers that also adapts to each and every one of them. That can be a monster undertaking, but the payoff is equally massive. Steve Jobs said this when confronted by an audience member that challenged him on a product release that some thought was not ready for the market. "You have to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? If mistakes are made it means decisions are being made and that's good. Support customers and learn from the mistakes. Some will be unhappy, but it's a proven way of getting there." Your approach should ideally be a collaborative process that brings together everything the customer knows, fears, and aspires to achieve by tapping into your years of business experience and the expertise and wisdom that you have acquired along the way. Bigger Customer Experiences are Transformative Now, this is where things get a little tricky. How does a business organize its expertise and experience? I believe the most reliable way is with stories that capture people's imagination and affect change. Stories can be transformative, and isn't that what we are trying to do for our customers with the work that we do? I'm hoping to get you to think bigger, to imagine your customers' needs at a higher level than just the work they hired you to do. What do they want out of their lives, to be happier, fulfilled, accomplished, safe, secure, confident? Whatever that is it admittedly is hard to nail down, but there are ways. That said, for all of these methods to work everything must be written down. If you cannot commit to writing the value of the experience your business delivers to its customers then you do not know it with sufficient clarity. An excellent starting point is writing buyer personas to create a laser focus on who is being served, and how, and why and so on. Once that ideal buyer persona is created it gives clues to the buyer s journey, including what those buyers are experiencing at an emotional level. That is, what he or she is thinking, seeing, feeling and doing. I know this may seem a little touchy-feely and it is, but there is a reason for that. By starting with the feelings you have a much better handle on what to do at a practical level to make that transformation happen. For example, at some point, a contract has to be signed. When should that happen, where should it happen, and what do you want the buyer to feel when it does? It s essential for every business to understand what's going on when deals are made with people because they are investing in a relationship with your business. Some are putting their jobs on the line. In other words, just as you are taking risks, so are they. If the buyer's journey is the ideal or big goal, then the machinery that predictably makes it a reality is everything that guides that customer experience, including marketing, sales, production, and service. And the fuel that drives that machinery is the stories that give it meaning and purpose. The perfect customer experience is 100% purposeful. There should be a reason for everything and it should all work together perfectly, which of course it doesn't because people are people. Most important is trying to make it work (as Steve Jobs noted) because that s how you remove buying obstacles by answering questions, solving problems, and hopefully inspiring your customers to work with you. When you start seeing the world through the lens of customer relationships it expands and grows. That's what makes relationships the holy grail of business growth. Get close to your customers. Write everything down and persevere to make it all better while respecting the 3 pillars of personalization, collaboration, and community. If you can do that you'll find everything falling into place soon enough, and most likely long before your competitors. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is making the commitment to getting to the heart of customer relationships by designing your process — and committing it to writing —  for understanding and then ultimately discovering what really makes them tick. If you take the time to do this now you'll have a roadmap for making sustainable growth in 2018 and beyond! The post Getting To The Heart of Customer Relationships appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 79 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to build a relationship selling narrative that attracts and retains customers. Have you ever noticed that some people always answer a question with a story? For some of us, storytelling is part of our DNA because we learned at a young age that a compelling story is arguably the best way to sell an idea. For me personally, growing up with three brothers was the perfect storytelling training. When put to the test you quickly learn that telling the truth works better when it s backed with a compelling story. While a handful of people may be natural storytellers, most of us struggle with exactly how to convey information in meaningful ways, especially when the circumstances are unexpected. What s needed is a structure that will stand up to the demands of any situation, including what buyers want to know that they believe will help them solve their problem. This is why relationship selling requires a sales process that is supported by a narrative structure, a series of stories that collectively become a purposeful, global story, like a novel, film, or non-fiction documentary. Your global story is your value proposition. The sequence of stories that support it give prospective buyers what they need, where they need it, and at the right time. In my landscaping business, we knew that early in the relationship we had to tackle tough issues like design fees, budgets, and timelines. If we failed in that conversation it was all over. Thus, the first true challenge was to get the buyer to know, like and trust us and our business. How exactly does that work? Most of us have learned to start by asking good questions and listening, but at some point in that conversation, you need a story that hooks them so that they are dying to know what happens next. That's where the relationship selling narrative begins. The Classic Storytelling Structure Buyers are hungry for information because they want to make the best decision for their particular situation. Yet even in our data-driven world facts and figures will fall short if there is not a persuasive story that validates why that data matters. Before I started writing this article I pulled out a legal pad and divided the page into three equal sections that represent the beginning, middle, and end of the article. Probably the greatest value of this planning and organization method is that it gets you thinking in terms of where your ideas will work best. Last night I was watching the film Adaptation that profiles Robert McKee s legendary storytelling methods. One of the points he emphatically made to the aspiring screenwriter played by Nicolas Cage is there has to be change! For characters to be changed there has to be a progression and that is a function of time. This is why every story has a distinct beginning, middle, and ending, and yours should too. It s a classic structure that has been used for centuries. Here s a modernized version. Beginning Hook – For a story to work it has to hook the audience in a way that has them wanting to discover how it turns out. Middle Build – Taking action involves risk and that's what builds in the middle of your story. There is drama and suspense that raises the stakes and the risk of taking action. Ending Payoff – Did the risk pay off? That's the resolution of the conflicted emotions that build in the middle of the story, and it often happens in unexpected ways. It's helpful for you to know that every story is comprised of beats, scenes, sequences, and acts. It's not important to know what these are, other than pieces of a story that move it forward. Your story may have three acts, one for the beginning, middle, and ending, or like most novels, it may have over a dozen acts. But what s an act? Acts are major changes in the story that are comprised of beats, scenes, and sequences, which are smaller elements of change. They all build on each other to create greater change. The important changes or acts in your sales process may be signing a contract, mobilizing for the work, and getting paid. You ll intuitively figure out how to spark those changes that get buyers taking action on mutually beneficial objectives. Everything Supports the Global Story One of the reasons it is so difficult to answer the networking question, "What do you do? is that the best response is telling your global business story, which would be a massive undertaking. In fact, most of us often reply with something like, Wow, where should I start? Now, you know at the beginning. A smart approach is to define that beginning within a much narrower context, like what you are working on right now. That s what will easily get the conversation started. This is exactly what you want to do in selling situations to engage prospective buyers or customers. Your larger narrative is the global or brand story that is at the heart of all of your marketing, but that can be too much for most people to digest. Try this. Start with the most relevant story and wait for the response. Then follow it with another that is equally meaningful and that gives it further context, and so on, with all of it relating back to your brand story. It isn't necessary to understand everything about storytelling to build a customer-focused relationship selling narrative. More important is to understand the big picture, your brand story, and how a collection of supporting stories build it, including those that may be 140 characters or less. Show Notes If you would like more on this, check out The Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne The ideas I've shared here are a portion of my most popular speaking program: Relationship Selling in The Trust Economy. I'll be presenting it in the coming months at a number of events, including LANDSCAPES 2017 . Hope to see you there! Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to get clear about your brand. Then get busy using your website, social media, and email marketing to tell that story with a narrative of stories from your years of helping customers every day. In an earlier episode of Landscape Digital Show, we discussed the editorial calendar. You may wish to review that to learn how to use it to keep topic ideas ready to test new stories when they come along. them. The post Relationship Selling: Building a Customer Focused Narrative appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 78 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how a meaningful relationship selling narrative attracts and retains customers. One of my longtime landscaping clients helped me understand the dynamics of relationship selling with a very simple question. "What's Next," he asked, after a walk-through of a recently completed project. My response may not have been the most thoughtful, but it was accurate. "What do you mean what's next, we're done," I replied. "You don't get it do you," he asked? "I guess not. Help me out, I said. My customer proceeded to remind me that years ago when our relationship began, his primary goal was to create a showplace that not only he and his family could enjoy, but also his friends and neighbors. It was apparent I was standing in the way of that vision because I had viewed our interactions as a series of business transactions, as opposed to a relationship a business has with one of its customers. That experience dramatically altered my view of selling. And I hope it has the same impact for you because embedded within that understanding is not only the secret to relationship selling, but clues for using email marketing, social media, video, websites, and just about every tool we have available to make it better. Tell Better Stories I've never been comfortable with the term upselling because it tends to focus on the stuff, the products and services, sometimes to the detriment of the relationship. This is one aspect of what my customer was trying to convey to me. If you have to upsell a customer doesn't it suggest that you didn't get it right the first time? I believe it does and that has shaped my relationship selling model. #1. Buying is personal #2. Selling is collaborative #3. Customers are community To have relationships with customers you have to personally get to know them. Then capture that data with buyer personas that inform your future actions with your customers, that is, who they are, where to find them, keywords and phrases that resonate with them, and so on. Selling is a collaborative activity or should be, regardless of whether of whether the communication channel is digital or personal. This collaboration is another source of valuable information, especially stories that illustrate why customers choose to work with your business. Our brains are wired to make sense of the world. We search for stories that provide meaning by getting to what every buyer wants to know, and that's why. Why you, why this product, why this price, why now, etc. Most customer decision-making criteria are stepping stones to a universal question of trust: Why should I consider or stay in a relationship with this company? This is a question that every business must answer again and again because it is one that comes up not just at the beginning of the relationship, but whenever there are communication gaps. As you know, communication gaps nowadays are any failure to respond to customers or proactively keep them informed. Thus, relationship selling has a lot in common with content marketing: Consistently creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, and ultimately, to drive profitable customer actions. Today I was thinking about the many apps that I depend on. Every single one of those companies has a direct channel to communicate with me due to my having downloaded their paid or free app. If I were them and I would be using that channel to ask questions like these. How are you using our product? Have you downloaded the most recent update to get this cool feature? Is there anything you need to know that we can address? Since most of them rarely if ever contact me, other than to upsell me to a higher version, I have no other choice but to conclude they are concerned about profits above my business or personal well-being. Like most consumers that don t have a choice, I plan to stick around with these companies until something better comes along. Thus, your relationship selling mantra probably should be: Communicate now or lose them forever. Build Your Relationship Selling Narrative As we know, customers share stories about their experiences with friends and neighbors, but that s not where it starts. Before customers become customers they tell themselves a story that justifies their decision. Actually, it's not one story but many. This explains why relationship selling is ideally a collaborative process that progressively achieves alignment, one story at a time. Throughout the experience of working together, the buyer discovers little pieces of meaning that either further or stop the process. That said, remember that communication gaps can also stop the process. When a buyer says, Let me think about it, that is indicative of a gap that is in need of the right story to come to its rescue. Your website and media are outstanding places to practice and record your stories. Get your sales and support team involved in this content marketing exercise too. Then do the hard work of organizing those stories so that they can be used in the right places and times throughout the buying or customer experience. Your customers are a community that has self-selected by nature of their purchase behavior. Like members of a club, they tend to share similar lifestyles, challenges, and aspirations. Therefore, a story that resonates with them will tend to attract more valued customers just like them. Show Notes If you would like more on this, check out my book: Built-In Social. You can buy it or download the introduction and first chapter for free. The ideas I've shared here are a portion of my most popular speaking program: Relationship Selling in The Trust Economy. I'll be presenting it in the coming months at a number of events, including LANDSCAPES 2017 . Hope to see you there! Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Like my customer, I am hoping you are wondering what's next. Build your plan for telling better stories that further the relationship selling narrative because that conversation gets and keeps customers invested in the relationship by either informing or reminding them why it matters. The post Relationship Selling in The Trust Economy appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 77 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to reach any goal with deliberate practice that becomes self-teaching and coaching.  In her bestselling book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, psychologist and professor Angela Duckworth provides evidence that more than talent and skill, it s gritty, deliberate practice that predictably leads to the accomplishment of goals. For this to happen, she cites four conditions that must be met. #1. A stretch goal #2. Concentration and effort #3. Immediate feedback #4. Repetition, reflection, and refinement My personal experience training months for a marathon backs this up and clarifies grit to be a blend of physical and mental practice. While I have once previously completed a marathon, that was over 30 years ago. Nevertheless, my results from my current marathon training have been surprising, even to me, and I believe the method can be replicated to reach any goal. Assuming you are committed to your goal and are consistently doing the work, you are already fulfilling most of the conditions that define grit. You only need a reliable feedback mechanism for getting better. This is key. If you read no further than the following heading you will discover one of the secrets of deliberate practice for reaching any goal. Of course, if you would also like to discover the complementary component that truly makes it work, you will want to read further. Physical Practice is Self-Teaching When a scientist enters the laboratory, he or she follows a disciplined process for making new discoveries. Variables are tested and the results recorded and analyzed. It s one experiment, trial and error, after another. The act of recording is much more than documentation. It creates awareness that leads to progress when action is taken to solve problems that stand in the way of you and your goal. In my opinion, this is the secret to achieving goals. More than practicing you have to test the boundaries that are holding you back. Here s an example of how solving one small obstacle led to massive progress toward my goal of running another marathon at age 60. In the early days of my training, I experienced a recurring injury that shut my training down completely. This was troubling because two weeks later I was scheduled to participate in a memorial race honoring the legacy of my high school track coach. Not being able to even walk without pain, I considered canceling. Then I researched injuries and made a remarkable discovery from a book on the anatomy and mechanics of running. It turns out I was doing everything wrong. Who knew that we needed to be taught how to run? Actually, most of us need to unlearn habits that we ve acquired from well-meaning people, including high school track coaches. There is indeed a great deal of science behind running that I was completely unaware of. While the details are beyond the scope of this discussion, I ll only say that nearly all of it is counterintuitive, such as using your legs as little as possible and shortening your stride to go faster. What I learned from that book was rigorously tested in my training and the results recorded. That simple process of recording is a personal conversation that leads to progress, provided every condition you encounter is thoughtfully considered as a teaching moment. Mental Practice is Self-Coaching In addition to recording logical training data like pace, mileage and weather conditions, my running log is mostly an ongoing conversation of scientific experimentation. For example, after learning that a shorter stride and quicker cadence results in less fatigue and fewer injuries, I began testing it. It was months before I was finally able to support the hypothesis. Part of the challenge was actually learning how to consistently and comfortably increase my running cadence (steps per minute). Then one evening it all seemed to magically come together, and that was a beautiful moment. You don't have to be a scientist to put scientific experimentation and deliberate practice to work in your personal life or business. More important is committing to a goal that you care deeply about and recording your progress, while always seeking solutions by doing research and more testing. One particularly surprising discovery I made is that I often run faster into the wind, which clearly doesn't make sense. I've reasoned this it is due to the cooling effect, which is part physical and part psychological. This brings us to the power or mental practice. They say the mind leads the body. Actually, the two work together.  I ve also learned that mental fatigue is to be taken seriously because it compromises physical performance. As a business leader, your words directly influence the minds of your team and that means they affect their physical productivity. Have you considered how useful it would be to understand what your people are thinking and feeling on any given day? Businesses tend to track physical inputs and outputs, such as the man-hours necessary to complete a job. I believe it would also be helpful if each team member personally recorded his or her daily thoughts in a journal. This practice becomes valuable self-coaching that gets the wheels turning about how to make the next day better. Those ideas can be tested when similar circumstances are encountered. Until that time the mind is actively working on crafting new solutions. Just staying the course with deliberate physical and mental practice and daily recording will get you there. Show Notes If you happen to be a runner, the following books were my faithful companions on the way to achieving my goal, which is still in front of me. You may hear more about that outcome in a future episode. **  Anatomy for Runners: Unlocking Your Athletic Potential for Health, Speed, and Injury Prevention, by Jay Dicharry, MPT, SCS **  Chi Running: A Revolutionary Approach to Effortless, Injury-Free Running, by Danny Dreyer and Katherine Dreyer. **  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to apply deliberate physical and mental practice toward the achievement of important personal and business goals. I d love to hear about your progress. The post How to Reach Any Goal with Deliberate Practice appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 76 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to sell more products by finding and closing gaps in your marketing systems.  When you approach marketing as a system everything gets easier because it gives you a basis for evaluating possibilities, such as what to leave in and what to leave out. Choices have to be made and less is usually more. Less complexity leads to more predictable results. One of the challenges for companies that learned to succeed with traditional marketing and selling systems is being relevant for digital savvy consumers. However, regardless of the methods used, everything still comes down to a simple three part formula: #1. Get people's attention #2. Interact with people #3. Sell products that add value to people's lives If there are any gaps in that equation business growth is compromised. All marketing systems must balance attraction with engagement, and they must seamlessly integrate with selling systems that bring home the profits that sustain the company and its growth. #1. Get People's Attention Advertising is how businesses have traditionally introduced or reminded people about them and the products they sell. Now social media is the new advertising, and that's certainly how many companies try to use it. However, anyone that has tried to use social media for product awareness understands it s a different animal than advertising. Not only do you have to choose from the many social media channels, but also how to use them well. You must have a strategy that goes beyond basic awareness because that's not nearly enough anymore. Your strategy to get attention might include humor, entertainment, education, news, or humanity. The trick is deciding on the story you want to tell and making choices about how to use one or several channels to consistently do that. Whether the media is free or carries a price-tag, the true cost is what it takes to get people's attention. If you cannot accomplish that then your business will always be challenged with lead generation. Study what works for others, then test those methods and track your results to discover what works for you. #2. Interact with People Interaction is a two-way street, and that is why it's best to get permission to do so. Fortunately, social media typically takes care of this for you by managing friend requests and the like. Although, more powerful than social media for interaction is email because it is targeted and gives you greater control. However, as a business, you still have to get people's permission to send them emails. That's why we call email marketing permission marketing. The flip side of email marketing is that people will unsubscribe if the interaction does not give them the value they had hoped for. Thus, if your list is not growing you need to change your approach. As long as that list is growing you shouldn't worry about unsubscribes. You only want people on your list that want to receive communications from you, because if they are not, the likelihood of them buying is almost zero. You may find it useful to occasionally create a Facebook custom audience of your unsubscribes and target them with a special offer. You may be surprised at how many accept it and rejoin your list. This is just one example of using marketing systems to add value instead of just promoting. #3. Sell Products that Add Value to People s Lives To sell products on or offline you need a system that you can recite in your sleep, step by step. In fact, if you believe as I do that everyone in your company is in selling then they too should know this system cold. You never know if the opportunity to sell will happen at a neighborhood block party or waiting in line at the local Chamber of Commerce event. This is why everyone in your company is in selling, and why they should know the constants and variables of your selling system. Constants are the non-negotiables that allow your company to deliver an exceptional customer experience. This may include when and where you meet, what gets discussed, and the resources used, such as how to communicate payment terms. Variables are how the business adapts and personalizes its products and experiences for the buyer, including budgets, timelines, and style choices. Ideally, this should be a collaboration that makes the customer feel safe and confident in their future with you. Lastly, every selling system should accommodate specific exceptions that I refer to as catalysts. This is when a buyer wants to take a shortcut to product ownership. It may go something like this: "Look, not to be rude, but I trust you and would just like to move ahead now. Can we do that?" If you are comfortable that what needed to be communicated has been, or will be before the work begins, then accommodate their wishes. Marketing systems are typically designed to close gaps by removing obstacles that prevent buyers from moving ahead. But there should also be some flexibility in them to accommodate a more experienced or prepared buyer. