Get Social, Build Legacy: The Landscaper’s Guide to Social Media
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Table of Contents Click Here to Show
You’re chatting with the landscape crew on a job site one day and your foreman mentions “social media marketing.” When you hear that term, what comes to mind? Many contractors, understandably, think of posting on social media platforms. They imagine overpaid millennials spamming their newsfeeds with social ads for useless products and walls of meaningless hashtags.
Ten years ago, that might have been a fair assessment. But today, social media marketing is both highly sophisticated and highly necessary. More and more people are researching major purchases online, engaging local brands through preferred platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and consuming tailor-made content to assist in their buying decisions. They’re even using social media to find jobs. If your business doesn’t have a social media presence, you’re simply behind in the industry.
As a landscape or pool contractor, you simply cannot afford to be absent from the spaces where your target customers are active. That’s where your market is! Establishing and maintaining a social media presence will keep you front of mind with your potential customers and help you generate quality leads, while also building your brand.
Why Social Media?
Social media has evolved over the past 10-15 years. It’s no longer a place where only college kids hang out, as Facebook was at its inception. In fact, a study published by Pew Research reports that 72% of the public uses some type of social media—including every demographic.
There are over 3 billion global social network users out there, 80% of which follow at least one business, and it’s the primary way that many people engage with brands of all kinds. Let’s look at how social media can help you grow your landscape or pool installation business and recruit top talent.
Establishing Your Landscape Contractor and Pool Builder Brand
What is a brand, really? Your brand is the way your landscape or pool business is perceived by potential customers and team members, and a strong local brand enables the right customers and potential employees to relate and connect with you so that they’re more likely to choose you over your competitors when they are ready to act. This is crucial because, to the average person, your business may look just like all of the others in your service area. With brand building, you can set yourself apart for your exact services and culture, in your local market, and be easily found by the type of customers and employees you are hoping to attract.
The benefits of social media for brand building are immense. Social media is not only part of most people’s daily routine but it’s a big part. According to a Statista study, the average American spends just over two hours on social media each day.
Your social media presence expresses your individuality and strengthens your connection with customers. Your captions, the content you share, and your response to feedback via direct messages and comments all convey your business values and voice.
You want your gorgeous pool designs or your custom paver patios to tempt educated, high-income earners on social media. This is where you are most likely to capture the attention of your existing customers, as well as new prospects, and generate high-quality leads.
Partnerships
Once you’ve established a social media presence, partnering with dealers and manufacturers allows your creations and the products you work with to cross the paths of even more homeowners specifically looking for highly rated, detail-oriented, and superior craftsmanship and service.
Few other marketing strategies have the ability to target, or micro-target, a very select group of people who are already interested in what you do. Not only do partnerships improve your reach, but they also strengthen your brand by identifying the types of businesses you relate to and respect. In addition to increasing awareness of your products, social media can be used to achieve a range of other goals, from obtaining product reviews to clinching sales.
Pride Yourself in Providing Excellent Customer Service? Social Media Is a Critical Tool!
Social media is now an extension of whatever customer service operation you may or may not have. It’s a critical customer service hub where you can answer questions quickly, and people love the human touch that comes with active social media engagement. You’re communicating directly with customers in a friendly, approachable way, as part of relationship-building and not as an overt sales tool. By virtue of simply existing in these online spaces, you are offering people a direct line of communication with your business.
The purpose of that level of access is not only to facilitate inbound leads but also to resolve problems that customers may be having. It’s a platform for responding to comments and messages, and for maintaining a conversation that allows you to be wherever your clients need you to be. Whether it’s a question about pricing, availability, maintenance, or some other topic, your absence will not go unnoticed.
Digital marketing is all about meeting your customers where they are, and social media is a critical tool in satisfying that goal.
What Can Social Media Do for You? (Hint: Establish Your Business as a Market Leader!)
Here are some additional ways social media can benefit you:
Potential customers can discover you.
It’s two-way communication on a public forum—a good way for you to build trust and engagement.
You can stay top of mind. Most social media users are online at least once a day, and many check social accounts several times daily. Keeping your posts entertaining and informative means your audience will be happy to see you in their newsfeed. Out of sight truly is out of mind. Staying top of mind means your audience will think of you first.
Establish yourself as an expert and innovator by showcasing your latest projects alongside meaningful captions. Thought leadership builds trust, and trust leads to sales.
Everyone loves to shop, but nobody likes being sold to. Generate leads and increase your website traffic by sharing great content that links to your blog. It drives traffic in a no-pressure, low-commitment way that beats relying on pushing a pricey print catalog.
Social proof and word-of-mouth drive almost half of all buying decisions. The more people talk about your exquisite outdoor kitchens, show off your luxurious pools, and praise your stellar lawn care services (especially people with a big following), the more brand awareness and leads you’ll likely generate.
