5 Ways to Get More Clients for Your Landscape Architecture Company
—
The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Originally published on October 3, 2015. Updated on November 2, 2022.
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The long sales cycles and the significant amount of money that goes into finding, meeting, researching, and bidding for projects can make running a landscape architecture company stressful. Attracting potential customers is less about quantity and more about quality in this business. With a strategic digital marketing plan, you can save valuable time by ensuring your leads are pre-qualified before they even contact you.
Successful landscape architecture firms harness the power of digital content and inbound marketing to drive more qualified leads. The more qualified your leads are, the more effective your team can be in sourcing additional qualified leads and completing high-quality work. While there are numerous ways to use content effectively, we have identified five methods that are the most lucrative, especially when implemented together.
1. Blogs
Businesses that blog have 126% higher lead growth than those that don’t, showing the incredible power of this platform. If you’re not blogging, you’re limiting traffic to your website and losing out on potential leads. The landscape architect companies with the best website traffic have invested in search engine optimization to ensure their content appears at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).
SEO Optimized Blogs Drive Traffic to Landscape Architecture Company Websites
Appearing at the top of SERPs is essential for driving organic traffic to your website to help generate leads, and blogs play a significant role in making it happen. The first organic (non-paid ad) search result on Google has a 39.6% click-through rate (CTR), while the second is less than half of that. The percentage drops substantially the further down the list it goes.
Keyword stuffing and similar practices that may have worked in the past are ineffective and will hurt your rankings today. The depth of the content plays a role in search engine algorithms, which is why many landscape architecture companies rely on marketing agencies to write professional blog posts for them.
How aggressively you approach your blog output depends on your goals and resources. It takes time to create valuable content, but it builds on itself. Think of it as an investment that you will collect on over time. If you’re starting your own design company, blogging multiple times per week could generate faster results. Whatever you decide, be sure to update your blog regularly.
In this industry, it’s essential to have a niche-specific marketing agency with writers knowledgeable about landscape architecture who can produce high-quality, useful content. If your business is not at that level yet, focus on creating helpful content, and your blogs should naturally contain the keywords that will allow them to rank higher in the SERPs. Consider the questions your prospects may be asking, and create content that answers them.
How Blog Content Helps Pre-Qualify Leads
Using blogs as part of a content marketing strategy is effective because it draws prospects to your website, usually to help answer a question. They click through your website to view other content, services, and more. Content that establishes your business as a thought leader will help create trust and generate leads.
For example, you could target general contractors who build LEED-certified homes and serve eco-conscious customers. You could publish a blog post about ways landscape architecture can benefit LEED-certified homes. The keywords used within this article will likely cause it to appear in the search results when the contractor is searching for information about landscape architecture for eco-friendly homes in your area.
This blog post will answer the contractor’s questions, and then they will click on the About section of your website to read about your landscape architecture firm. Next, they may click to see which services you offer and perhaps view your project portfolio to view the scope of projects you work on. When they click on the link to schedule a consultation, they’ll already be pre-qualified, and you’ll be steps closer to closing the sale.
The Many Ways Landscape Architects Can Repurpose Blog Content
Investing in professionally created content, whether written content, photography, or videography, will pay for itself many times. You can reuse stunning photos and videos on blog posts, social media posts, printed in your brochures, and so on.
You can take your blog post about the benefits of green roofs and share it on all your social media channels, including Facebook and LinkedIn. You could post a photo on Instagram of a green roof your firm created, along with a link in your bio to the blog post. Once created, you can repurpose evergreen content repeatedly.
Other ways your business can repurpose content include creating a video based on the blog content, publishing it as an ebook, extracting quotes to post on social media, or designing infographics based on the content. Your website will act as a central hub where all your content originates or where you direct your prospects when they interact with the repurposed content they’ve seen on social media.
2. Internal and External Links
Links from your website to others and vice versa help establish your brand as a reputable authority on landscape design and architecture subject matter. Not all links are created equally, and you want to be connected with reputable and authoritative sites, both internally and externally.
An internal link leads to another page on your website, while an external link leads to a completely different website. Whether internal or external, they should improve the user experience and provide valuable information.