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to revisit your systems for getting people's attention and selling them products that will add value to their lives. In other words, revisit how your company fulfills its mission. The post Marketing Systems: How to Close the Gaps and Sell More Products appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 75 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to build marketing resources that will save time and sell more services.  The dilemma for business owners that are also the primary rainmaker, and our survey indicates that is the majority of landscaping companies, is the ongoing fight for your time between marketing and production. Production usually wins because that s what generates profits. Then the cycle begins again as selling takes priority in order to make it rain. It doesn t have to be this way because nowadays there are many marketing options for keeping the pipeline full. As you know, having abundant options means you have to choose, and my experience in this industry is that most companies will choose whatever promises to get results quickly. That s what keeps that stressful roller coaster going. To get off of it you have to commit to building time-saving marketing resources. Plan and Grow Valuable Marketing Resources The resources necessary for marketing and selling your landscaping services will be created over time, so don't get overwhelmed if you currently fall short in one particular area. More important is to know what you'll need so that you can be planning for creating it. Photos are an excellent example. Most landscaping companies put off taking photos until they need them for upgrading marketing materials such as websites or social media profiles and pages. This is unfortunate because you only have one chance at getting before photos of a project, with numberless opportunities for capturing the best after image. Think of your marketing resources as selling tools, because they are. Photos, videos, testimonials and more are invaluable tools for both marketing and selling, and not having them puts your business at a serious competitive disadvantage. You may have the most talented salespeople in your community, but without these tools, they will have to invest more time than necessary to communicate with prospective customers. It s up to you as the owner to plan for growing these assets. That planning starts with creating a list of what s necessary, including the following. Photos Videos Testimonials Case-studies Unique solutions Informative articles Budgeting scenarios Hidden costs Common shortcuts FAQ s with answers What would you add to that list?? Marketing Resources Are An Investment in Your Target Audience There s a reason why marketing resources were once commonly referred to as marketing collateral. You are using them to invest in relationships with customers. Case studies are a perfect example. Everybody that has been in business has them, but only a few have taken the time to break them down into teaching moments for staff and prospective customers. The longer you have been in business the more cases studies you should have for helping buyers better understand what's possible, while also getting a glimpse into the personality of your company. Let s assume you have been in business for at least ten years. Can you produce at least 10 customer case studies, supported by data and visuals, that can be used to help people envision a relationship with your business? If not, the same is probably true about other marketing resources that serve to educate and inspire your targeted audience and ultimately drive profitable outcomes. In a nutshell, that s the definition of what we now call content marketing. It s using marketing resources to attract and retain customers. It requires an investment in the future of your business your customers Now decide who can get this work done? Systems are Necessary for Creating Marketing Resources Whether you do the work yourself or delegate it to a team member, you need to build a reliable system for getting the work completed. To quote legendary production efficiency expert, W. Edwards Deming, A bad system will beat a good person every time." A checklist is a system. Choose at least at least a couple of marketing resources to build, maybe case studies and unique solutions. Then list the steps involved and put them on the calendars of the people responsible for creating them. Remember our 10-year example? Surely your aspirations are higher than that, but to be sure you have a win in a few categories, aim for just two pieces every year. That s two case studies, testimonials, FAQ s and so on. Try this. Charge your teams with building the habit of asking customers to share their current challenges. It could go something like this. Can I ask you a question? If there was one problem that I could solve for you, what would it be? For one thing, that customer will appreciate that you cared enough to ask and listen. And most likely they will be thinking about your business for much of the rest of their day. That is free marketing. If every one of your front line people brought just one story like this to your weekly staff meetings and it was captured in a few sentences, you would soon have more valuable content than you could ever use to help your customers. Those problems and their solutions are the seeds of a case study, testimonial, or informative article that can be shared with all of your prospects and customers, whether that is with a website, newsletter, social media, or in direct selling situations. Selling suddenly got a lot easier, didn t it? Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to put this into action. List the marketing resources your business needs. Get them on the calendar. And get them done. Over time you will have marketing assets that will save time and sell more services. The post Marketing Resources: This is What You Need to Sell More Services appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 74 of Landscape Digital Show reveals 9 ways telephone selling can be used to get people talking, earn trust and grow relationships When I began my career in the early eighties I accepted a technical sales position with a big oil company. That s when I learned to overcome my fear of the telephone as a selling tool. At that time telephone selling skills were everything because other than personal meetings, it was the fastest way to make discoveries, share information and develop relationships. Like anything else, telephone selling is something you learn from experience. This may be why so many people today are afraid of cold calling. They have seldom been in tough situations where they had to make it work. Instead, they lob an email out there and hope for the best. There's a problem with that approach. Everyone else is using it too. This is why telephone selling works. It makes you memorable, and that should be enough to make it a key part of your selling strategy. Not only that, it improves the effectiveness of your other selling tactics, including email and social media. Telephone Selling Sparks Relationships If your audience is predominantly comprised of people are over the age of 40, there is a very good chance they prefer to do business in person or over the telephone. While they may use text and email, you will never truly have their full attention unless you are face-to-face or on the telephone with them. The telephone gets and holds people's attention. If you have ever tried to have a short telephone conversation you know that it's not easy because most people want to have a little small talk first; it's just how we are wired as human beings. The telephone makes human connections that are vital for earning trust and closing deals. Contrast that with email, texting, and social media. These methods of communication are best-suited to brevity. It's why lengthy social media updates earn the tag TLDR – too long didn't read. That s not going to happen with telephone selling if you follow these 9 proven practices that respect the person you are calling and the value that you bring to him or her. You may not agree with all of them but give each a few tries before rejecting any because people are different and not every tactic will work every time. #1. Have a written telephone selling plan. This includes how you will open and close the call, and key questions to ask. This is especially important if you are not comfortable with telephone selling, and if there are key issues you want to be sure to address. However, be prepared to go off script. Most important is to follow the lead of your caller. If they want to small talk you should too. They will let you know when it s time to talk business. #2. Do not send an email to set up the call. If you use email to state your business up front you increase the odds of having your call ignored. That email gives your caller what they need to craft an excuse for the gatekeeper. #3. Be prepared to leave an intelligent voicemail. Congratulations. While you did not have a conversation, you ve become more memorable than your competition that isn't using the telephone. Now you can follow-up with an email to provide additional value that you promised in the voicemail. It s a process that you have to plan and track. #4. Research your caller. When your call is accepted you need to quickly establish alignment. The purpose of the call is to develop a more personal relationship by making discoveries that are shared with the inner circle. Come to the call prepared or you will destroy that trust. Also, be sure to update your CRM systems to document the call and build your intelligence for this contact and others like him or her. #5. Connect the dots to mutually trusted connections. Having mutual friends in common is a great way to establish alignment that moves the conversation along. Just be prepared with details that only another friend would know about that person. #6. Be humble. People may be intense or relaxed, but those that are most successful are always humble because nobody knows everything there is to know. Be attentive and interested and you will make surprising discoveries. #7. Offer to collaborate. This stops short of offering a solution and that earns respect from people that don't want to be pitched, and that's most of us. Collaboration always leads to better outcomes and greater commitment to seeing them through. #8. Go for no instead of yes. High-pressure sellers go straight for yes and that makes people uncomfortable because everyone has a different process for making decisions. Smart sellers make inquiries that are likely to receive a no response. This approach eliminates obstacles and objections one at a time. Eventually, there is only one likely response, and whether that s a yes or no, you will be remembered as a professional. And that is how you get referrals from people that do not become your customer. #9. Thank them for taking the call. This is an extension of being humble. Your caller took a chance that you might have some value to offer. And they invested a nice chunk of their time. That should be acknowledged in no uncertain terms. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action As I was putting these tactics together I realized there are more I ve developed or happened upon during the course of making thousands of telephone selling calls over the years. I'll put those together for a future episode. Until then, the call to action for this episode is to put these 9 telephone selling tips to the test. Then drop me a line to let me know how they are working for you. The post Telephone Selling: 9 Ways to Get People Talking appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 73 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why customer relationships with a business are more valuable than those with its products. Relationships have a fundamental purpose. They make us better; otherwise, there is no reason for the relationship. In business, the debate is whether the customer has a relationship with the products or the business or both. And if it does, which should come first? If your customer relationships are with your products, then the relationship is only as good as the products. The problem with that scenario is that if something fails to work as expected, the relationship is at risk of failing too. It takes work to build business relationships, so it makes sense to use every means possible to avoid those breakups. Flip Your Marketing from Products to Relationships In his bestselling book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It, former international hostage negotiator for the FBI, Chris Voss, identifies two conditions that people need to be comfortable in negotiating situations: #1. Feeling safe #2. Having a sense of being in control These conditions are personal and emotional, and that means they are people, not product-based. Traditional advertising creates product awareness, and it does that well. But you have to go further to get and keep buyers engaged with your business so they can feel safe and in control. You have to shift your focus to create familiarity with buyers by showing them the big picture, that is, how your company goes about helping its customers. Give them something that helps them see, feel, and understand their relationship with your business in advance. And that something is your branded process that addresses the known customer concerns, which may include: Project scope Budget and payment terms Schedules and timelines Communications and changes Warranties and remedies To name a few. Fortunately, the interactive nature of digital marketing makes it possible to address these concerns pretty easily. A short explainer video on the home page of your website that introduces your company is a good start. Then, you can create more videos, podcasts, or blog posts that address every conceivable concern, with the idea of removing risk so that buyers feel comfortable moving forward with your business. Your Business Process is The Relationship It should encapsulate the 5, 10, or 30 years of your company s accumulated business experience, especially the relatable stories that make its capabilities real. To convert prospective buyers into customers requires trust in your business, in your products and services, and the people on the front lines and behind the scenes that make it all happen. That s a lot to accomplish when you have the limited attention of a potential customer because trust is something that has to be experienced first-hand. A referral or testimonial is helpful, but not enough. For some companies, a "try before you buy" offer is a risk-free way of acquiring that first-hand experience. Although, one problem is that trial is a product based-solution, so it falls short in the relationship department. Also, that could involve significant costs for a landscaping business. The alternative is to design, brand, and market a process that can serve as a stand-in for the experience. Think of your process as an interactive map that gives buyers the opportunity to experience the most meaningful aspects of your business. What are those essential elements or touch points that make your business unique? I m sure several come to mind, but I ll suggest you can find others where your competitors tend to drop the ball. If you would like to know more specifics on how to build and brand your business process, check out the links in the show notes below. Good luck. Show Notes Case Studies: How to Get Customer Stories that Sell Customer Experience Marketing: Differentiate Your Business with Empathy, Brand Story and Service Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to give people confidence in your business by taking control of customer relationships from the beginning. The paradox is that you taking control makes them feel in control. It s no different than going to a doctor or CPA that you know and trust. You are putting your faith in them and secretly hoping that they will deliver everything you want and more. There are no guarantees, but that hope is often enough. The post Customer Relationships: This is Why People Come Before Products appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 72 of Landscape Digital Show reveals the connection between surfing and personal branding that instantly influences buyers and outcomes.  In all walks of life, people are most admired not for what they have achieved but how they went about it doing it. How people get things done in life used to be known as reputation management, but now that we all manage our own media it is best described as personal branding. A Harvard Business Review author observed that all surfers end their ride in exactly the same way: They fall into the water. It doesn't matter if that ride was an epic success or dramatic defeat; the outcome is the same. This is why what happens next matters most. Does he or she head back into the surf or pack it in for the day? I imagine that is something surfers talk about that defines their personal brands, who are the risk-takers and who are not. Evaluating outcomes and taking action to create something better is what life and business are all about. People admire winners, but we are especially interested in the path they chose to get there. As an entrepreneur, this is your personal brand, and it's never been more important for attracting the opportunities you desire for your business and your life. Celebrate Endings That Create New Outcomes Like so many other practices, surfing is a series of events. Knowing they all come to an end makes it that much easier to get back up and do it again in the quest for the perfect ride. The truth is the perfect ride probably doesn't exist for surfing or any other profession. Whether it does or doesn't, the question that arises is always going to be the same. Now what? By definition, winning is an ending. It's an event or outcome that had a beginning and now it's over. That win may be an amazing landscape project that earned an industry award and put you on a big stage. Now what? Your current customers want to know. More important is that it shapes your personal brand for anyone that may be watching, and these days that audience is as large as the Internet. What happens off stage matters as much and probably more than what happens when the spotlights are bright, because almost everybody can be good when they others are watching. Then there is that uncomfortable gap before the next event when we as human beings have all kinds of feelings What happens in those gaps between events influences buyers more than we care to admit because that's when your true character is revealed. This is why it is vitally important to close the gap by celebrating the wins and the losses, and then taking action to create the next new one. Your Brand Story Lives Between Wins and Losses Have you ever noticed that when people win too often their methods and practices are scrutinized and sometimes criticized? This is one reason to publicly celebrate your losses just as much as your wins to humanize your personal brand. If you are an introvert like me it can feel like work to live your life out loud on social media. But the truth is if you are not telling your story people will make assumptions based on what they think they know. It's fair to say that the term personal branding has business connotations, but it's much more than that. Your personal brand impacts your success in life because it communicates who you are and what you care about, which of course either attracts or rejects people with similar interests and values. The story of you is your personal brand and the easiest way to give your audience of fans, friends, and followers a glimpse into the authentic you is to document what's happening in your world. Video may be the best way to do this because it's pretty hard to not be yourself in front of the camera. Just be mindful that it's not so much what you have to say but how you say it that people will notice and remember. Make no mistake that being your best self is a performance. After all, being yourself is typically being who you think people want you to be in the role you find yourself. You will have to find that balance for yourself. You will have to find the balance that's right for you. Good luck. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to plan your personal brand just like a celebrity because it deserves that attention. Determine the qualities that best represent who you are as a person because that personal brand is what will attract the right people to your business for years to come. The post Personal Branding: How to Instantly Influence Buyers and Outcomes appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 71 of Landscape Digital Show reveals what the LinkedIn native video rollout will do for social selling and how to get your business ready for it. Earlier this year LinkedIn made a number of updates to their platform that signaled a more relaxed environment for its users. The most notable change is the newsfeed is now prominently displayed on the home page, making content (not contacts) central to the LinkedIn experience. Content updates boast bigger photos and video that occupy the full-screen width on mobile, with comment and share buttons more visible too. All of this is clearly designed to position LinkedIn more like Facebook, it's splashier social counterpart and not the old man of social media. It's apparently creating confusion about LinkedIn's identity and how we should now be using it. For instance, LinkedIn started as the business networking platform, but now it prompts you to wish your connections a Happy Birthday, an activity that many believe belongs to Facebook. Astute social media marketers are taking notice of the conversations growing on LinkedIn and considering a reallocation of resources to take advantage. You should too because, in addition to what we ve seen thus far this year, the current rollout of native video is sure to shake-up how we accomplish our objectives with LinkedIn. Native video is video that is created on social networks and played in-feed, as opposed to links to videos hosted on other sites. Native Video Promises to Personalize LinkedIn As of this writing, it is reported that only 500 people have the LinkedIn native video capability, and that is currently only possible using the LinkedIn mobile app. By limiting it to mobile, LinkedIn may be telling us that it is interested in what's going on out and about with our lives, not just from behind the desk. Native video is going to give you the chance to share more of your personality and the enthusiasm and energy you bring to your work. This means you should be thinking about how video can help bring out your best qualities as a person first and a business second. LinkedIn s co-founder, Reid Hoffman, has said that no business has ever given you any business. It s always a person within a business that helps you to accomplish your objectives. That s probably a good stance to take with native video. Social selling is being a person first, not a business. It s easy to imagine that if little things like birthday notices create turbulence for some LinkedIn users, then native video will be a disruptor, especially when you consider that what follows it is sure to be live video. That will no doubt be the game changer, but before we go there let s get ready for native video. How to Get Ready for LinkedIn Native Video One of the first steps for being ready for native video is getting your LinkedIn profile in order so that it is congruent with the persona that you intend to amplify with it. Depending on its current state, this may be no small effort. Every LinkedIn profile should incorporate these accepted practices. 1. Choose a headline that accurately identifies your expertise 2. Write everything as a person, in the 1st person 3. Place special emphasis on the first 220 characters of your summary 4. Make your work and volunteer experience come alive with story 5. Upload articles, videos, and other supporting content Getting your profile right is the foundation for native video, just as it is for all of your other content updates. The trick is to use it to encourage a dialog between you and your connections to hopefully spark new opportunities. While I have done my share of video, I ll admit to not having a great deal of experience with doing it live, which to be honest is how native video feels to me. The raw qualities native and live video make it best suited for live events and unique venues that bring a slice of your business activities to your LinkedIn audience in an interesting way. Your LinkedIn native video readiness should consider the following. Locations Topics Structure and Format Goals Equipment To do mobile video right you will need a mobile device with a good camera and an external mic to best manage the audio quality. The Rode smartLav+ lavaliere microphone is one that my tech savvy friends recommend. As with anything else, the early adopters will get the most bang out of this before it goes mainstream. You can be part of that first wave if you start planning now, and of course, if you are one of the lucky ones to be among the first to get this feature. You'll know that when you have a video icon in your mobile app for making post updates. We re told it will start showing up in the desktop version sometime after that. If you follow the practices suggested here, you will be fully prepared to make the most of it. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to be prepared for using LinkedIn native video when it arrives to get serious about enhancing your social selling interactions and outcomes. Once you master native video you'll be a pro with live video. The post LinkedIn Native Video: Social Selling Comes Alive appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 70 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why social selling success is like running a marathon. Marathon training is a slow process of teaching the mind and the body to take the right actions. Anyone that has enjoyed selling success understands it too requires unique skills that are learned over time. Last month I began training for my first marathon in over 30 years. Everything was going well until I got caught in a downpour that chilled me to the bone. That concerned me because I was pushing the limits by upping my mileage too soon to get faster results. Then it happened. Instantly, I recognized that piercing pain in my calf and stopped, hoping it was just a warning. It wasn t. I was out for more than a week. Desperate, I researched injuries and discovered 83% of all runners are injured at any given time, but fixing the running mechanics can actually prevent most of those injuries. Isn t the same true for some social media practitioners? They automate and push the limits without giving much thought to their mechanics, the process of serving customers You re going to discover it is. If you build the proper foundation, it will reliably lead to results that far exceed the competition. Social Selling is Discovery and Understanding If you are still blasting email messages to your communities like it s 1999, then you are overselling. You are like a runner on the path to pain because you are forgetting that social is an essential part of the selling equation today, and ignoring it will quickly get you blocked or ignored. Social media success starts with making discoveries that can potentially lead to profitable relationships. Maybe your connections will become clients or customers, and maybe not, but you won t know without engagement and interaction. Understanding people can be a slow process, but it s a vitally important aspect of social selling. Think of it as training that builds the foundation for later using marketing automation and other cool technology that can help scale your human interactions. There are now 2 billion Facebook users and 65% of them are active. That s a lot of prospects you can reach with Facebook advertising (good luck reaching them any other way). But then what? Hoping that people will buy once you have their attention is not an option. In my opinion, social selling success is using technology right to take relationships to the next level, and then the next, and so on. It s and ongoing process of engaging and understanding that should never stop. If it does, you re done. Now you have two choices. You can either quit or fix it. Many people quit, but surprisingly most of the others keep going without fixing what s broken. It doesn't have to be that way. Your Overnight Success Start Today A recent report from LinkedIn shows that 78% of social sellers outsell their peers that are not using social media. That s exciting, but it requires making good choices for using the social channels well. You will find many coaches, consultants, and advisors that promise to fast track your path to results, but the truth is you can get good advice by simply engaging with your network. Fast growth does happen, but not as often as many believe. Those that have reached the top, such as Gary Vaynerchuk or Chris Brogan, point out that it took them 20 years to become an overnight sensation. That's good advice for beginners or anyone that wants to get to the next level. There are more than a few YouTube celebrities that have recently had massive falls from stardom. Better to go the marathon route and build a foundation for your future success. That s what Vaynerchuk and Brogan have done, and their careers continue to flourish. They say knowledge is power, but it s really potential power that only works when you are ready for it, otherwise, it can be destructive. Think of an automobile. You need a solid chassis to transfer the power of the engine into acceleration without breaking down. The chassis for runners is a balanced and flexible body that is not prone to injury. For your business, it s everything that got you here, including the network of people that support what you do. Your success starts with respecting and building on that. All of us have pain points in our business that need to be fixed to take full advantage of our strengths. These are obstacles that can be flipped upside down to reveal the opportunities that are needed to create more forward progress. You have to try new methods and shift your thinking, such as erasing the word 'blast' from your email marketing vocabulary. Interact and engage with people. You don't think of engagement as selling, but if engagement is necessary to succeed with social selling, then it is, isn t it? Business owners, marketers, and sales teams are discovering, that social selling is a wonderful thing, but it requires practice, patience, organization and occasional adjustments to make it work. That s how selling has always been, a marathon, not a sprint. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to rethink your social selling as a marathon and not a sprint. You'll get there faster by steadily using your smarts to build a foundation that respects your customers. The post This is Why Social Selling is Like Running a Marathon appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 69 of Landscape Digital Show reveals one powerful idea for making social media marketing work for any business. In a recent video interview, internationally recognized Internet personality Gary Vaynerchuk shared a brilliant idea for making social media work. If you get overwhelmed with the grind of creating content to fuel your social media marketing efforts, then this is your lucky day. This approach will work for anybody because most of us share the same challenge. Here s the idea: Stop creating and start documenting. We spend too much time thinking about creating perfect content when the content that matters most is what we are doing every day. Document that and you ll never run out of content. GaryVee points out that documenting is actually creating your own reality show, and the best part is you do not have to think too much about it. Just show up and be yourself. What you do every day and how you do it matters to the people you interact with, including the customers that your business serves. That reality is the opportunity. If it's boring, you'll quickly figure out a way to make it better. People seldom get better by thinking and planning, but by testing those ideas again, and again, and again. As Gary puts it, "Do this and check back with me in five years." Is there work involved? Absolutely, but knowing that work will lead to tangible results is exciting. So, let s break down this equation into its most essential components, with the most important being you. Your Brand Voice is Social As you know, most of the social media published is not remarkable because it has been scrubbed and sanitized of what makes social media work, and that's what s real. Reality disarms people and makes them take notice. This reality is the voice of your personal brand. That voice stands out in a sea of sameness, but it's not going to fully express itself without daily practice. What are people buying when they buy you? That s a good question to answer because it will help you position your personal and business brands. Whatever it is, you'll discover more about it by putting your most authentic self out there on channels like Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook, because these are the visual channels. Visuals are memorable content that can be created in minutes if you commit to doing it and not worrying about making it perfect. In fact, raw media tends to get the most favorable response because we recognize it to be real. It's been said that life is what happens when …. Complete that sentence as you wish, but use it as a reminder that your life is full of content branding opportunities. Don't let them pass. Document them. You just may discover that it s a fun way to become a better you. Now that you have the approach, let's go further and apply it to your business marketing. Authenticity Speaks to Ideal Customers Before people invest in your business, they invest in you. That's what your authentic brand voice can accomplish. You are now halfway there. You've achieved the know and like of getting people to know, like and trust your business because that is all about personality. The only thing missing to convert that attention into profitable outcomes is a repeatable business process that shows the world what you do and how you do it. One of the secrets to marketing nowadays is you have to be able to show people why your business matters without overselling. In the context of social media, this is accomplished by documenting what your business does that s real, honest and authentic. Don t underestimate how desperately your ideal buyers want this, which may include: Customer interactions. This speaks to who is your ideal customer. Work in progress. People like to see how things are made. Happenings behind the scenes. Unique methods are always attractive. Commentary on local or industry events. Your voice offers insights about what you care about. When you use social media to document these events you are doing two things: #1. Creating connections.  The people, places, and things that you are connected to are used by the social networks to connect the dots. More connections mean more opportunities for appearing in the newsfeeds of people connected with other people, places and things, and so on all the way out to infinity. That is a massive payoff just for showing up! #2. Becoming more aware. Awareness of your daily business activities helps you progressively refine the process of serving customers to make it better. Don't create; document. It s a monster tip for using social media marketing to build a personal brand that attracts leads and opportunities that will make your business grow. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Now that you have no more excuses, it s time to start using social media marketing to document what happens in your landscaping business. That s the call to action for this episode. I chose to focus on posting daily on Instagram and it s working. I m reconnecting with friends and colleagues that are not active on my other channels or are filtered out by the algorithms Perfection is nice to have, but progress is what gets you there. The post Social Media Marketing: One Idea to Make It Work for You appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 68 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why digital leadership is necessary to integrate sales and marketing channels, and how to get it done. It seems business slows down this time of the year. This leads to a question: What should we be doing during these summer doldrums? Keep moving. Every business experiences slowdowns, but they can be minimized by taking the right measures to close the gaps. Is the cause a lack of leads or a failure to close sales? Leads are the responsibility of marketing and closing sales is clearly the responsibility of the sales team. The solution is getting sales and marketing working together. When sales slow down, doubling up on selling efforts is the action that many businesses take. However, that can be a big mistake if you have not properly prepared your customers for them with tactics that demonstrate empathy and earn trust, such as content marketing. Empathy is a vital business objective because that understanding is the raw material for achieving alignment with customers. Let s explore how this can work to smooth out wrinkles like the summer doldrums that can impact business growth. Empathy is a Valid Business Strategy Some people associate empathy with intimate feelings and touchy-feeling tactics that have no place in a business setting. Empathy is understanding. That s what buyers expect before they will commit to a relationship with a business. Thus, getting your sales and marketing down to the level of emotions and feelings will only make it better. If your business slows down this time of year, as many do, use this time to interview your customers. Stop focusing on product sales and start asking your customers questions. Pay attention to how they position your company and compare that to your marketing. Are they congruent? Look for what is not being said too. Take the risk of going deeper and you may be surprised at what you get for creating case studies that can be used across all of your sales and marketing channels. Practice the Digital-First Mindset It s recommended that you build all of your sales and marketing on the foundation of digital. For one thing, our experiences nowadays are predominantly digital, and the majority of those digital experiences are mobile. Therefore, your attention and resources should be weighted more heavily on creating the best mobile experience possible for your customers. If you doubt this strategy, consider that Google now gives priority to the mobile vs the desktop experience in search results. Our increasingly complicated world is driven by search, and not just online. Acknowledge and use this to your advantage by working to achieve consistent use of keywords, natural language, messaging, and voice and style across all of your channels. Get into the habit of having a digital-first mindset. For one thing, it s necessary to make your digital channels work. More importantly, when you take this approach to your internal systems it teaches everyone to communicate consistently with customers, regardless of the channel he or she may be using. Customers Expect an Integrated Channel Experience Marketing today is ideally a collaboration with buyers. It's one in which the business and its customers co-create solutions that are better than what was previously thought possible. This requires customer-focused sales and marketing that attracts attention, encourages engagement and interaction, and leads to experiences that build business growth. The traditional role of marketing was to create awareness and interest, but today it is bigger than that. Our digital marketing channels, including websites, blogs, social media, email, podcasts, and video can indeed take a lead all the way to a sale, but they can do it much better with the help of sales and service. That experience must be planned, tracked and measured because the sales and marketing channels now overlap, and that is why each of them should be used to do what they do best while supporting the others. Every channel should have a theme or purpose that closes a gap in the overall customer experience. For example, you have to decide if your email newsletter will drive sales with special offers or nurture and grow that audience with valuable content. There is no right or wrong answer here, just right or wrong outcomes that are due to failing to deliver an experience that is congruent with the brand promise who the business wants to be for its customers. United Airlines clearly didn t intend to create a media fiasco when it permitted security guards to drag that passenger off one of its planes. It simply lost touch with its customers. Now it is employing an empathy strategy to fix who it wants to be for them. The digital channels are a constant reminder that a customer-focused strategy is the only way to operate a business today As you move forward with your plan, keep in mind that integrating the respective channels is more than a project. It's an ongoing challenge that can actually be fun for sales and marketing geeks. If you enjoy making customers happy, then I imagine that describes you too. Join me and we ll make this happen together! Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to apply digital leadership to mapping out the integration of your sales and marketing channels. Leading brands are increasingly shifting to a digital-first approach for building more relevant experiences that are bigger than the products they sell. You should too. The post Digital Leadership: Integrating Sales and Marketing Channels appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 67 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to teach CRM systems to organize and manage data to better manage customer relationships. The most basic tool for accomplishing business objectives is a simple checklist. You have lists of customers, products, and activities that drive your business. How well all of that works together will determine the success of your business. While some have tackled this challenge with spreadsheets, CRM systems that integrate with marketing automation are infinitely more reliable. CRM or customer relationship management systems initially start out as a database of customers and information associated with them. Over time this database becomes something bigger. It grows into a digital asset whose value grows as the business grows and streamlines the management of customer relationships. There are many excellent CRM systems, but let s be clear that the value of the CRM is ultimately measured by the quality of data that it gives the business. The responsibility for making that happen is 100% on the business. You have to teach your CRM how to give your business the right data on its customers, leads, and prospects. Let s examine how that works. Step 1. Use Categories and Tags to Organize Lists work best to get the job done when they are highly targeted, and that is made possible with strategic tagging. Tags organize customer data so that it is discoverable, but more important so that the CRM can segment customers, prospects, and leads into lists that the business can use to accomplish its objectives. Many companies segment their lists into customers and prospects and that s it. My practice is to go further so that my business can personalize its interactions with our customers. For example, we obviously have a client list, but we also add other tags to distinguish repeat customers from the larger group of customers because they are clearly higher value customers that trust us completely. Think of your tagging system as the search algorithm for your CRM. You know when you perform a Google search it delivers all the available search results. However, the Google navigation allows you to focus on specific result categories, that is, images, news, videos, maps and more. Think of categories as buckets of similar content. For your CRM they are buckets of customer insights that are defined by related tags. The more tags you use the more accurately your lists can be defined, but to make those tags easy to locate and use you should create meaningful categories. Here are the categories I use that you can borrow from: Business Status (client, prospect, lead, vendor) Personal Status (repeat client, early adopter, friend, influencer) Behaviors – (actions people take) Subscriptions – (opt-ins) Products – (purchases) Interests – (insights) Events – (live events) A contact (person) can only have one business status tag, but he or she can have multiple personal status tags that further describe who they really are, such as a client that is a repeat client and an early adopter. These are the clients that help us test and refine our ideas to make them suitable for the majority. Subscriptions are information lists that the subscriber has requested to join. Behaviors are non-buying actions people have taken, and products and interests are self-explanatory. As you can imagine, most businesses will have multiple products, and the people buying them will potentially have hundreds of interests. As a professional speaker, I present at and attend many events, so that is an important category for organizing my relationships. And I would think it would be for many business professionals too because in our digital world it s especially important to get the full value out of these more intimate, in-person interactions. Step 2. Teach the System the Actions to Take CRM systems should ultimately tell a story that helps the business to make better decisions. Your decision-making process may follow a traditional sales funnel or the more contextual buyer's journey. What's key is to anticipate and encourage desired customer actions by responding appropriately to every action taken. This can be accomplished by considering what if? What if a prospect buys? What if customers need to be notified of an emergency? What if a buyer needs more information? What if our offer is rejected? What if a prospect's interest score jumps? All of these actions by customers or prospects merit an appropriate response, and the best-prepared business will almost certainly be the one with a robust CRM that has been adapted to know how to respond to each and every situation. Let's say a prospect's interest score does jump. In most CRM systems any type of engagement (typically clicking a link) will be interpreted as interest that raises his or her score. Depending on the type of business, this may trigger an offer or a manual response like a phone call. Historically, CRM systems have been used to accumulate data. In 1998 when my landscape business committed to our first true CRM our productivity jumped because we had invaluable data at our fingertips. However, we had a new challenge and that was what to do next with that data. Now that we have marketing automation and mobile devices that give us notifications, it's entirely possible to filter the numberless 'what if's" so that what follows is our top priority, and that it gets the attention it deserves. It's necessary is to create actions that address the many 'what if' possibilities and then build lists around those actions. Examples of actions that may be triggered are as follows: Start tracking Promote a product or service Connect and engage Offer a discount or reward Educate and inform Express gratitude Request more information You get the idea. These are common day-to-day activities for any business. The only difference now is that we have data to assist in making the right decisions and to automate action sequences whenever possible. Good luck! Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action is to get a CRM if you don t have one. If you do, start getting more from it if you do have one by teaching it how to give you the data you need to better manage your customer relationships and grow your business. The post CRM Systems: Using Data to Manage Customer Relationships appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 66 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to achieve business growth with marketing systems that identify and remove buying obstacles.  You may be familiar with Ryan Holiday's book The Obstacles is The Way, which has gained cult status with NFL coaches and elite athletes, among others. The thesis of the book is one with which many of us are familiar. When the way out is obstructed it s telling us something. As Holiday puts it, "Turn it around. Find some benefit. Use it as fuel. Turn every obstacle into an advantage." Holiday suggests obstacles are what they are because of perception. For example, some companies are too quick to fire customers that challenge them. That s unfortunate because those customers may actually lead them to new discoveries and innovations that could benefit all of their customers. The difference is perception and that perception can be changed. Remove Buying Obstacles Early in my career, I worked as a sales professional in the petroleum industry. The products we sold were mostly commodities. As a result of this pricing was often the primary conversation topic with customers and differences of even a penny/gallon could prevent a deal from happening. But I quickly learned that matching the competitive price was only part of the equation. That was the requirement for just getting in the game. The deal makers were other decision criteria such as assured supply and on-time delivery. Working them out tipped the scales in our favor. Experience taught me that selling was mostly about removing obstacles that prevented buyers from buying. To accomplish this I had to thoroughly understand my company's capabilities and what would be acceptable for each and every customer. For example, some wanted delivery by rail car to assure them the lowest price, but others could only accept trucks. Delivery was huge in that industry, and sometimes you could get a premium price for it. Of course, if you gouged a customer a few pennies when they needed expedited truck shipments, which was more costly, that would be remembered and factored into the next negotiation. Every business regularly encounters obstacles and systems are necessary to manage them. Fortunately, in this data-driven world of CRM systems and marketing automation, that is readily accomplished if you take the time to build and consistently use them. Why? Because soon there will be artificial intelligence technology to teach your system how to automate the process of understanding and responding to buying obstacles. But don t worry about that now; just be sure to consistently feed customer data to your CRM. Get Excited About Obstacles In the previous episode, we discussed why The Coca-Cola Company eliminated its CMO – Chief Marketing Officer position and replaced it with several new officers that are charged with implementing a "growth-oriented and consumer-centered" strategy. It's apparent that Coke plans to focus less on traditional product marketing and more on the industry obstacles that inhibit growth, such as consumer lifestyle choices. There is abundant research that both diet and sugary sodas can contribute to health issues. That has been a challenge for decades, and it deserves to be addressed sooner than later because consumers are increasingly aware of it. What are the big obstacles in the landscaping or lawn care industries? A couple that come to mind is completing projects on schedule and the communication of schedule changes. Just fixing that could make your company stand out. The truth is in most markets product and service quality exceeds buyer expectations. As a result, the differentiating factors are the elimination of common obstacles that prevent buyers from approaching not just your business, but any business. This should make it easy to get excited about being the company that is known for eliminating or mitigating them. Here s a tip: The solution is often getting personal with people to show them you care and that you have a plan in place for backing up your promises. That should be reflected in your marketing, such as website content, social media, and email newsletters, and it should especially become part of your sales and service training programs. Business Growth is Data-Driven Get comfortable with the term business growth because, for lack of a better term, it may prove to be the one that best represents the discipline formerly known as marketing. Coke's CMO was replaced by a Chief Growth Officer, a Chief Innovation Officer, and a Chief Information Officer. That combination acknowledges the fact that marketing today is now about the growth of more than product revenue, that it will require innovation, and that the comprehensive customer experience will be one that is data-driven. Uh oh, that may be an obstacle. That s right, you can expect marketing to become increasingly technical and dependent on technology. Instead of perceiving that to be an obstacle, why not get excited and get busy being the company that is known for using that technology to do more for its customers? Good luck! Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Reconsider marketing and what it is becoming, and that is something bigger than just the promotion of products and services. Business growth is more than just increasing sales revenue. It's discovering new ways for connecting, engaging, and interacting with customers. That comprehensive experience will soon become the benchmark of business and marketing success. The post Business Growth: The Obstacle is The Way appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 65 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why experiences are bigger than products when digital innovation drives marketing.  