Boost sales by providing easily accessible product information and by growing your audience with every like, comment, and share. Your social media audience is positively predisposed to buying from you based on the social proof they see day in and day out.
Manage your reputation. Online reviews can be wonderful, or devastating. Increasingly, people are voicing complaints on social media instead of directly to the company. Social media offers an opportunity to answer criticism as a form of crisis management and leave an unhappy customer feeling good.
Offer customer service. Today, people expect businesses to be available on social media. They also expect them to respond to customer service inquiries on these platforms. Customers who receive a timely response to their comment (even if it’s a complaint) are often willing to spend more in the future.
Learn more about your customers. Sometimes, companies think that their customers want something they don’t, and social media offers a chance to learn more about customers in order to make more informed decisions.
Get feedback, fast. If your posts are gathering negative comments (or worse: crickets) you can pivot quickly, address the problem, and make changes to improve engagement. See the impact of your social media activities with reporting and analytics.
Monitor the competition. Social media lets you “spy” on your competition, especially if you read their customers’ comments.
It’s an avenue for targeted advertising to people who are already predisposed to investing in their outdoor spaces based on their online activity.
Social Media Posts: What the H*ll is the Difference Between Posts and Social Ads?
A social media strategy can be broken down into two sides: organic and paid. The difference is more subtle than where you spend money: At Halstead, we explain this as “front of page” versus “back of page”—and scalable ROI comes from the back-of-page efforts.
Squeezing every drop of ROI from social media is more than merely posting on social media, which is essentially what organic is. If you randomly post about your products, there’s a really, really slim chance that more than 5% of your target audience will see your post. In fact, Hootsuite reports that organic reach has steadily declined over the years, dropping 2.5 percentage points between 2018 and 2020, and continues to decline. If your business is thriving and you don’t want to increase your customer base and profits, then perhaps this siloed approach is enough to maintain a little presence.
Your Instagram can serve as an online lookbook to inspire your existing customers who already follow you and remind them of your existence. Leaders in the industry are having success with this, and if you want to stay competitive, you may want to adopt a more strategic approach to social media.
The real difference between organic and paid traffic is this:
Organic traffic is simpler and saves time. It’s a “spray and pray” approach that puts your high-end shots of outdoor living areas in front of people who, by and large, are not interested in a new design of their backyard space or are not in the market for a company to take care of their lawn care needs. While it enables you to engage with customers, offer customer service, and build relationships, it prevents you from reaching the vast majority of people who are looking for what you have to offer.
Social media’s growth into an array of sophisticated marketing platforms is largely thanks to the existence of paid ads. Nowhere is this more true than on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. So let's break down the different types of content that appear on these networks.
Ads vs. Posts
In the small business community—and in the landscape or pool building space in particular—it’s quite common for owners to equate posts and ads. While posts are important in their own right, they are quite different from ads. Let’s take a look at how they are different.
Ads are advertisements that live on the back end of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. While Facebook and Instagram tend to reach potential residential customers, LinkedIn tends to reach commercial decision-makers. More tactically speaking, if you just launched 10 Facebook Ads yesterday, when Mrs. Jones visits your business page, she won’t see any of them. They do not exist on your business page or profile but rather in the newsfeeds of your target audience.
Paid traffic allows you to reach a much larger audience of people who fit certain demographic criteria, who have already shown to care about your product or service, and/or are primed to buy from you based on their actions over a period of time. The payback for the investment is built on the data collected by social media platforms—data that you could never acquire and analyze all by yourself.
Knowing that your posts are reaching people interested in improving their landscape or outdoor living areas enables you to curate content that is likely to lead to sales. Many businesses use a hybrid model that combines the best part of an organic traffic strategy (it’s free) and the best part of a paid strategy (it’s effective). However, paid ads are more targeted and boost your reach, and a social media strategy without a paid component drastically reduces the success of social media as a marketing tool.
Posts are user-created updates, links, or comments that live on your business’s page or profile. They are no different than the posts that individual users can make on their own profiles. Because they have to compete with so many other forms of content, posts aren’t always seen by all of your audience. This is why it’s important to know the difference between posts and ads and to curate your marketing efforts accordingly.
What Can You Do with Posts?
Whereas ads drive clicks, traffic, forms, and DMs (direct messages), posts drive engagement. Letting people share, comment on, or interact with your content helps build your brand and establish a community.
But Facebook and Instagram posts can only do so much to drive leads or reach new markets. The potential for organic reach via posting on social media is increasingly limited. In fact, the rate of organic reach on social media—defined by the percentage of followers who see your posts—has declined dramatically over the past decade. On Facebook, that figure hovers around 5.2%, according to Hootsuite.
The numbers are slightly better on Instagram but are still on the decline. Of all the major social networks, LinkedIn is actually the most effective when it comes to organic reach, but if your customers aren’t on LinkedIn, that fact isn’t of much use.