How to Use Internal Links on Your Website
Internal links are essential elements in building the site architecture and can help with the discoverability of a page. You can create nternal links through navigational features on your website and internal links within the body of content, such as in blog posts.
Since they affect SEO, internal links are important. Internal links provide Google with information about the structure of your website when the search engine crawls and indexes your site. These internal links signal that these pages are valuable, so the algorithm will more likely display your pages in the search results.
How to Use External Links on Your Website
External links work two ways: you can link to other websites, or other websites can link to yours (backlinks). Studies suggest that external links are the most critical factor in obtaining a high ranking because they are harder to influence. Whenever a reputable website links to yours, it’s viewed as a vote of confidence and increases your credibility.
Other websites can see when you link to their site, and often they will link back to yours in return, helping to improve your SERP ranking. Providing links to trustworthy sources helps improve your website’s authority because it shows that you offer your readers more value.
What Makes an Authoritative Website?
Ahrefs offers a free tool to check your website’s authority. It calculates a score based on several factors. Comparing your score to similar landscape architecture company websites (your competitors) will help determine if your authority is on track.
A website with high-quality content from a trusted source is considered an authoritative website. This is generally determined by the quality of links, website functionality, user engagement, and domain.
Social media is a valuable link-building tool, despite not being included as a ranking factor. Search engine crawlers treat social media sites like any other website, meaning that social media links are accounted for. Plus, social media platforms have high trust ratings, with Facebook having domain authority of 96/100, Instagram 93/100, and Twitter 94/100. External links from social media have an indirect effect on domain authority.
3. Facebook, Twitter, Houzz, & Pinterest
85% of marketers indicate that social media has generated more exposure for their business. Facebook and Instagram contribute the most to sales, with 64% of marketers indicating such. Marketers report Twitter at the bottom of the list, with only 11% stating it contributed the most to their sales—demonstrating why we don’t recommend putting marketing effort into Twitter.
Organic reach across all social media platforms has steadily declined over the years and is currently at 5.2% for the average Facebook Page post. Social media can be an effective lead-generation tool when the right amount of ad spend, and the right target audience is selected. 43% of marketers report that Facebook and LinkedIn contribute to the most amount of leads generated.
Which platform you use to generate leads will depend on whether your landscape architecture company is marketing toward residential or commercial projects. For example, LinkedIn generates approximately 80% of all B2B social media leads, while Facebook generates more B2C leads.
Instagram, Houzz, and Pinterest are best suited for sharing inspirational photos and videos of your landscape architecture projects. These platforms are a digital portfolio of your best work, with professional quality content that will help drive more traffic to your website, resulting in more leads.
Sharing the work that you do daily can help establish credibility. Including everyday photos taken with your smartphone are also effective on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You could post photos of the city park project in progress or get your customer’s permission to share design renderings of the commercial campus you are working on.
4. Reading Offers
Providing reading offers is another way to gain credibility and trust. While this content is similar to blog posts, it’s generally longer and more in-depth. Long-form content gets 77.2% more external backlinks than shorter content, showing the value of creating this in-depth content to help establish website authority, which results in a higher SERP ranking and more lead generation.
Ebooks, templates, guides, and checklists are examples of material that prove your knowledge of the industry and help prospects evaluate your business. For instance, you could create a free downloadable checklist that helps prospects decide their landscape preferences. This checklist would feature questions you usually ask during a consultation, such as how they plan to use the outdoor space, what they want the ambiance to be like, preferred design themes, etc. This information will come in handy when they’re ready to contact you and move further through the sales funnel.
These offers can be used as lead magnets to attract prospects to your website. When combined with a strategic website design, you will start to generate leads.
5. Forms on Your Site
Once you’ve attracted prospects to your website, you’ll want to guide them further into the sales funnel by collecting their information to turn them into viable leads. This is the first point of contact that takes them from being visitors to being those interested in your services.
Many top landscape architects offer a lead magnet or reading offer that is accessible after the prospect fills out a form on your website. Other times, prospects fill out a form to schedule a consultation.
Forms allow you to know who the prospect is by asking for their name, email address, and any other information you need to know. This solidifies the connection between your business and the lead. By this point, they’ve read your blog content, viewed your digital portfolio, and are already pre-qualified leads. You’re one step closer to closing the sale.