This short episode is a study of recent changes in the world of marketing that will give you ideas for ensuring the relevance of your business marketing for your audience. The event that best profiles these insights is the recent elimination of the Chief Marketing Officer role at Coca-Cola (better known as the CMO). The significance of this event can be traced to the influences of digital innovation on marketing. Former Coca-Cola CMO Marcos de Quinto led a product-based marketing strategy at the global marketing organization. That emphasis on product marketing ultimately proved to be the impetus for shaking up Coke s management structure. The truth is many consumers today are less interested in product features, probably because they cannot distinguish them from the competition. Nowadays it's the contextual customer experience that is desired most, and this suggests the product is merely an introduction to something greater. In fact, Coca-Cola s CEO James Quincy stated, "The Coca-Cola Company has to be bigger than brand Coca-Cola." He elaborates, "The brand Coca-Cola will always be the heart and soul of the Coca-Cola Company, but the company needs to be bigger than its core brand." That's interesting, but how exactly does marketing interpret bigger so that it can give it life? To accomplish this initiative, the CEO s direct reports will be a Chief Growth Officer, a Chief Innovation Officer, and a Chief Information Officer, with the Information Officer being charged with "increasing visibility and focus on efforts to digitize all aspects of the company's business." The significance of the Growth and Innovation Officers is that in order to transcend its core brand, Coca-Cola intends to become a "growth oriented and consumer-centered organization." Let s take a closer look at that. A Growth Oriented Business is Data-Driven Coca-Cola's Chief Growth Officer will be growing all aspects of the brand, not just product sales, but how consumers engage and interact with its products. This bigger vision will be data-driven, that is, it will incorporate AI (artificial intelligence), and that gives it a hope of winning over analysts and shareholders who will be expecting proof of ROI. Consumer engagement and interaction are just a couple of metrics that must be measured to reliably predict revenue growth. If that can be accomplished, marketing will by default become more consumer-centric. Consumer-Centric Marketing Builds Community Your marketing shows what your business cares about. A product focused company cares about sales and a customer focused company cares about the people that generate those sales. A consumer-centric organization recognizes that customers are seldom product experts, but they are indeed experts in the user-experience of, let s say, their automobile, favorite pair of jeans, or landscaping. Businesses that seek to understand customer experiences will be ideally positioned for making product innovations that lead to sales growth. Contrast that with this statement Coca-Cola's former CMO made to his advertisers, "If you want people to love to drink Coca-Cola, please show in your commercials people who love drinking Coca-Cola." In all fairness, that type of advertising is how many of us were taught to market before digital became the dominant form of marketing. However, the problem with this product marketing approach is that it doesn't integrate well with digital because consumers, not the company, are the most credible source of marketing. And as we ve noted, they care less about the product than the experience of consuming it. What do customers want from your business, better products or unique solutions to their problems? Do you see the difference? Nowadays most products perform exceptionally well in getting the job done, whatever that may be, but that s not enough to get talked about on social media. This is why I like Coke's vision to be bigger than its core brand. For most companies, the core brand is necessarily product or service-based because that's how we have traditionally measured success. Whereas, a consumer-centric approach to business seeks to create what most of us would call community, a sense of belonging or connection. When you buy a product or service you literally join a community of like-minded people. The challenge for businesses likes yours and mine are discovering ways to make that more tangible by creating opportunities for people to share ideas and insights that just may become bigger than the brand that initially brought them together. Isn t this kind of digital innovation what social media does well? Make that your call to action. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action How can you use social media (or any other platform like a live event) to create opportunities for your customers to come together and share ideas that you can then use to create a bigger brand experience for them?. The post Digital Innovation: Experiences are Bigger than Products appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 64 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how CRM systems can become digital assets of customer insights that increase sales productivity. Recent research conducted by industry CRM leaders Salesforce and Hubspot indicate companies using a CRM are more productive and sell 30-40% more than their competitors. Our 2017 digital marketing survey revealed more than half of landscaping industry respondents do not use a CRM. Specific feedback suggests this is due to confusion about the role of CRM in general, set-up, training, and maintenance costs, and how to choose a CRM that is right for the business. These are all important considerations that are best addressed by considering what the business wants to accomplish with its CRM and the resources that it is prepared to dedicate to those objectives. The Role of CRM The term CRM is short for customer relationship management. And when you consider its meaning it becomes obvious that it's not just the CRM, but the planning and implementation of actions that affect customer relations that are vital to CRM success. CRM technology promises sophisticated customer insights, but that information is unattainable without taking the time to plan for its acquisition. This is a challenge even with basic CRM's. There is a learning curve. In addition to several industry-specific CRM systems, I have worked with several of the top-tier CRM's, including Goldmine, Salesforce, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, and Nimble. They all have their merits. Finding the one that works best for your business will require an assessment of objectives and the resources necessary to accomplish them. Typical CRM objectives include: Capturing leads Giving every lead the attention it deserves Filtering out leads that are not a good fit Tracking leads to ensure they convert to sales Nurturing relationships with leads until they are ready to buy Tracking referrals within your network Maintaining a centralized log of all customer communications Building a database of customer insights Fulfilling all customer commitments Following up on key anniversary or milestone dates Responding to specific segments of your database when necessary Automating sales and marketing actions CRM Set Up and Costs A CRM should allow for easy importing and export of data. Depending on your skills, this may be a service that you will want to hire out because it should only take a few hours at the most for someone familiar with the system. Training is necessary to get the respective team members using the CRM properly, including owners, managers, and sales and support teams. Note that more team members will increase the monthly cost of using the CRM system because additional seats must be purchased, but keep in mind some of those seats can be shared. After the initial training, which can be significant, most CRM services will provide regular system updates for little or no cost. However, this will require the dedication of at least one person in your organization to keeping everyone current. Choosing the Right CRM You probably think of a CRM as a tool, and it is when you first acquire it. Yet, over time it becomes a digital asset that can be mined for business opportunities, including referrals and upsells. Therefore, it's important to choose a provider that you are confident will be there for you for years to come. Also, the leading CRM systems integrate with other services, such as Gmail and Outlook, and social media. Look for a CRM with a track record of partnering with other companies because that usually brings additional value to you at no additional cost. More sophisticated CRM's such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, and Infusionsoft carry a higher price tag and require greater skill and time to employ the many features. Do your homework and test-drive these systems before making that commitment. If you decide to move forward, be sure to negotiate your best deal. You ll discover the big players will work with you on pricing to get your business locked in. Among the more affordable, yet powerful CRM's are Nimble, Zoho, Insightly, Sugar, and the free version of Hubspot. Pricing for these systems is typically around $30 or less per month per user, and most provide a free short-term trial. The truth is there is not a perfect CRM because every company has different needs, budgets, and skillsets. If your experience is like mine you will discover there are systems that just seem to fit how your business operates. For example, if you are a heavy email user, consider systems like Nimble with integrations that allow for automatically adding contacts directly from email. Once you have selected a CRM your task is to give it a chance. This is vitally important because some companies get frustrated and quit. I'll admit to having done this once after paying for the entire year in advance. For a CRM to deliver on its promise you have to develop the discipline of using it to make regular updates, while also learning new skills. Some companies resist this because it's one more thing to do at the end of the day, but you will discover it to be an invaluable practice. A habit that works for me is keeping a notebook in Evernote where I make notes of my CRM workflow after learning new techniques. Over time you will build a set of company-specific tutorials that will save you time and that can be passed along to others. Remember that a CRM is a means to better relationships with your customers. You may not necessarily enjoy learning technology or data entry, but if you commit to it you will be rewarded with insights that help to close more deals. And who doesn t enjoy closing more deals? Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to double down on your commitment to your CRM. Rethink what you want to accomplish with it or start researching other CRM systems if you believe you haven given it a fair shake and it's time for a change. Before you do that contact customer service and explain your situation. I was ready to quit my current CRM until I got the help I needed. The post CRM Systems: Digital Assets that Increase Sales Productivity appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 63 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how data science can help discover and interpret customer insights for running a smarter business. This episode examines the role data plays in the success of your business, and how to acquire, analyze, and use it to gain valuable customer insights I ll introduce terminology associated with data science that that may be new to you. This will help you to intelligently research and study this important topic further. And I ll give you an example that will show how to identify and analyze data points to run a smarter business. It turns out that I've just returned from a conference where I had the opportunity to get a first-hand take on this subject from Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM This event was a celebration of IBM's top performers and significant others from around the world. If you were wondering, one of those top performers was indeed my wife Leslie. While I imagine Ms. Rometty s presentation on data and analytics was primarily intended for IBM employees, I was especially interested in what she had to say because it provides insights on how you and I can expect to be using data in our businesses. Let s take her high-level review and bring it down to earth. Data Science is Storytelling When you think of data, do you imagine cubicles of geeks poring over numbers and equations? The truth is data science is hot now and its practitioners are in-demand storytellers. One thing to keep in mind is that numbers are never the point, but a means to an end. As a business owner, you want to use data as a lens to filter and focus and make better decisions, presumably to better serve customers and generate profits. Ginni Rometty says the purpose of acquiring data is building a resource of insights. And the most valuable insights are the stories data tell through the interpretation of the daily activities of regular people, your customers. That's what data scientists want to know, what people are seeing hearing, thinking and doing. That contextual data tells a story about what people want, and that is valuable information for any business. To get ready for the data science revolution you can start by mapping out what customers are doing as they experience your business. Empathy mapping is an invaluable tool for understanding what customers are seeing, thinking, hearing, feeling, and doing at every key interaction with the business, such as discovering it online, visiting it, and ideally make a purchase. Check out this article I wrote for Speaker Magazine for more on how to use empathy mapping. It gives you a visual of an empathy map and helps to identify those interactions and use them for refining your process for serving customers. Artificial Intelligence is Software at Work Artificial intelligence may sound like it belongs in the playground of organizations with teams of scientists and engineers, like IBM, for example. In reality, you experience artificial intelligence every day. You've used natural intelligence your entire career, that is, asking good questions, listening, and evaluating the results to make better decisions. Artificial intelligence, often referred to as AI, is simply using automation to emulate natural intelligence and gain more accurate insights more quickly. The most common approach to artificial intelligence is machine learning that identifies human actions and responds to them. As the name implies, machine learning uses machines, better known as computers, to automatically respond to repetitive questions, and to get better doing it over time. And some of the best-known examples of machine learning are artificial intelligence chatbots, with Alexa and Siri being two of the most recognizable examples. AI is readily available to businesses large and small. In fact, some elementary schools are teaching children how to create their own bots. What s a bot? Just a software program, but it takes a human being with natural intelligence to create one. You can actually create your own AI bot to respond to your Facebook page visitors with Messenger. Here s a free mini-course you can sign up for that will help you create a Facebook messenger bot. The approach to using data science is not complicated: 1. Set goals 2. Collect and analyze data 3. Use data to make better decisions IBM s CEO used the term 'man and machine,' which is a phrase that for decades has come to stand for industrial progress. That s the idea behind AI, machine learning, and bots. The intent is not to replace man, but to augment man for making him or her better, smarter, and faster. Most important is you need to supervise your business data and train it to accomplish specific business goals. Train Data to Be Smarter Every industry has typical activities or functions that if improved will significantly affect the bottom line. In labor-intensive service industries like landscaping, this is production labor because that s usually the most significant variable cost. A logical goal is to reduce labor costs while maintaining or possibly increasing the current level of production. To accomplish that, the business has to track labor to better understand and manage it, and to determine the data points that will provide insights that tell a story. Here's an example that may give you some ideas. IBM used its Watson artificial intelligence technology to help Dave Haase compete more effectively in the Race Across America, which is a cycling event spanning over 3,000 miles from Oceanside, California to Annapolis, Maryland. Competitors must navigate terrain, weather, and manage their schedule of sleep and nutrition, typically staying on the bike for an average of 30 hours and alternating with 2 hours off for rest for a period of 8 days. You can imagine there are a lot of variables to process. Thanks to wearable technology devices that measured cycling cadence, skin temperature, heart rate, weather, etc., Watson was able to give Dave a big edge over competitors that relied mostly on intuition. While the Race Across America is athletic competition at its highest level, you can draw inferences about the importance of collecting and analyzing data to make better decisions in your business. What are the important data points in your process? It may help to go back to the suggestions of the empathy map, and what people (your labor force, sales teams, customers, and so on) are seeing, thinking, feeling, and doing. Those human activities are sources of data that can affect change. Your business needs to start building its future on a foundation of human data that in most circumstances does not yet exist. With or without AI, you can gradually acquire that data and periodically analyze it to make progressively better decisions over time. We'll talk more about this in future episodes. For now, have the intention of becoming a data-driven because that alone will give your business an edge. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Human beings are not perfect and neither is data, but having the intention for acquiring, analyzing and using it to make better decisions will position your business for the future, one where data science is sure to be one of the most important disciplines. Your call to action is to get ready for that inevitable reality. The post Data Science: Discover Customer Insights for Running a Smarter Business appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 62 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to use email as a customer communication channel for building genuine trust with customers. The best marketing for any business is not what its media says, but the actions the business takes, especially when circumstances are less than optimal. Those familiar words introduced our customer care episode two weeks ago where we revealed the leadership and marketing lessons from the recent airline fiasco in which a passenger was forcibly removed from an airplane. If you happen to be a United Airlines customer you recently received an email that addressed the situation, and in my opinion, it nicely accomplished its objective. After a series of media mistakes, I believe the United CEO s customer communication email will very likely prove to be a key step toward fixing his reputation and the airline's. It can also serve as a case-study for using email to build genuine trust with your business customers. Email Is An Intimate Communication Channel Choosing email to address customers directly was a key decision United made for healing relationships with its customers because unlike the major media channels, it s personal. Major media is more of a performance than a communication because it's open to everyone, including people that don't need to be part of the conversation. Email is intimate because people give you permission to access their inbox. That permission is granted because they trust you, and if you do not live up to the implied promise of respecting the channel, then that permission will be revoked. The subject line of the United CEO s email, Actions Speak Louder Than Words, was carefully chosen to give the copy an overall theme to distinguish it from general marketing. That s personal. In addition to that, the short paragraphs read like a personal letter. Some of the first words of this customer communication state, You will be treated with the highest level of service and the deepest sense of dignity and respect. The words deepest sense of dignity and respect set the tone of the message. But make not mistake, so does the email channel itself. There is a lesson here for anyone that uses social media marketing for customer communications. If the message is for everyone it is for no one. When customer communications are blasted out to multiple social media channels it weakens the message because it's not targeted. This is why the most successful marketers consider email to be their most valuable digital asset. Customer Communications are Teaching Moments The second paragraph of the email states, Earlier this month, we broke (your) trust when a passenger was forcibly removed from one of our planes. Our procedures got in the way of our employees doing what they know is right." An amicable settlement was made with the passenger that was forcibly removed before this email was released. That is precisely what I suggested in our customer care episode: Fix it and share the teaching moment with your customers because chances are they going to eventually learn about it anyway. The CEO s words signal that he is taking full responsibility, while also removing the burden of the people on the front lines that have to go out there every day to serve the customers. That s smart on many levels. In taking responsibility, he outlines specifically what the airline is doing to fix the situation so that it hopefully never happens again. The remedies include: Up to $10,000 for voluntary rebooking No-questions-asked $1,500 reimbursement policy for permanently lost bags Rolling out a new app for employees so they can give away miles, travel credits, and other benefits on the spot when things don't go right. For those interested, the special customer hub gives additional details on the actions that are being taken. Don't underestimate that approach for complementing email. Customers always have questions and the message tends to stick when the company uses its website to give everything more context, and therefore, more relevance. Go Further and Make a New Promise When you break a promise trust is broken, maybe forever. This is why apologies are only a stepping-stone to what should follow, and that s a new promise. Here s United s new promise. Our goal should be nothing less than to make you truly proud to say, I fly United. Should be those are powerful words that acknowledge there is more work to do. It goes on to say this. "Ultimately, the measure of our success is your satisfaction, and the past several weeks have moved us to go further than ever before in elevating your experience with us. The customer experience is the ultimate measure of how well a business is serving its customers. Don't wait for a crisis to elevate the customer experience. Reasonable people understand that no company is perfect, but they want to be assured there is a promise to make the customer experience everything it can be. When things go wrong you have to take strong actions to get them right. While not everyone is going to agree with your decisions, they will respect the fact that you took action. In addressing a live audience once, Steve Jobs acknowledged that Apple indeed makes mistakes like everyone else, but he noted that's better than not making decisions that lead to actions. Action is what the customer communication promised, and some of the results are already in place. Now it s time for customers to respond with their actions. It turns out that next week I m flying United Airlines from Chicago to Hawaii. I ll be interested in reconciling the United Airlines customer experience I know with the customer-focused airline you expect and deserve. I ll be sure to share what I discover with you when I return. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to be diligent about building your lists of customers, influencers, and partners by using email to nurture those relationships, including sharing teaching moments from both favorable and less than favorable circumstances. Actions do speak louder than words, and that's why your customers will appreciate hearing from you on a regular basis. This humanizes your business and keeps that personal email channel warm and ready for any type of customer communication. The post Customer Communication: Using Email to Build Genuine Trust appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 61 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to create winning landscape industry awards entries and sell more work with storytelling. In one of the first episodes of Landscape Digital Show, we discussed why storytelling is essential to winning landscape industry awards. Since we are once again in the thick of the landscape industry awards season, I d like to go into more detail about why your project story is vital to winning, and how to tell to tell that story with familiar storytelling practices used every day in Hollywood. What I m going to show you is that amazing project photos are essential to winning landscape industry awards, but without a good story to back them up your entry will play like a silent film. How Judges Choose the Winners Years ago I was asked to be a judge for the landscape association that is now NALP The National Association of Landscape Professionals. There were 4 landscape company members charged with judging several hundred projects over two days. Here's how it works. Each project has a general description that is read aloud for the group. That description has to tell a story that aligns with the judges' expectations as they review the dozen or so images. Pretend you are a judge. As each image pops up on the screen its one or two sentence description is read. A couple of things are happening. One is that you are reconciling the photo with the description. Two, you are looking for confirmation from your fellow judges, like a nod or smile. Those photos have to deliver on the promise of the overall project description and the specific image description. They do that be letting the story unfold. Think of the project images as scenes in a movie. There needs to be a logical progression from beginning to end, with drama, suspense, and surprise as we progress from scene to scene. If you can accomplish that, you have an excellent chance of winning an award. Contrast that with image descriptions that are vague or do not align well with the visual in front of us. We hear one thing and see another. That confusion is a misfire that will likely drop that submission down a notch. If there is no recovery, such as stunning photos that create a big finish, it will be lucky to receive any award at all. That s it. Game over. Now let s get into the specifics. Every Project Must Have a Theme Great novelists and screenwriters know you have to get and stay on-theme if you expect to capture and hold the attention of the audience. Your audience of judges needs to know why each submitted project was undertaken. That s its purpose or theme. And you need to spice it up with whatever backstory you have, such as the residential landscape renovation that was completed just in time for a milestone family event, thanks to your company's innovative mobilization and execution strategy. You get the idea. Your story narrative and images must work together to become a short film that sparks the imagination of at least one of the judges. Just one. And this is key. You see, while there is usually agreement on the merits of each project, disagreement on any little thing leads to further debate. In other words, there are negotiations among the judges and compromises have to be made. So, to sell an award to the group, at least one of the judges has to champion your project entry. Then he or she will use your story to help the others understand why it deserves an award. And that story starts with the project being true to its theme or intended purpose. A compelling story puts meaning to the project images. In short, when everything else is perceived to be equal, the story is the tiebreaker. Now that I have your attention, let s talk about how to tell that story. How to Tell a Story Like Hollywood Storytelling at the highest level is a complex mix of beats, sequences, scenes, and acts. You may not know what those elements are, but you intuitively know that something is amiss if they are not right. Most important is to understand the main storytelling elements, which are the acts of the story. You know them simply as the beginning, middle, and ending. What s important is what happens within each respective act. 1. Beginning Hook – It contains the inciting incident that propels the story forward 2. Middle build Here there is crisis and progressive complication that holds the audience's interest 3. Ending payoff This is resolution of the crisis and the story climax What's interesting about this simple but reliable formula is that you probably use one like it to sell landscaping projects. Your sales story is one of transformation from a beginning landscape reality into something remarkable, which is the ending payoff. That s what will win the judges over. You start with the beginning hook that sets the stage, giving them a reason to buy into your story, while creating suspense about how the projected outcome was ultimately achieved. The beginning hook prepares the audience for what is about to come, and within that first act is an important moment known as the inciting incident. This is when the story really begins. In the film Rocky, the inciting incident is when Apollo Creed picks Rocky's picture out of the book of contenders and proclaims, "I'm going to give this chump a shot at the title." Now you know there is going to be a fight to the finish. Everything in the middle builds up to the finish, with plenty of challenges that create anticipation about that climactic moment. Rocky experienced his share of challenges and your landscape awards story must do the same. The crisis in the middle raises the stakes for the protagonist, and the higher the stakes for failing the bigger the payoff for winning.  The protagonist of your story is the customer. And the stakes are the award level your project can achieve by coming through for them. So, go ahead, give your story impact by making it a fight to the finish. Let it get a little bloody. Did everything come together perfectly? Doubtful. Quantify your challenges with data to amplify them for the judges. Let s go back to the inciting incident again. What exactly is that for a landscape industry awards project? It's the reason why the customer chose you over your competitors. It s your better idea or way of doing things that hooked them in. And the challenges and struggles you encountered along the way make the outcome that much sweeter for everyone, including the awards judges. That s your storytelling formula. It s a hook, build-up, and a payoff. Back in Episode 4 of Landscape Digital Show, I discussed the details of a particular project that resulted in my young landscaping company at the time winning its first of what would be many landscape industry awards. Give it a listen because it's a real-life example of how this worked for us. Show Notes Need help putting together your awards submission? Let's discuss it. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to start thinking like a storyteller because that is how you are going to sell more work and win more landscape industry awards. If you would like help with your landscaping awards submissions, that is a service that I offer. You can get in touch with me using the contact form or you ll find my contact information on my personal LinkedIn profile. The post Landscape Industry Awards: How to Create Winning Entries appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 60 of Landscape Digital Show reveals customer care marketing lessons in leadership, communication, and training from an actual case study. The best marketing for any business is not what its media says, but the actions the business takes, especially when circumstances are less than optimal. To perform in these clutch situations and let s face it, everything in life is a performance, requires a customer care plan. This means that your people need to be trained for every conceivable circumstance they may encounter. One of the best ways to prepare is to take situations that you experience or learn about and break them down into practical lessons that become part of your regular training. That's what we're going to do today as we explore a situation that ignited the social and traditional media channels around the globe last week. Of course, I'm talking about the incident involving one of the major airlines in which a passenger was re-accommodated with the use of excessive force. (Google that term for the backstory). This situation and others like them are case-studies that can prove invaluable for preparing your business to avoid or skillfully manage crisis situations like them with leadership, communication, and training. Customer Care Starts with Leadership Many people have called for the firing of the airline CEO. If you are the owner of your landscaping business, you know what that spotlight feels like when operations do not go as planned. Unlike the airline CEO, I hope that you will: a. Acknowledge the situation and calmly take responsibility for it. b. Get together with your team and study it to learn what went wrong and how it can be avoided in the future. c. Fix it for this customer and train your team so that it never happens again. I'm confident you already knew this. But let s consider taking this a step further with your marketing. As you resolve difficult situations consider making them teaching moments that are shared with all of your customers. Depending on your community, they will probably find out on their own through Angie's List, Yelp, or day-to-day word of mouth. If you take the lead and risk being vulnerable, you can make this a teaching moment that shows your company's commitment to making things right. Everybody hates rework, especially customers. So, the next time you have to incur the warranty expense of replacing expensive trees, use your media to share a lesson on watering or whatever went wrong to help other customers avoid a similar event with their property. If the problem was something underground, have a conversation about soil types and amendments. You can try to protect your business with contract language, and should, but a better approach is to support it with teaching examples. Customer Care Requires Proactive Communication A friend of mine wrote an article last week about her true experience with another airline that also involved a challenging situation. It turned out to be memorable for all of the right reasons because the pilot proactively communicated with the passengers, every step of the way. This included a face-to-face explanation at the gate about the details of a mechanical problem, and then another, and then a gate change that required a manual rebooking procedure, and so on. You get the picture. People were inconvenienced, they were delayed, and they were less than delighted with the experience. But everything worked out fairly well because they were communicated with in an open, honest, and direct way. Contrast that with the major airline and how it handled their challenges. There was blaming, forced evacuation of a passenger that required hospitalization, and the curious absence of involvement from the airline staff that deferred to outside security personnel. Here s something to consider that s vitally important. You are not the CEO of a major company. Therefore, you cannot call a press conference on one of the major networks to apologize or explain. You need to proactively communicate to your networks to ensure you will have an attentive audience for handling crisis situations or any other. Of all of the communication networks a business can have, email is the most important because it s the most personal. Email is personal if it's consistently used to encourage a dialogue. Use it to inform customers about anything that aligns their relationship with your business, such as the personal side of team members they work with every day. For this to work, you have to show up on a regular schedule. Think of it as making a weekly or monthly appointment for enhancing customer care. Training Makes Customer Care Responsive If you expect your team to perform at the highest level they need to know you will do your job, and that s to use your industry leadership and experience to develop systems that ensure the right things get done right. In our major airline example, there has been some interesting social media commentary. One person suggested the staff was trained to get airplanes to destinations on time when in fact they should be trained to get passengers to destinations on time. If you think about it, when you see airline industry rankings it s usually about flights arriving on time. Have you ever seen a ranking until recently about the number of passengers that get bumped? Customer care is really one outcome of the collective customer experience. Everything matters, from departing and arriving on time, and everything in between. Isn t that what your landscape customers want, projects completed on-time, professional care, and working with great people that take the time to answer the many questions that people will always have? Training makes it all come together. Update: After this was published the CEO of the airline made some strong moves and released an email to its customers detailing those actions. You can get the full update here. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to sit down with your team and discuss this major airline fiasco. Ask what they think should have happened, and what they would do about it now if they were the CEO of that company. Make this a regular training practice with mainstream and landscaping industry examples that you encounter. In fact, if you have one to share I d love to hear it. Without identifying any specific company, leave a comment below and maybe we can talk about it on a future episode. The post Customer Care: Marketing Lessons in Leadership, Communication and Training appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 59 of Landscape Digital Show reveals the 4 most important SEO ranking factors according to leading SEO industry studies. Today we're going to examine the top SEO ranking factors for 2017 that every business needs to know if it expects its website to rank well right now — and hopefully for years to come. This episode is based on data from a number of sources, with the most comprehensive being an article published in Search Engine Journal earlier this year. Here s what the author of that article had to say about SEO ranking factors: Fortunately, not all ranking factors are created equal you can maximize your SEO efforts by focusing on a few specific ranking factors. Of course, Google s algorithm is always changing, and we can t rely on yesterday s ranking factors as we step into 2017. The point is that there are hundreds of factors that Google considers in the ranking of website pages, but if you focus on these four you have a good chance of winning with Google in 2017. #1. Content Using Natural Language It s important to understand that Google technically does not rank websites but pages with content that serve an audience searching for solutions to specific problems. Obviously, more pages with quality content collectively boost the overall ranking of a website. One of the most important measures of quality content nowadays is natural language. In other words, you need to understand and use the language your audience would use in a casual conversation. This means that fake language written specifically to optimize for keywords is penalized. The landscaping industry is full of this type of content, with the most notable example being a homepage that lists dozens of counties that the business serves or hopes to serve. That s not natural because human beings don t list all 27 counties they serve when talking to customers. Another example is an abundance of blog posts with repetitive location language, such as Chicago Commercial Landscape Management. Google uses artificial intelligence (better known as bots) to look for this. Not only that, they have real people doing this too. Therefore, when you are optimizing content be discriminate and use natural language like you do every day in casual conversations. You may wish to try the Hemingway app to test some of your content. I know some copywriters that swear by it. Easier yet is to be yourself and not who you think Google or your audience wants you to be. There s nothing more natural than the authentic you. #2. Backlinks from Influencers Links that point to your content are a vote of confidence. They suggest the source likes your content and appreciates its value enough to share it with his or her community. The first source of backlinks to consider is from your own content. Most content creators know to link to earlier content that adds value. But equally important is to link from older to newer content as well. You want to link to content that adds relevant value. Also, you want the anchor text, this is the text that you are linking from to be relevant. But be careful that you are keeping it natural. If your anchor text is consistently the same words or phrases Google will interpret this lopsided linking as unnatural, which may harm your ranking. What you ideally want are inbound links from influential sources. These are the leaders in your industry, not just in size, but also in terms of their online authority. When they link to your site they are sharing that authority with you. To discover these influencers, consider using BuzzSumo, Twitter advanced search, or Google. #3. A Mobile First Experience It's absolutely essential to have a mobile responsive website. In fact, maybe you recently received an invitation from Google to grade your website. If you accepted Google's offer to grade your website you know the first score on their report is its mobile friendliness. We've arrived at a point where you essentially have two website experiences, one that is mobile and the other desktop. Of course, Google is pointing to the fact that mobile is the future. Experts agree Google is primarily crawling the mobile, not the desktop version of websites. If your site is mobile responsive, the primary action to take for getting mobile right is reducing clutter by taking a less is more approach. Use concise, natural language that is free of industry jargon. And don t use massive photos when a smaller one will do the trick. #4. Important Technical SEO Ranking Factors The top 2017 SEO ranking factors are content, backlinks, and the mobile experience. However, there are technical factors that will support them and also prepare your website for the future. One is https encryption. Not only do the top 100 ranking websites on the web all have https encryption, the Google Chrome browser marks sites without https as unsafe. Thanks to the functionality built into the Rainmaker Platform that supports this website, adding https encryption was painless. This tells me it s something that your Webmaster should be able to easily handle too. But there is one thing to know. You will most likely lose some or all of your social media share counts because technically you are moving to a new domain (one that begins with https versus http). Just make the move and be done with it because it s a matter of time until this encryption becomes the standard. Another technical factor that is known to be good for SEO is using H2 headings to make your content easier to scan and consume. These headings are the promise of what the underlying content will deliver. The H2 heading should be descriptive, just like the 4 SEO ranking factors headings used in the notes for this post. While I could have used an edgy heading like Badass SEO Factors for this section instead of Important Technical SEO Ranking Factors, it's not descriptive, and therefore, not as likely to attract the right audience. After all, that is what we are trying to do with SEO. Show Notes There is more to optimization than Google. If you use LinkedIn, this article will help you optimize your personal LinkedIn profile. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to take a serious look at your website SEO ranking factors and begin updating your content for 2017 and beyond. You want your site to be as human as possible, with content that looks, feels and sounds like an old friend. That s what will lead to earning valuable backlinks that help your rankings. But don t forget the technical factors such as the mobile experience and the safety that https encryption provides. After all, an old friend would never put you or your website in harm's way. The post SEO Ranking Factors: How to Win with Google in 2017 appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 58 of Landscape Digital Show reveals a data-driven social advertising system for reaching a larger or deeper audience. One of the most insightful sessions I had the opportunity to experience at Social Media Marketing World 2017 was one by Larry Kim on social advertising, that s using Facebook, Twitter, and Google advertising to promote content that drives traffic to your website to sell more products or services. What s beautiful about this data-driven system is its simplicity for getting the job done with a minimal advertising spend. Here s how it works. #1. Find Your Unicorns The key to the system is using social advertising to promote only your best content, what Larry Kim refers to as your unicorns. This is content that has proved its value, and therefore, merits the opportunity to reach a larger or deeper audience with the boost of social advertising behind it. Compare that to how some companies use social advertising. They promote all of their content equally with the hope that some of it will stick. This is like sitting at the blackjack table and going all in on every hand with only hope as a plan. There s nothing data driven about that, and that s why it s called gambling. It s not necessary to use complex analytics to find your unicorns. Social share counts are usually enough to find content that resonates with the audience you are targeting. Google favorably ranks content that meets the test of resonance, relevance, and recency. Resonance is an indication that content is hitting the mark with a targeted audience. That is, it s solving a problem a particular problem that is relevant to the audience. One measure of resonance is relevance. Another is recency. Recency can be tricky because sometimes evergreen content that is years old still ranks well, while content that is only a few days old is no longer considered relevant. Use your best judgment based on the type of content. #2 Strategically Promote Your Content If you review your (recent) content for the past 12 months you will discover that only about 5% of it is truly relevant. That is, it has earned moderate or better social shares. This resonant content is likely to achieve desired outcomes with social advertising. Test it with a limited advertising budget of about $10 – $50. If it doesn t bring a measurably favorable return you stop. To make that determination choose the desired outcome or action, such as filling out a form to get more information or calling your office. According to Larry Kim, there are two purposes for social advertising. 1. Catalyst 2. Accelerant A catalyst speeds up a process that will otherwise work without it. In terms of social advertising, this is giving your content a lift to see if it has a chance of running with the unicorns, so to speak. If it doesn t, you stop. Save your money until you have better content. If the content is performing well with advertising as a catalyst you then employ the accelerant strategy. Invest in more social advertising to fuel the virality of your content just as gasoline fuels a fire. The hard part is getting the fire going, so when you discover one you want to take it as far as you can, to the extent that your budget allows. #3. Create a Bias for Your Brand Here s the truth about social selling and content marketing, especially for landscaping and other green industry companies whose revenues are largely dependent upon trusted customer relationships. 1. Promote inspirational and memorable content aligned with your brand to a target audience. This creates awareness. 2. Awareness creates a bias toward your brand. But there are a number of reasons why an interested buyer will choose not to take action at that time. This is why content marketing is a forever game and why using marketing automation to nurture those relationships with unicorn quality content and social advertising should be strategically planned. 3.  Buyers with a bias will take action with your brand when the need arises. One of the outcomes of our industry research is that landscaping companies need more leads and greater conversion of the leads they get. This is what we are talking about here. The winners today are the companies that rank highly for the search terms used by their targeted audiences. That s a good source of leads. The winners are also the companies that are earning social engagement that tends to create even more engagement. That s one of the best sources of conversion. All of this is measurable, so there s no excuse for not taking a data-driven approach like this one. The truth about content marketing nowadays is it is becoming a winner take all game. It s a natural function of the maturation of social media. Now consider that Facebook advertising is very economical today. Doesn't it make sense to give it a try before it too becomes winner take all? As social advertising matures it s only a matter of time until the price to play goes up. Show Notes Check out Facebook Advertising: Target and Reach Your Ideal Buyers. If you listen to the show on mobile I highly recommend the Overcast app because it also gives you access to these show notes and links on your device. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Here s the call to action for this episode. Use BuzzSumo to find your content unicorns. You simply type in your company name or domain and it will list your most popular content in terms of social shares. Then promote this content to a targeted audience such as visitors to your website. You ll know who they are if you have placed the Facebook pixel on your website. It takes time to build that audience from the Facebook pixel. In the meantime, you can target other audiences, such as your Facebook fans. Check out the link on Facebook advertising for other ideas for using custom audiences in the Show Notes (above). The post Social Advertising: A Data-Driven System appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 57 of Landscape Digital Show reveals tips from 3 influential social media experts for live video marketing.  I just returned from Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, and one of my goals was to learn as much as possible about live video. What I discovered will not only give you the motivation to create live video marketing, it will make it easier. #1. Don't Be Perfect David H Lawrence, XVII is a former film and television actor who knows what it's like to deliver in front of the camera. His presentation on using video to build authority at a moment's notice was both educational and entertaining. David's definition of authority includes being believable and trustworthy. And he noted that trust and believability are directly related to vulnerability because what happens in the moment when you allow yourself to be vulnerable is the authentic you. Vulnerability engages audiences. One reason live video is so hot is that connecting with real people is engaging. In contrast, highly edited and sanitized video is often boring. To be clear, you have to know your material well and practice delivering it, because that helps to remove fears that can undermine your authority. When you trust your authority you know whatever you need at any moment will naturally come to you. One of my roles at this event was introducing some of the biggest social media personalities to their audience. I tried David's advice and was pleased to discover that taking the risk of embracing little mistakes instead of trying to be perfect proved key to encouraging laughter and attention that engaged the audience.   Not being perfect will save time-consuming video editing time and will put you more at ease when creating live video. #2 – Push Yourself This tip from Facebook marketing expert Amy Porterfield was indirectly suggested by all of the marketing experts I had the pleasure to connect with. The way David Lawrence put it is to "set up quickly" so that you actually get in front of the camera and create video instead of planning to do it another day. He said this is actually a Hollywood trick for bringing out an actor's best qualities. One of the ways Amy pushes herself to do video is to schedule it. She will typically create 4 educational videos one week apart in advance of a product launch. She also prepares opt-in and thank-you pages that describe what the videos will cover. They will say, This is what I'm teaching. This is what you will learn. Please join us live. When you think about it, you can randomly show up on Facebook and do a live video, but if you plan for and promote it in advance you are more likely to attract a larger and more engaged audience. So push yourself with video. Our next tip explains why. #3. Facebook May Soon Be All Video Mari Smith is sometimes referred to as the Queen of Facebook. And that designation is earned because Facebook itself has hired Mari to teach Facebook marketing to small business audiences across the country. In her presentation on improving your Facebook marketing ROI at Social Media Marketing world, Mari mentioned a quote from Facebook VP Nicola Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn said, "If I was having a bet, it'd be video, video, video. Facebook live may be all video in half a decade" That quote was made last June, by the way. She went on to say that Facebook Live is "a bigger, faster phenomenon" than Facebook expected and that people "are loving the behind-the-scenes content." This is significant because Facebook's algorithm is designed to show content in the newsfeed that people most want to see. This is video, especially live video, and it explains why that content is achieving far greater reach than static content. It's also important to remember that Facebook's revenue is directly tied to advertising, and with 10 billion videos consumed daily on Facebook, it's clear that video is how advertisers will choose to reach buyers. You ll want to do the same. Live video is the next evolution in storytelling and Facebook is the current and potentially foreseeable leader because they have a massive, ready-made audience that loves video. If your business wants to reach a greater audience, live video should be part of your marketing strategy for reaching your audience and engaging it to build believability and trust. Show Notes David H Lawrence, XVII recommends the AT2020+ mic for recording video because it includes a headphone jack so you can hear what you are recording. An inexpensive lavalier mic for on-camera work is the AT3350is. And David says Screenflow is the only video editing software you need. To switch between her laptop and mobile devices with live video, Amy Porterfield and Mari Smith use Wirecast. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode to push yourself to do video. While it s unlikely Facebook will ever be 100% video, it s clear that video is the future of marketing. Video marketing is absolutely exploding, especially raw, unpolished, live video that assures us we are getting the real thing. The post Live Video: Top Tips from 3 Social Media Experts appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 56 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why the secret to digital marketing is showing your customers how your work is done. If you have been a subscriber or member of Landscape Digital Institute for a while you know that I typically close out my emails with this: Now go out there and show them how it's done! Your purpose, your mission, is to get out there every single day and serve the people that are now your customers, however many or few there are, for one very important reason. That base of customers is everything when it comes to your digital marketing because they are your link to new business. If they are not talking you up on the digital channels you may have to rethink what and how and maybe even why you are doing the work that you do today. The fact is people talk and share what's part of their daily lives. If they appreciate and trust you they will share that with friends. It's all about inquiry and being top of mind. Facebook asks us, "What's on your mind?" Twitter inquires, "What's happening?" And LinkedIn suggests, "Share an article, photo, or update." Let's assume that your products and services are better than most. They work. They get the job done. That's enough, right? Not exactly. How your business accomplishes its work, and why, is vitally important. And because that can get a little messy from time to time, it necessarily makes live social media and other forms of digital marketing points of vulnerability. This is why more conservative companies tend to shy away from digital marketing, especially social media. They prefer to polish their marketing to a mirror shine to get rid of all the wrinkles and warts. There's nothing wrong with that because we all need our glamor photos and pieces of marketing that fluff up the business to that perfect version of itself. But that's not going to get talked about because it's not engaging. People want to see how things work. They want to know how the secret sauce is prepared and why those special ingredients matter. Consider that next landscaping project or lawn care treatment to be a meal. Is it enough for it to be tasty? For some people, yes, especially the ones that know you well and trust you. These are your current customers. But what about the customers your business has yet to serve? They are not going take everything at face value because everyone has slightly different decision-making criteria. More than anything, new buyers are wondering if they can trust you. And you know how that works. You never trust anybody just because they say you should. You trust people that show you they are trustworthy. Embedded within the experience of discovering, acquiring, using, and enjoying what you sell is the key to getting your company talked about because that's where trust is earned. It's seldom just the transaction of acquiring what you sell that matters because that's just a moment in time. It's something else that either precedes or follows it that is worth remembering and sharing. That may be how you open the door to new relationships or transition your customers from the design to the construction phase, and then to caring for their property. For my former landscaping business, it was helping people to dream bigger. We loved that challenge because it's easier for people to buy into ideas that are better than they dreamed were possible, even if they do cost more money. Most important is that we created a system that showed how we were going to make that possibility happen.  Neuroscience assures us that most people make decisions by trusting their gut, their intuition. It also assures us people will not make a decision until they have a mental picture of how everything will play out and why they can trust your business to make that vision reality. Showing your customers how things are done not only builds relationships and earns trust, it also gives them more to share that will get people talking about your business. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Show your customers how everything about your business works so they can become its advocates to the new customers you have yet to discover. That's how this crazy thing we call digital marketing works and why video is absolutely exploding, especially raw, unpolished, live video that assures us we are getting the real thing. This week I'm off to Social Media Marketing World in San Diego where I hope to make new discoveries about live video and more that I can bring back to you. If you are not attending, you can still register for the digital pass to get the recordings of over 200 expert sessions. Look for updates on the Landscape Digital Institute Facebook Page. The post Digital Marketing: Show Them How It's Done appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 55 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to use content marketing to sell more business by making a difference for customers. For over 15 years, Seth Godin has been blogging short nuggets of information, insights, and inspiration every day of the week. His track record speaks to the power of content marketing for attracting an audience of people that you can serve. Seth Godin says that we lay clues with our content that sparks change, thereby giving people permission to take action and acquire the things we sell. Those products and services we make matter a lot, but first, they have to be discovered by the breadcrumbs that lead to their discovery. This includes the conversations people hear and the experiences that are shared that casts a shadow that starts days, months, and often years prior. We're all casting a shadow of some kind with our content marketing, but is it helping you stand out in a sea of sameness? Content marketing is not for everyone for two reasons:  #1. You have to believe content marketing works. #2. You must have a plan for making it work for you. Everybody sells something. The art of content marketing is putting some meaning behind that by showing your customers and potential customers and influencers what you stand for to cast the right shadow, one that engages people. That meaningfulness is a combination of what your customers want and how you are aligned with helping them get more of it. This may be what you sell, but it's also what they believe in, which may include environmental stewardship, community involvement, and educating our future leaders. Telling that story is something that I'm very passionate about, and I hope you are too because it not only helps people discover how you can make a difference for them, it adds value to what you sell. You only need a plan for making that happen. Here's a simplified approach that will help you to find the gaps in your approach so that you can fix them. #1. Content Audit The first step is the content audit. This is a compilation of all of the content you have out there on the web, where it's located, and it's purpose. Focus on the content that is now the most highly visible and that you have control over, which for most people will be your social media accounts and website. My suggestion is to cut and paste that content into a folder where it can be the controlling copy. My preference is Evernote. I'll edit that to make it a better, date it, and then set triggers to remind me to do it again a couple times per year. Then it's a simple matter to update every version of it that's on the web. This may start with your LinkedIn profile, let's say, and then carry over to your website, YouTube channel, and so on. #2. Content Topics Next, is choosing the topics you wish to address with your content. This goes back to what you and your customers care about besides what you sell, which again may be the environment, community, etc. #3. Editorial Calendar Take these topics to your editorial calendar to guide your content creation. Keep this simple. Maybe you stick to just a few themes, rotating them every month or so. If you are a commercial landscape management company, these topics may be managing project costs, safety, communication, and planning. That's one topic per quarter. #4. Content Distribution Channels Which channels do you plan to use to share that content? That is, where will it be published? This can be a combination of your website, a blog if you have one, email newsletter, YouTube channel, both personal and business accounts for LinkedIn and Facebook, Pinterest, and Houzz. Your content distribution channels are where you can and should be encouraging engagement with your communities. This is what distinguishes social from traditional marketing that gives it greater and more sustained impact. #5. Analytics You have to monitor and measure your results and make adjustments to your trail of breadcrumbs that lead to the discovery of the products and services your business sells. In addition to Google Analytics, you may wish to consider a business intelligence service such as Cyfe. There are a few other steps for taking your content marketing to the next level, such as creating a style guide, but implementing these five will put you on solid footing. Seth Godin wrote his first blog post on January 2002. He just kept going, and now he has a body of work that not only casts a long shadow, many of us find it to be an indispensable source of inspiration. We are all going to experience shifts in our businesses, but capturing that experience with content allows you and your customers to get the most from it. If you are an introvert or your business culture is conservative you may not be comfortable with content marketing because creates vulnerability. Depending upon your approach, that may be exactly what attracts more customers to the great products your business makes. Show Notes Check out Content Marketing Roadmap to go deeper on this topic. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to take this simple, 5-step, content marketing approach to cast a shadow of content that communicates the great work you do, and thereby helps to sell the products and services you make. The post Content Marketing: Making a Difference that Sells appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 54 of Landscape Digital Show reveals a 5-step writing process formula for creating winning content that captivates your audience. In this episode, I'm going to share my writing process that has evolved over the years by borrowing secrets from great writers, including novelists, non-fiction authors, editors, screenwriters, copywriters, bloggers and more. Like any other activity, writing must follow a process. It s the only way to consistently achieve results. Every day billions of people jump on Facebook, LinkedIn, and so many other channels to share a message, often to accomplish a business purpose. That's usually a written message, but if it's the spoken word like this podcast or a video, I hope at least a portion of it is first written. Why? Some people can indeed create amazing improv content, but they are rare. If you doubt this, just rewind in your mind the rambling acceptance speeches of too many Academy Award winners. That's what happens when there is no preparation, and that preparation you will discover is writing. Whether you think you have writing talent or not, I can assure you anyone can do this better if they commit to studying and practicing to find and perfect his or her process for doing it well. Here's the writing process that works for me. #1. Generate Ideas The first, and in my opinion, most enjoyable step in any writing process is to start writing to discover new ideas worth writing about. You're having a conversation with yourself that leads to accessing ideas that you may have long forgotten or not explored as they are in that moment. This is one of the secrets of writing. By typing on those keys you are engaging your mind and body, and most likely your heart and soul too. Anyone that has not written a book may not understand this. I know that I didn't because I desperately wanted to write a book and it took me almost a decade to make it happen. Instead of writing to generate new ideas I was trying to create perfectly written content without doing the work of discovery. You'll never have everything perfectly organized, so just get started and put in the time to see what your mind, body, heart and soul come up with. And be prepared to thrash around, struggle and fail because that's part of this too. Trust the process and stay with it because what comes after that struggle will be the ideas for some of your best writing. #2. Give It Structure Once I have the thread of an idea I print it out and start looking for the structure. Typically, I'll use a three-part beginning, middle and end structure, just like a screenwriter or playwright will use a three-act structure. It's a time-tested formula that always works. There are more advanced structures that I use, and that I've discussed in earlier episodes, but this one is foundational. #3. Write to Completion Now the true writing begins. And the cardinal rule is that I do not take my butt out of the seat until the article, podcast show, or chapter is complete. You've invested a fair amount of time to get to this point. That's why it's important to use that inspirational flow to go the distance. It's quite likely that before taking this step I've allowed my idea time to set, giving my conscious and subconscious mind time to work on it. This is something we all naturally do. It's called the Zeigarnik Effect. The mind tends to work on what's not complete. So, you have to get started to have something, anything, that you can then take to the finish line. It may work differently for you, but I've personally discovered that not writing to completion is like swimming halfway across a body of water. Turning around means starting over again. #4. Take Time to Edit Editing to most people means fixing misspellings and typos. Clearly, that has to be done but there is much more to it. Since most of the content you create will be published somewhere online, you have to ask yourself if you have been true to the theme that is represented by the headline or title. Often I will find that I can come up with a better headline. After I do, I'll usually have to eliminate, reorganize or rewrite some of the content. Then, I'll create subheadings or improve those that I already have. After that, I'll scrutinize the paragraphs to make them as tight as possible. This includes breaking out key sentences that can stand on their own, thereby giving them more punch and making them retweetable. Finally, everything has to pass a visual test for look and feel. People don't read nowadays as much as the skim content for meaning. So keep your paragraphs short, usually no more than three sentences. And be sure to highlight key phrases and sentences in some way. They can be bolded, italicized, numbered, or featured in a call-out box. Congratulations. You are done, except that you aren't. #5. Rewrite, Reformat and Repurpose If you haven't heard the term writing is rewriting, get comfortable with it because that's what should follow the initial publishing of your content. A lot of people publish and stop. No, no, no, no, no. You have to now publish your content in multiple formats to adapt to the desired learning or discovery preferences of your respective audience members. The good news is each writing iteration makes your content that much better. Trust me, this phase of the process often will take on a life of its own that can go on for weeks, months, even years. And it should. Think of this as a dialogue with your audience that never stops. If it does the relationship with that audience of customers, influencers, and potential buyers falls apart. This is why I go back to my archives to take earlier content and make it more relevant to my audience today. Rewriting, reformatting and repurposing are more work, but it s truly where the magic happens. Sadly, most people skip this step in favor of chasing new ideas. Ideas become what they want to be at a particular moment in time, but they cannot get there on their own. You have to be the guide by rewriting them. Show Notes Here are some of my favorite books on writing: Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t, by Steven Pressfield – This easy read by one of the masters is informative and humorous. You'll discover fiction and non-fiction writing have a lot in common. Everybody Writes, by Ann Handley – Ann's book is a great one for both beginners and serious writers. Here's my podcast interview with Ann when her book was first published. On Writing, by Stephen King – This is both informative and hilariously entertaining. That's why I suggest the audiobook that is recorded by the author. The Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne – You probably need to be a lifelong writer to pursue this publication. It's for serious writers. Check out How to Discover and Perfect Your Brand Story for additional ideas on story structure. 27 Writing Productivity Tools, Techniques and Resources is a monster blog post that I put together after writing my first book. It's exactly what the title suggests, tools, tips, and resources. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to take my 5 step writing process and test it against yours. If you don't have a reliable process make mine your own and borrow from those of other writers. If you don't have a reliable process make mine your own and borrow from those of other writers by exploring the links listed in the show notes. The post Writing Process: A 5-Step Formula for Creating Winning Content appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 53 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to create a social selling plan for gettin buyers to know, like and trust your business. As I read that headline I wrote for this article, the phrase know, like and trust strikes me as overused. How about you? The truth is those words matter more than ever when it comes to social selling. Social selling is powerful and becoming more so as the technology improves. But you first have to get the basic foundation in place. It's a fact that people want to buy. They have problems to solve and dreams to fulfill. But they will not take action if everything is not right, and they ll make that decision at a gut level. Smart people trust their intuition when making important buying decisions such as choosing the company that will beautify and maintain the outdoor environment of their home, their castle, their most significant investment in this lifetime. When you put it like that, suddenly trust takes on new meaning, doesn't it? Perfect. Let's get to work building your social selling plan for using all forms of marketing, including social media, for getting buyers to know, like and trust your business. I. Principles of Social Selling These principles put a frame around the current selling environment that has been greatly influenced by social media over the past decade. #1. Business is Now Personal – Most people will not even approach a business nowadays unless they have a relationship with a person in it. Use your media to help them get to know you. #2. People Like to Collaborate – If you can get buyers involved, they will be emotionally invested in the creation of their own solution, which means they will naturally make the financial investment to acquire it. People like to be involved. Use your media to give them that experience and they will buy.  #3. Communities are the New Markets – Thinking in terms of markets produces faceless marketing that is not trusted. Building trust takes time; it comes from being visible and active in the places where buyers are hanging out. That community is where trusted relationships grow. Remember these principles when choosing your digital marketing channels and the content that you will share to move people to action. First, let's consider the channels. II. 4 Pillars of Social Selling #1. Modern Website – Your website is the primary vessel or container for storing and delivering your media content that will help people to know, like and trust your business. Is is personal? Is is collaborative? Does it encourage community? #2. Intimate Newsletter – This is how you get the word out that you've just published new content on your website or any other channel that will help your community of subscribers. #3. Consistent Blog – This could also be a podcast show like this one. It's where you consistently provide fresh content that builds your digital footprint and helps your site's ranking. Trust is a function of relationships, and you cannot be successful them if you are not consistently showing up to add value. #4. Active Social Media – This should be self-evident but it bears repeating. You have to be actively engaged with your community of buyers if you expect to build trust. If you want to measure how you compare against your peers in this department on LinkedIn, just Google Social Selling Index and check out your score and how to improve it. The third and final step for creating a social selling plan is where the magic happens, creating social content that sells. III. Social Content that Sells Content that sells is content that builds trust because that s what ultimately gets people to sign on the line that is dotted. That content can accomplish many objectives, but in its simplest form it should: 1. Answer questions 2. Solve problems 3. Provide inspiration Think about media in general and why people tune in. They want answers, solutions to problems, and ideas that inspire them. Ideally, you want to be their go-to source for all three. You have to know your audience's challenges to answer their questions and solve their problems. And you have to inspire them to take action so that they can actually enjoy the benefits of what your business sells. Let's face it, getting people to know, like and trust you is selling. That's why it's interesting that the more recent term social selling implies a different take on social media marketing. Social is personal and selling is personal, so it stands to reason that social media should connect with people on a personal, emotional level. Social selling is primarily removing obstacles. People want to buy but there are obstacles that stand in the way of them trusting your business, and the same is true for its competitors. Here are 4 examples specifically for landscaping and lawn care companies that are equally applicable to many other industries. #1. Overcharging – This is a fear many people have. Addressing it can be tricky because often there is a reason why your pricing is higher than the competition. Use your media to show them why by being honest about what's built into your solutions. There are countless things that happen behind the scenes or during construction that justify a higher price. Show people what that is or they will have no choice but to judge the book by its cover. #2. Unreliable or untrained staff or workforce – Nobody wants to or should have to babysit their project or clean up after a crew. Probably the best way to convey this with your media is testimonials from real customers. And be sure to get their permission to use their real names because without that it looks like smoke and mirrors. #3. Unsafe chemicals, pollutants, or irritants – Creating and maintaining landscapes is messy because it's disruptive. The company that wins the business is the one that shows it understands, among other things, local ordinances and how to manage even what seems unmanageable. You especially want to use your media to show buyers you know what they don't know and can guide them through it all. #4. Inconsistent follow-up – Communication is vital for building trust. No company is perfect, but those that have systems in place to communicate consistently will build confidence with buyers. As you can see, social selling with digital media is no different than traditional face-to-face selling. Both require planning and deliberate implementation of that plan. If you are a beginner, and even if you aren t, keep this as simple as you can. As you progress you'll gain insights and make discoveries about what works best, such as which channels, the type of content, and so forth. Just keep one thought in mind and make it part of your sales and marketing training: When all things are equal, and sometimes even when they are not, people will do business with people that they know, like and trust. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to commit to a simple social selling strategy that gets consistently implemented. If you can do that you will be ahead of 2/3 of the companies in your industry. That's what the research proves. Be sure the cornerstone of that strategy is personally engaging with buyers on a regular basis to develop and nurture relationships. Remember that most people want a relationship with someone in a business before they will approach that business. The post Social Selling: Getting Buyers to Know, Like and Trust Your Business appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 52 of Landscape Digital Show reveals what your business needs to know to take full advantage of the recent LinkedIn changes.   If you have the new LinkedIn profile interface you know its bigger and bolder. On the surface, this update looks like LinkedIn has simply polished things up, but the reality is you'll want to make some adjustments so that your connections and people searching for your skills and experience can find you. If you do not have this new update yet, be patient. Our understanding is you will by the end of the month. Let s take a look at 6 of the more relevant LinkedIn changes. #1. The Summary The Summary used to be a separate section, but now it's part of that top box that includes your headshot photo and headline. People are only going to see the first 220 characters of the Summary in that box, so you need to make some adjustments to take full advantage of this valuable real estate. Think of those first two lines of content as a meta-description — a little introduction of the content to follow. Craft this carefully to express who you are and what you do to make a difference in this world. The goal is to entice people to click and explore your entire profile Summary. So, you may want to include a call to action like this: Learn How In My Summary You may want to consider putting that statement in all caps. #2 – Who's viewed your profile Also prominently displayed at the top of your profile is the number of people that have viewed it. This is valuable information that you want to take action on. If someone viewed your profile there is a good chance he or she is considering working with you. A friendly response is obviously a smart option. If you participated in our 1st webinar you ll recall one of the advanced LinkedIn strategies is to view the profiles of the people that you want to work with. They ll see that activity and possibly reach out to you. Also, this where LinkedIn will make a pitch to sell you on the Sales Navigator, which is the premium service that costs $79/month, because you can only see the 5 most recent views with the free version, but can unlock all of them with Sales Navigator. #3. Skills and Endorsements It's possible that LinkedIn is deemphasizing this because they are only displaying your top three skills. You can choose the three skills that best represent your current business focus. This should ideally be what gets you hired, which may not necessarily be the 3 most popular skills. #4. Your Experience The Experience section is now much more important than it has been because most people are not going to click through to read your entire Summary. Unlike the Summary section where you just get two lines of content, the Experience section for your primary business or position automatically opens completely as people scroll down. But that s only for the first position. In addition to listing your most important position first, you should add media, which could be videos or links to articles on Slideshare. If you are not familiar with Slideshare check it out because it's owned by LinkedIn and the easiest way to include articles, PowerPoint® presentations, and other content to your profile. To get to it go to the More button at the top of your profile and click on Slideshare. #5. Notifications The Notifications section makes it much easier to engage with people on LinkedIn without losing the flow of the conversation. This is where you will find content that you have been tagged in. For example, I recently attended a networking event and was tagged, along with a dozen others, in that photo. This is how LinkedIn is feeling a lot more like Facebook. It's one more reason why you will want to invest the time to share content that represents your skills and expertise well. #6. The LinkedIn Newsfeed The newsfeed is where LinkedIn takes us most of the time, so it's clear they want this to be central to your LinkedIn experience, and why they designate it the Home page. The top of the Home page newsfeed is where you make content updates, including adding new articles to LinkedIn Publisher. It's striking how much it is beginning to resemble the Facebook newsfeed. In addition to the usual content updates most of us have been sharing, I'm noticing more salesy content. Why? Because the opportunity is free. But don't expect that to last. For now,  if you want to get updates out about your events and things like that, you need a nice eye-catching photo to go with it. And I really want to underscore the importance of that photo to avoid getting lost in the stream. Also, find a balance with the type of content you share because just like Facebook, users can hide content from their feed and block people that are overly promotional. There s nothing wrong with a little promotion if its relevant to your audience, but that s a slippery slope if your audience is diverse, which it is for most of us on LinkedIn. All said, I really think these are positive changes for LinkedIn because when Microsoft purchased it there was some fear that it would become too corporate. But clearly, it's recognizing the need to retain its current identity, while taking notice of the trend toward more multi-media content. In fact, don t be surprised to see live video in the LinkedIn newsfeed real soon. Until then, think about how you will use it to accomplish your business objectives. Show Notes To learn more details on the LinkedIn changes, check out this article from Social Media Examiner. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to first get into your LinkedIn profile and update your Summary and Experience sections to maximize the value you get from LinkedIn. Then explore the other LinkedIn changes discussed in this episode. The world is changing and so is our place in it. So, it's vital to periodically refresh your story to stay relevant with the communities you serve. Good luck and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. The post LinkedIn Changes: What Your Business Needs to Know appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 51 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to teach customers to buy by applying an adult learning framework to your marketing. There are many definitions of content marketing and even more for marketing in general. But at the end of the day, I think we can all agree the ultimate purpose of marketing is to attract the right buyers and guide them toward a relationship with your business. To do that, we re going to use a framework that compliments how adults like to learn. It s credited to a man by the name of Malcolm Knowles, who is well known for his theories regarding self-directed or autonomous adult learning. That's what's happening these days when prospective customers are checking out your website, videos and other marketing to make comparisons with your competitors. According to Knowles, the four factors you should consider to move buyers to action are as follows: #1. Collaboration – Adults want to be involved in the planning or creation of their experience for making new discoveries #2. Relevance – Adults are most interested in learning about subjects that are relevant to their jobs or personal lives. #3. Direct Experience – Experience, including mistakes, provides the basis for learning. #4. Problem-Centered Approach – Adult learning should be problem-oriented. Let's take them one at a time. #1. Collaboration Your future customers have access to abundant media and are often well-informed about their situation. Armed with that information they are usually looking for a guide that can take them further. People want to collaborate and co-create their own solutions. If your marketing communicates that your business has a collaborative process to engage them you will easily stand out from your competitors. #2. Relevance Adults are interested in two things: What will help them better perform their work, because that's where they spend the majority of their waking hours, and how to improve their quality of life. In the previous episode, we discussed audience outcomes. The challenge for businesses is to thoroughly understand their customers' decision criteria. While surveys are helpful, interviewing them one-to-one is best, according to Adele Revella, the founder of the Buyer Persona Institute. #3. Direct Experience Let's face it, most people like to try things before they buy them. Is there a way to test-drive your landscaping services? At the very least, you should help your audience experience what you sell through the lens of your successfully completed projects. This is why I'm a huge advocate of case studies that showcase the evolution of project solutions from start to finish, including the motivations of the customers, challenges encountered with delivering your solutions, how everything came together, and what's next, like a plan for care and upkeep. 4. Problem-Centered Approach It's not always natural to think in terms of problems, especially if you consider yourself to be a positive-minded individual. Nevertheless, that's the key to selling more work. You have to get to the heart of what drives your customers to take action, all the way to the finish line. People get stuck. That's why they contact businesses like yours. It's up to you to prove that you are the better choice. This includes not just solving the obvious problems, but the ones that buyers don't even know that they have. You sometimes have to turn up the heat to help them feel the pain of making a poor choice. One of the surest ways of accomplishing this is to show them the why behind everything you do. People want a product with integrity, but they may not know what that is. So, if you can show them how and why you build that integrity into your solutions, you will not only justify the sale, but also the potentially higher price it should command. Show Notes Check out my interview with Adele Revella to get her entire process to using these interviews to create buyer personas and align your marketing with its ideal audience. Buyer or audience case studies are invaluable for making discoveries about the outcomes they value most. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Get everyone on your marketing team thinking of marketing as education that teaches people how your business solves problems. Recognize that it is the responsibility of the business to take every buyer by the hand and guide him or her where they want to go, which is to the successful resolution of their problem. This is your content marketing in action. It informs; it guides; it teaches, and all of that sells. The post Adult Learning: Teaching Customers to Buy appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 50 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to create better content faster by aligning it with the ultimate audience outcomes.  MailChimp® is an email marketing platform that recently changed the message on its home page. It reads: Send better email. Sell more stuff Too many organizations seem to be creating content without an apparent theme or purpose.  They may give some thought to how it positions their company, which may be as better, faster, or cooler. But does that help them to sell more stuff? Maybe, but not likely. What then is better content and why is it so important? Better content sticks to a particular theme that is congruent with what your products and services ultimately do for your audience of customers. Do you know how your audience is changed by your products and services? Or better yet, how your audience is changed by the experience of acquiring and using or consuming your products and services? That change is what drives your business. It's your business mission, and it s also what must drive the content that stands in for the experience of acquiring and using your products and services. Let's unpack this by peeling back the layers to get to those audience outcomes that should drive your content. #1. Outcome Gains and Losses People take action to buy a product or service to achieve an outcome. This can usually be categorized as gaining something, such as status or productivity, or losing something, such as pain or weight. It's important to be clear because there is a difference between losing weight and gaining health. While the two usually go together, some people are more interested in looking physically attractive than actually being healthy. Challenge your team to drill down on how your customers are changed in terms of what they gain and what they lose or eliminate. For example, if your company provides lawn care services you know that getting rid of weeds is more important to some customers than gaining a thick, lush lawn. For others, it may be primarily losing the responsibility of doing the work. Be specific on the audience outcomes because this will drive the content that markets your products and services. Now, lets's take that a step further. #2. Resistance to Change The problem with people is that we are all victims of our own understanding. We often don't know what we don't know, or worse, we don't care to know. In other words, we are resistant to change. Technology beautifully illustrates this because even though it solves all kinds of problems some people resist it and choose to do things the way they have always done them. So, if your products promise to change your audience for the better and they are not willing to change, then they probably are not your customers. Right? If people had a better understanding of how or why your products affected those changes they just may become your customers. Instead of jumping to conclusions, take a step back and seek to understand. In my opinion, one of the greatest benefits of creating better content is that you learn and make new discoveries about your audience, and that understanding helps you to sell more stuff. #3. Self-Identification When you really get to know people they will tell you what's important to them, and the chief way they will do that is by self-identification. As an example, you may know men that self-identify as "a family man". Is that important to your content? How people self-identify tells you what's important to them. It gets to the heart of why they make certain decisions. If there are predominant themes that your audience self-identifies with you should consider them to be content drivers that can distinguish your business. Creating better content and doing it more quickly is a direct function of the audience the business serves. You and your competitors all want to sell that audience more stuff, but when all other things are equal, and they often are in the eyes of most buyers, they will choose the company that tells a better story. That better story is content that communicates the subtle themes that are important to your customers, and that are aligned with how their lives are changed for the better from the experience of working with your business. Show Notes Buyer or audience case studies are invaluable for making discoveries about the outcomes they value most. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to list the true audience outcomes that your business provides and how they change their lives. Then create content that drives home the message that your business understands its customers and is committed to providing products and services that will help them get what is ultimately most important to them. The post Audience Outcomes: How to Create Better Content Faster appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 49 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to build and implement a channel plan to achieve your content marketing roadmap goals.   Before you build a content marketing channel plan you need to give careful consideration to your business goals, its ideal audience, and finding and perfecting your brand story. You can get that foundation from Content Marketing Roadmap: 3 Keys to Ideal Customers. If you know your ideal customer you know the problems they face that prevent them from choosing any company, including yours. This is especially true for services like landscaping or lawn care because they are not a must have like healthcare, for example, but a lifestyle choice, something people simply want to have for their own enjoyment. What is your audience hungry for that if you give it to them will move them closer to a relationship with your business? This may be solving a small problem with your content, such as an assurance that the pesticides your company uses are safe for children and pets. Solving small problems is a strong indication that you can solve the larger ones too. Thus, your content is like an appetizer that activates the hunger for the main course, which is your products and services. You have to show people you care about helping them, that you are capable of doing so, and that the entire experience will be one they will enjoy. Let's now unpack the 7 steps to building and implementing your content marketing roadmap channel plan. #1 – Content Audit You may not have a lot of content, but at the very least you have a website. And you probably have some print marketing materials. Start by listing everything you have created to date, with the goal of keeping that list current moving forward. For more detail on how on this and a template to follow, check out Content Audit: Building Your Content Marketing Foundation. You won't regret this exercise because we all forget what we published after some time and being able to access earlier content makes the present work easier. #2 – Content Topics The topics your content addresses should be relevant to your customers' aspirations and challenges. For example, if you are doing high-end residential landscaping work, maintenance and upkeep is most certainly an issue to be addressed. Our customers often told us they would only move forward with a landscape project if we promised to maintain it for them. They trusted us to design and build it, so naturally, they wanted its care to be entrusted to the same company. #3 – Editorial Calendar The editorial calendar will detail the specific content topics for the entire year. Most companies work with a monthly theme that s broken down into subtopics. #4 – Channel Plan The channel plan can be combined with the editorial calendar to clarify which channels will receive what type of content, whether that's long or short form, video or audio, and so on. The channels we re referring to are blogs, email newsletters, and all the social media channels, but there are many others. The channels we re referring to are blogs, email newsletters, and all the social media channels, but there are many others. 5 – Content Ownership The editorial calendar should specify the content ownership responsibilities, which are: Content Ideation or Creation Content Publication Content Promotion It's important to note that these respective responsibilities do not have to be owned by the same person. #6 – Publishing Style Guidelines It's highly advisable to have publishing guidelines that keep the voice, style, and tone of the content consistent. This will also detail what you do and don't do, such as using specific keywords and whether or not to link to outside content. There are very capable virtual admins that can efficiently and economically take care of content publication and promotion for you. But, you have to provide them with guidelines that are consistent with your brand. #7 – Analytics The only way to get better is to measure your channel performance. At the very least you should be checking your Google Analytics to determine where your traffic is coming from and which types of content and channels are proving to be most productive. That's why we call this a roadmap. It's a reliable guide, but its consistent implementation is what will lead to the accomplishment of your goals. Show Notes Be sure to check the links for each of the 7 steps to get in-depth information on those respective topics. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to first check Content Marketing Roadmap: 3 Keys to Ideal Customers to get that necessary foundation. Then start organizing your content marketing system with the 7 steps discussed in this episode. The post Content Marketing Roadmap: Building a Channel Plan appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 48 of Landscape Digital Show reveals 3 keys to a content marketing roadmap that creates alignment with ideal customers.   Great coaches start with a strategy, a roadmap or game plan, but they are prepared to make adjustments based on how their team is performing and how the opposing team is responding. They study, measure, evaluate and realign their resources to accomplish specific goals and objectives. That is how we are going to design your digital, social and content marketing roadmap. You just have to start well and make adjustments to its implementation as you make new discoveries about what your ideal customers want and how to give it to them. #1. Business and Personal Goals The starting point of your content marketing roadmap is your business and personal goals. You cannot separate the two because those personal details that answer why you are in business inspire people and build trust. Growth is probably the most common business goal, but you have to be specific about the type of growth you are looking for and what s now standing in the way of your achieving it. Rebranding is another common business objective. My question is why are you rebranding? Is it to serve new markets or to achieve deeper penetration into existing markets you serve. Write out all of your goals, prioritize and categorize them as you wish. And here s a good question: Which one goal, if you achieved it, would change your life most dramatically in 2017? #2. Ideal Audience and Actions Every business needs to define the audience that it can best serve with its expertise. Is this an audience of people or companies? What are their needs and wants? What are the pain points that get in the way of achieving those desires? What actions do you want buyers to take to solve these pain points? When your content communicates this it creates alignment with ideal customers by showing them you understand what they want, and that you are capable of helping them achieve it. Your content also has to be relatable by demonstrating it understands their worldview, which is how they see the world. We re talking about real people here, but we need a stand-in for them, something that literally hangs on the wall so that you and your marketing team can create content that is on point. This description of your ideal customer is known as an audience or buyer persona. An audience persona is not a blend of all of your customers, but one customer in particular. By designing your marketing content for this singular ideal customer it achieves greater focus. You may have more than one audience persona if you have a variety of product lines, such as commercial landscaping and residential landscaping. While they are both landscaping, the customers for them are as different as a commercial truck and an automobile. Both are forms of transportation but are respectively designed to do two completely different jobs. Too many businesses fail to achieve their goals because they take on all kinds of work, whether it fits their capabilities or not. When the business is clear about its ideal audience it naturally attracts it.   #3. Find and Perfect Your Brand Story What does your business stand for? Often, this is personal, but it doesn't have to be. Every business has a personality and that needs to come out in your marketing because it's what makes emotional connections. Not only that, your brand story is the most powerful marketing distinction you have because it cannot be matched. It's what aligns your business and its goals with a targeted audience and their goals. Your content needs to effectively communicate that fit or there is no sale. And it has to consistently and continuously communicate it with a compelling brand story that captures the hearts and minds of its ideal customers. Content marketing is like a dance between you and your audience. The better you know them the easier it is to create content that communicates the value your business can bring to their lives. We'll discuss the specific content formats and marketing channels for implementing this in the next episode. Show Notes Discover more about audience personas in Episode 9: Buyer Personas: How to Create Customer-Facing Marketing Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action Let's make getting clear about your business goals and audience the primary call to action for this episode because that's the foundation that will support all of your content marketing. This includes listing your business goals and defining your respective audiences with accurate audience personas. Those two activities are key for your building your content marketing roadmap. Then give consideration to finding and perfecting your unique brand story. This is who you are and how your business helps its customers get more of what they want out of life with its unique solutions. The post Content Marketing Roadmap: 3 Keys to Ideal Customers appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 47 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to create a content style guide to consistently brand your marketing message. In an earlier episode of Landscape Digital Show, we discussed why it may be beneficial to take a production approach to your marketing. Your landscaping company is a production business and that approach to marketing should add order and discipline by giving it a familiar context. We are going to take this further with 5 steps to creating a content style guide for achieving greater consistency with your content marketing, including your website content, newsletter, blogging, and social media updates. In episode 42: Marketing Production: Manage Your Marketing Like a Factory, we noted there are many activities involved with marketing, but all of them can be organized into three content categories. 1. Ideation 2. Publication 3. Promotion All of the content you create and share should have a consistency that is congruent with your brand and what you want buyers to think, feel, see and do when they encounter it. The content you publish either adds value to your products and services or it doesn't. Let s face it, lousy content tarnishes your brand image. It says you are not concerned with being a professional. Thus, whether you are creating the content in-house or outsourcing it you have to take responsibility for its value and relevance for your audience. Let's now put together a framework from which you can build your content publishing plan using your available resources. A quick note: If you are the business owner it's very likely you are the primary person responsible for content ideation, publication, and promotion. Nevertheless, there are two big benefits for creating your editorial guidelines. #1. It will improve the quality of content you create by tightening up your workflow, thereby saving time and making it more consistent. #2. You will have a proprietary system ready when you decide to delegate or hire out some or all of the work. And if you get requests from guest contributors, you will have standards that will hold them accountable. The following style guidelines are in no particular order. Customize them as you wish according to your business and content marketing objectives. #1 – What is your content mix? Will it be original content or curated from other sources, and if so, in what formats? There is no right or wrong here. As an industry and community leader, your original perspective is relevant. There are many successful blogs and newsletters that curate the best and most relevant news for their communities. It saves people time and builds your authority just as well as original content. #2 – What is your preferred voice? Use objectives to define this. For example, our brand is personal, professional, and value-driven. #3 – What is the tone of your content? For example, our goal with Landscape Digital Institute is to cut through the clutter, and quite frankly, the BS too. And we will and support that with research and science-backed content from trusted sources and direct experience. In other words, we will be honest about what works and will not hesitate to take on pretenders that offer silver bullet solutions. #4 Do you have a content style guide? This is especially important for delivering content that is congruent with your brand. What are the standard dimensions for images, and how are they used? What are the conventions for headlines and subheadings? If they make a promise the content needs to deliver on that or you will lose subscribers very quickly. Your content style guide should adhere to precise branded colors, typical paragraph lengths, how inbound and outbound links will be used, and so on. You have to be specific with everything, all the way down to the fonts you use. In short, your content style guide details everything that affects the look and feel of your marketing. Set your standards and stick to them. #5 – What will your content always and never do? This is where you really get down to setting expectations for your audience. For example, if you intend for your content to be instructional, you need to focus on giving step-by-step instructions and valid examples. If that is what your content always does, what will it never do? Maybe it will never mention another brand in a negative way. But it can still address the issues. And it probably should for the audience to get what they need. If you expect your content to stand out in a sea of sameness you have to take a stand. And there is no better place for getting that clarity than with your content style and publishing guidelines. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to create standards for your marketing content, just as you do for the work your business performs for its customers. Determine who is accountable for what, including content ideation, publication, and promotion. That may or may not be multiple people. Build a framework with the questions listed here and refine that into a content style guide that becomes standard operating procedure. This means writing it down and updating it over time as you encounter and adjust to new circumstances. Need more ideas? Check out our earlier Episode 29 on content repurposing. This is something every business should be doing, but it can be a complete mess if you do not have a system to follow. The post Content Style Guide: How to Brand Your Marketing appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 46 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how marketing consistency leads to being the trusted customer choice.  The Consumer Electronics Show is underway and buzzing with talk about Artifical Intelligence and Virtual Reality – two digital marketing technologies that we will be hearing a lot about this year, and most likely putting into practice in the years to come. There's no question digital marketing is going to get crazy real, meaning, it's going to be possible to have your website and other digital marketing platforms deliver an experience that is every bit as powerful as the real one. Oops! You may be thinking your live customer experience is pretty good, but it could be better. No problem, because that awareness alone is huge for making it better. One of the most important steps for improving that customer experience is making your marketing more consistent. In our recent Digital Marketing Report, which will be published in Landscape Management magazine next week, green industry marketers compared their marketing with that of their peers. The most telling response was that 20% rated their marketing as good, but inconsistent. Anyone will tell you that you cannot be a good spouse or friend if you are inconsistent. Consistency is expected because it is equated with quality and professionalism. If you ask people what it takes to be a great marketer, most will rank creativity high on the list. The truth is consistency is what always wins the marketing game because it builds trust. And we all know that people choose to work with companies that they trust. Not only that, if you take the steps to strategically plan your marketing and consistently implement it, your overall business performance will improve. The reason is that authentic marketing is a reflection of the business brand. 3 Requirements for Marketing Consistency Let's unpack how this can work for any landscaping, lawn or tree care company by breaking down the 3 essential requirements. 1. Get a marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals. 2. Consistently implement it to serve and grow your customer audience 3. Keep everything personal, because people trust people more than they trust marketing. Traditional marketing was designed to promote products and services. It sold features and benefits that promised a better quality of life for the customer. This is still valid marketing, but in a world with abundant product and service choices, your marketing strategy has to do much more than that or it will not get noticed. In a word, your marketing has to build trust. Trust is earned today with marketing content (often digital content) that educates, informs and inspires a targeted audience. This content gives customers an inside look at who you are, what you care about (which we hope includes them), and how you operate. It s personal. This means it has to be strategically designed to clearly tell the story you want to share with your future customers. What do you want them to know, to see, think and feel about you and your business? Your marketing content ideally promotes what you want your business to become. That may be something new or a better version of what it is today. Whatever it is, it s what you want people to see and feel so that they are inclined to initiate or sustain a relationship with your business. Content is the foundation of all of your marketing today because, without it, you have nothing to promote, other than your products and services. That means you will have a tough time building trust. It also means you will have nothing to optimize. You are probably familiar with the phrase content is king. Now we're talking about SEO – search engine optimization. All of the paid SEO in the world is not going to do you any good if it doesn't sit on a foundation of exceptional content that people want to consume. And when you consistently create that content over time it collectively tells your brand story for that audience of customers. This is content marketing. It's what you may know as articles, blog posts, videos, and social media updates. All of it attracts and retains the trust of a targeted audience, thereby driving profitable outcomes for your business. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to bring all of this home. First, get clear about what you want for your business from the perspective of your customers. What do you want them to feel when they first encounter your marketing or share when talking about their experience with your business? Then become a student of content marketing. You can do right here at Landscape Digital Show and with the other free content that we provide at Landscape Digital Institute, including our free webinars. In addition to that, we ll be offering structured online courses and coaching by this March or April when we open Landscape Digital Academy. And finally, be mindful of being consistent and remember to keep it personal, because people trust people more than they trust marketing. That's really the magic of content marketing, because what is consistent and real soon becomes known, liked, and then ultimately, trusted.  The post Marketing Consistency: How to Be The Trusted Customer Choice appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 45 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to simplify your 2017 marketing for growth by getting an audience strategy that includes content marketing. Did you know that 80% of consumers searching for a product or service are using the Internet to support their decision? Ask yourself about your own behaviors. Most of us will even not go to a new restaurant without checking it out online. Not only that, we now purchase products and services online that we previously would have only purchased in person. And the reason for this is nowadays the risk of doing so is removed. There s more. But the point is marketing is getting complicated. And that is why you should make 2017 the year to simplify your strategy for attracting and growing your audience so that you can grow your business with the tactics that consumers have come to expect and will be most likely to respond to. Take Ownership of Your Audience You have to be the business your audience can count on — no matter what. This means not ignoring digital marketing like so many of your competitors. Clearly, the solution is to have a digital presence that as a minimum includes a modern website that is regularly updated and used to communicate with and grow your audience. The emphasis here is ownership. Your business needs a home base that gives it 100% control. That website must include a fresh source of regularly updated information that educates, informs and inspires a targeted audience. The information must be relevant to and searchable by people looking for the solutions your business provides. Once you attract your audience you need some means for building your list of subscribers so that you can send them regular updates and interact with them. While you can do this with social media, there is no ownership unless you drive that traffic to your website. This is one reason why Facebook advertising has become so popular for retargeting traffic to owned business websites. Find Your Distinctive Marketing Voice According to Ann Handley, author of Everybody Writes, Don't get hung up on whether something s been said before just say it better. She says, Voice (like story) is another one of those literary terms that can sound abstract and high-minded in a business context. But the concept is pretty straightforward: your brand voice is simply an expression of your company s personality and point of view." Who is your audience and the audience they care about? Your words will show them your understanding, but your style how you use those words will make you and your business distinctive and memorable. This is why business owners need to be intimately involved in the creation of their marketing content. At the very least, be a raw source and do not allow those that clean it up to take out the essence of who you are and why you are passionate about this industry and serving your customers. That s your voice. It s your unique take on this. Get Better at Investing in Your Audience Marketing in 2017 promises to be many things, including the breakout year for artificial intelligence and virtual reality marketing. So, don t look the other way if you get a chance to learn more about them. But all of this is nothing if there is not a valid strategy behind it. And that strategy must involve attracting an audience that your business can serve by investing in solutions for them. Naturally, your landscaping and lawn care services are solutions. But these days buyers need assurances before they will step up to make a purchase. We ve just talked about one of them, and that s speaking to your audience with an authentic and humanizing voice. That voice is hopefully the beginning of a relationship. To nurture that relationship you need a strategy that includes content marketing. This is the practice of investing in the creation of solutions that are free and predominantly digital so that they can be readily shared online and from one friend to another. These solutions are an investment in your relationship with the customers you have and those that you want to attract. We used to think of this as answering questions and otherwise educating consumers. And while that's still true, content marketing is evolving into committed problem solving, something that skilled sales professionals have trained themselves to do. This is why I think of content marketing to be more like relationship selling than marketing. Salespeople naturally gravitate toward helping the customers they know they can help and nicely saying goodbye to the others. They know their customers and intuitively know if their solutions are right for them. And when they are that excitement gets transferred to the buyer that is right for them. This is what your content marketing needs to do. It s not promoting but guiding the buyer by showing them first with marketing content that your business has solutions that will solve their problems. It doesn t matter if that s a greener, weed-free lawn or an amazing landscape environment. Whatever it has to be sold first. And today that selling starts with marketing content that is online where buyers are looking for it. Show Notes Learn more about finding your brand voice by checking out Everybody Writes, by Ann Handley Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to do exactly what the title suggests: Simplify your marketing for growth. To accomplish that you may have to rethink it to be more solution-based and audience-focused. In other words, you need a marketing strategy that includes content marketing The post Audience Strategy: How to Simplify 2017 Marketing for Growth appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 44 of Landscape Digital Show reveals three digital marketing trends that you want to take action on to get results in 2017. I'm surprised to be seeing fewer 2017 digital marketing trend forecasts because it's not whether your predictions prove to be right or wrong but that you get the conversation started. And that's my goal with this episode. I am a fanatical student for all things marketing and these predictions are based on my research, observations, and study. But you should do your own homework to be sure. What I'll be sharing with you today are backed by not just one or two people or companies, but many. This is what leading digital marketing experts are using to get practical results now and for 2017. Let s unpack them one at a time. #1. Human Conversations One of the reasons most content falls flat is because it was created by someone without an intimate knowledge of the customer or targeted audience. Our industry survey indicated landscaping company owners have the primary responsibility for digital marketing. However, and I'm speculating based on personal experience, it is doubtful that they are the ones creating the content. It's very likely that task is handled either by an outside agency or someone in the office that is not distracted by, well, customers. You see where I'm going with this don't you? In an earlier episode of Landscape Digital Show, we discussed interviewing customers to create case studies that will resonate with future customers. If you take the time to talk to customers you are getting much more than a case study. That context, depth of detail, and customer s unique perspective are what is going to make your content come alive. His or her words and how they use them are what will truly resonate with other buyers just like them. Give it a try because many others are already doing this. Take the time to have human conversations with your customers; it will inspire your marketing. #2. Facebook Advertising Most of us know Facebook advertising from boosting a post. We discovered that for a few dollars we can reach thousands of targeted people with our content. But sadly, nothing substantive happens. That's because the targeting is happening at 30,000 feet, such as male vs female, income levels, interests, and so on. Don't get me wrong, that s all good information it s nearly impossible for us to sufficiently define our ideal buyer to reach them on Facebook. After all, you are trying to find a few hundred or thousand people from among billions. That's not easy to do on your own. But now Facebook can automatically do this for us. To get started install the Facebook pixel on your website. Just Google it or ask your webmaster to make this simple coding fix. It takes just a few minutes. Once that code is on your website you can target your most recent visitors on Facebook. This is called a website custom audience and Facebook builds it for you automatically and in real time. Now you can target this new audience and drive them to your desired call to action. This may be opting into your list, liking your Facebook page, taking advantage of a special offer, and more. You can then ask Facebook to match that audience using the mountains of personal data that we all give Facebook every day. You can also import your email list to Facebook to create an email custom audience and target that group, while also having Facebook create a new audience that matches it. This is what Facebook calls a lookalike audience. The point is marketers are getting amazing conversions from running ads by targeting these custom and lookalike audiences. And at least for now it's economical and easy to do. So, stop shooting in the dark with your advertising and give Facebook advertising a try by doing it the right way with custom and lookalike audiences. You ll never again be tempted to waste your money on boosting posts. #3. Repurposing Content The intent behind repurposing content is simple. You are trying to steal audiences. That s right, getting people from where they now to where you want them, which is on an email list or subscription service that you control. This is why we say you don't want to build your house on rented land. And that rented land includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and all of the other social media that you do not control. That said, these platforms have massive audiences and you don't. So, after publishing content on your website or blog, repurpose it in an appropriate format on these other platforms to encourage engagement. Just be sure you include a call to action that brings them over to your house, which is your website. Show Notes Get a step-by-step content repurposing plan in Episode 29: Content Repurposing: 5 Tips for Doing it Right Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to take action on these leading marketing trends. If you don't yet have a digital marketing game plan for 2017, just focusing on these three trends would be a great start. And if you need help building that game plan reach out to me by using the contact form and we can discuss your situation further. The post Digital Marketing Trends: Three Actions to Take in 2017 appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 43 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to interview customers to create case studies and get customer stories that sell. Why did Dos Equis fire the actor responsible for its highly successful World's Most Interesting Man campaign? According to their vice president of marketing, We re trying to reach a new audience. That comment says a lot about knowing your business, its competitors, and the audience you are trying to reach. Content is created to accomplish specific objectives. And that job is to attract, engage and inspire a targeted audience, with the ultimate objective of driving profitable actions for your business. Your role as the marketer or business owner is to know your audience, the one you have now, and the one you want to attract. Maybe they are the same or not. Incidentally, Dos Equis new World s Most Interesting Man is younger, more athletic, and he speaks Spanish. That should tell you a lot right there. Clearly, Dos Equis has done their homework and they are making an intentional shift with their marketing. How about you? As we ve previously discussed, talking directly to your customers, one-to-one, is how you create your audience personas. But what s really exciting is that if you set up those interviews properly you can also develop relatable case studies that can juice-up your marketing. This much I can tell you from experience. People want to tell their story and they will deliver some useful surprises if you give them that opportunity. Their relatable stories, examples, testimonials, and relevant keywords can all be used to make your marketing sparkle. Properly Set Up Interviews #1 – Choose your best candidates. You know who they are. They are probably your best customers. #2 Create a safe environment. Explain how the interview will work, and that you would ideally like to record it. Also, explain how they will be helping you improve your service for them and everyone you serve. #3 Explain how you will use the information in your marketing. Most people want to help, but there are some in particular that love the spotlight. This is the group that will speak openly and give you the freedom to use it all. #4 Ask good questions If you are not a good interviewer you may wish to hire an outside expert to do this because you want to get the right information that will speak to prospective customers just like them. Asking one or two questions is usually enough to get the conversation going. Once that happens, listen intently for their meaning as much as what is being said. After conducting over 200 interviews myself, I can tell you it s not as easy as it sounds. Finally, try to do this in person or via Skype so you can read their body language too. Listening is selling because it shows you care. It's inviting your customers to share what will make them happier. And in the process you are getting great marketing material to use for all of your channels. Avoid The Common Mistakes #1.  Be honest. Explain that you need their help. Your best customers will grant you this favor. #2.  Do not offer incentives because that will bias their response. If there is any unpleasant news to share you want to hear it so you can fix what s broken. 3. Offer to give them the questions you plan to ask. But explain you would rather not because you want them to spontaneously speak their mind. You want this to be fun, rather than a professional interview (even though that s technically what it is). Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to interview a few of your customers and use that information to either tweak or build your audience personas, to obtain marketable testimonials and quotes, and for creating interesting and relatable stories and case studies that will speak to the prospective buyers that are not yet your customers. Good luck. If you are interested in having me interview your customers for you, contact me and we can discuss how that can work. The post Case Studies: How to Get Customer Stories That Sell appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 42 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how managing your marketing like a factory will increase your marketing production and efficiency. It turns out there is a very good reason for taking a production approach to marketing, as opposed to automating it. The Zeigarnik Effect states that people have a better memory for incomplete complete tasks because the mind is actively working on what's undone. Once tasks are completed they no longer merit your attention, and that s not a good thing with most business activities. This may explain why people are often overwhelmed with marketing. Because as much as they would like it to be, marketing is never done. It requires constant attention to be sure resources are being properly allocated, tracked, and evaluated. So, the good news is that if you are a little overwhelmed with marketing you are in a good place. But let s take you to a better place by giving you a structure for organizing your marketing so that you can minimize that overwhelm. The idea is to approach marketing like you would your landscape, lawn or tree care production. Organize it. Build repeatable systems. And track the progress. There are many activities involved with marketing, but all of them can be generally organized into three categories. 1. Ideation 2. Publication 3. Promotion Creating marketing content is a time-consuming activity, but using the Ziegarnik Effect to your advantage can make it much easier. Focus on generating a lot of ideas and keep moving them along to completion. Just like a factory. Let s start with ideation. You can break content ideation into 3 phases. Generating ideas, drafting the content, and refining it so that it is ready for publication. Maybe that's one person or two or three. Typically those that are good at idea generation are not so strong with editing because they hate to kill their darlings, as Steven King recommends. Good editors eliminate what's not contributing to the desired outcome. And conversely, they will ask content creators to add what's missing, which is often an example or story that illustrates the point they are trying to make. After ideation is publication. If you've ever clocked yourself (and you should) you know that it takes more time than you think to add links, format photos, insert keywords, and so on to get content published. That s why you will want to detail the workflow steps so that you can get it done quickly and efficiently. But the real payoff is that as you refine that workflow you ll have everything systematized for when you are ready to hire an admin to get it done for you. And finally, you need promotion. Let's say for discussion purposes this is social media. You'll want to be clear on which channels to use, whether or not advertising will be necessary, and so on. This too can take a great deal of time, but that time can be dramatically reduced if you build systems and use tools to automate some of it. It's essential to complete the ideation, publication, and promotion loop. Because without promotion, the quality of your marketing ideas and content do not matter. You have to reach your target audience to get results. Show Notes Meet Edgar is a powerful content promotion tool that was mentioned in the audio. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call or this episode is to prepare for taking your marketing to the next level for 2017. Start by doing a SWOT analysis of your marketing. SWOT is short for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Divide a piece of paper or a dry erase board into 4 quadrants and honestly assess your marketing universe. Then prioritize what you need to work on. If you are truly honest you will have more to work on than you can handle. But having those raw ideas laid out should give you confidence because now you know what you need to be working on. First, prioritize them. Then for the remainder of this calendar year do a little on each but don t worry about completing any of them. You are putting the Zeigarnik Effect into play to start shaping the solutions so that your mind can be working on them. My suggestion after that is to schedule your calendar to master them. For example, take a month to master Facebook marketing, another to master your social media workflow, another for tools, and so on. What you ll find is that mastering just a few skills will give you much more confidence. Why? Because marketing is never done, not even for those of us that do it for a living. If you need help, use the contact form or email me at [email protected]. We can discuss the various consulting packages I m offering at discounted rates. This is a slower for many of us, so now is the time to get your ship sailing in the right direction to make 2017 everything it can be. The post Marketing Production: Manage Your Marketing Like a Factory appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 41 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how creating content people trust depends on the authority of the source and its relevance. "What kind of content should I create?" This is a common question that has an easy answer. Create content that people trust. Google defines this as: 1. Content that is relevant to your target audience. 2. Content that enhances your authority Relevance and authority are what Google uses to determine the content that will see the light of day. Obviously, there are hundreds of secondary factors involved, but what Google presents for search queries is what is most relevant, and that is greatly influenced by the perceived authority of its source. To be more accurate, Google has consistently stated that its primary objective as a search engine is to deliver the most relevant information as quickly as possible for every search query. To do that, they rely heavily on authority because that earned credibility assures Google the information is likely the most trustworthy Authority Takes a Stand People trust or at least respect authority. Traditionally, this authority is derived from a particular position or testimonial of another person of authority. You have to determine the type of authority that will best serve your business. And you have to be clear about it. You have to choose your authority and make it a consistent theme of the content you create. This is why many businesses struggle with content creation. They take on all kinds of work that fails to stand for something meaningful. Your work should demonstrate expertise in a particular area. And your content should reflect that body of work. This is a combination of the products and services the business offers and the unique experience that accompanies them. Relevant Content Rings True Claiming to be an authority in multiple domains is nearly impossible. It just doesn't ring true with most buyers that are seeking a relationship with a company that seems to be speaking only to them. To do this you have to become best in class for your targeted audience.  This is accomplished by creating products and services that are supported by content that attracts, engages, and inspires that audience The best way to determine the right content to create is to talk to your customers one-to-one. And do the same with people you think should be your customers but are not. What are their top challenges? Where do they go for solutions now? How to do they make new discoveries and stay informed? Using their responses you want to create what may be the most important piece of content. And that's a buyer persona that guides the creation of all future content. What motivates buyers often surprises companies that are in love with their products and services. More important is to fall in love with the buyer personas that become customers by creating content that speaks directly to them. Show Notes Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to get clear about your authority and then develop a strategy for creating relevant content that becomes a growing and trusted body of work that speaks to that authority. If you have questions on this, hit reply to any of my emails or use the contact form at Landscape Digital Institute and I will do my best to help you out. Thanks for listening. The post Relevance and Authority: Creating Content People Trust appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.