There’s just too much competition—and not enough of an incentive on behalf of the social media companies—to reach audiences by relying on organic traffic alone. Social media is increasingly becoming a pay-to-play landscape for businesses.
What Can You Do with Ads?
Paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are extremely sophisticated tools for reaching highly segmented markets. As with traditional ads, you can create the same type of ad over and over again, but in the digital realm, you can create different calls to action (CTAs) for each ad type. This way, you can determine which type of CTA performed best on the actions taken.
For example, you can choose the same image, the same copy, and then with one ad create a CTA that invites users to click a link; in another ad, the CTA can be to submit a form, and in another to send a Facebook message.
The idea is to bracket your CTAs in the hopes of determining which one is the most effective at driving leads and engagement. You can also set caps on your Facebook ads to ensure you don’t end up annoying your target audience with too many of the same ad.
Targeting Your Audience
There are plenty more reasons why you should be leveraging social media ads to reach your target demo. Let’s break down two of the biggest ones: audience targeting and customer service.
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ADVANCED TARGETING
The targeting capabilities of Facebook and Instagram ads are pretty much unmatched, as is LinkedIn for targeting commercial customers. It’s not only that you can target audiences who are interested in, for example, high-end luxury landscaping, but also that you can exclude other specified audiences.
Maybe you want to exclude people who studied masonry or who are currently employed by a landscaping company. Unless you’re making ads to attract skilled laborers, you probably don’t want your ads to show up in the newsfeeds of people who may be working in your industry or are competitors.
Social ads allow you to zero in on specific market segments to reach as broad or narrow of an audience as you’d like. There’s really no excuse not to be taking advantage of that kind of marketing power.
Which Social Media Platforms Should I Use?
Different social media platforms attract different audiences, and knowing which platforms to use to target each audience is key.
Facebook is a great place to share your blogs, polished videos, and professional photographs with the intent of driving traffic to your website. This is typically where homeowner consumers will be found.
Instagram could be considered your diary and lookbook, where you showcase your latest creations, team, and culture, and is a powerful relationship-building platform. This is also a platform where homeowner consumers tend to hang out.
LinkedIn offers another opportunity to showcase your work and services but also extend your network by forging connections with developers, architects, dealers, manufacturers, property owners, and property management firms. More formal than other social sites, LinkedIn is indispensable for making industry connections.
YouTube allows you to share videos of your products in action, as well as educational content designed to assert yourself as an industry leader in the eyes of partnered dealers and manufacturers.
Pinterest may earn less of your effort, which can serve as a casual way to infiltrate the internet with images of your product to be stumbled upon, and high-quality images of finished projects are preferred as the Pinterest audience is looking to be inspired. While Pinterest should only be used after Facebook and Instagram are fully utilized, it is a great way to connect with design/build homeowner consumers.
Understanding which of these platforms your audience engages with the most will drive your marketing efforts. You may narrow your choices to one or two, or distribute content more broadly. The beauty of social media advertising and marketing is that you have access to analytics that can help you fine-tune your approach quickly instead of wasting time, money, and effort on strategies that don’t generate a good return on investment.
The raw data show social media is an essential tool for marketing. Despite demographic changes and a shifting marketing landscape, Facebook likely still wins out in terms of the target demographic for most landscape and pool contractors.
Whether you’re a B2B company eyeing a commercial development manager, a landscape or pool contractor focusing on homeowners, or a dealer targeting both contractors and homeowners, more of your customer base is on Facebook than on Instagram. That’s largely due to the age and income demographics for high-end craftsmanship. But take that point with a couple of caveats:
Instagram is growing. As millennials get older and start to buy homes, more and more people from your target demographic will be found on Instagram. Plus, according to The Small Business Blog, 81% of consumers use Instagram for research on companies, products, and services. Aim to establish a larger Instagram presence than your competitors!
While not everybody who’s on Facebook is on Instagram, pretty much everybody who’s on Instagram is on Facebook.
If you have to choose one—and you shouldn’t if you want to reach as big of an audience as you can—go with Facebook. That’s not to say you should ignore the other social media platforms, but Facebook and Instagram tend to be the most popular.
For the high-end landscape and pool contractor demographic, your target customer presence is increasing year-over-year on Instagram; more and more 45-year-old wealthy homeowners, for example, are showing up there. That trend is continuing for thirty- and fifty-somethings as well.
Another reason why you should be on multiple platforms: When advertising on Facebook, you can seamlessly advertise on Instagram as well, engaging both platforms with the same ad-management system.
Choosing a Social Media Platform
There are some social media platforms that are better than others when it comes to posting your content—whether it’s a daily Instagram post or a professional video for the website. Here are some general rules of thumb to follow when developing a content strategy for social media:
Use hashtags only on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Keep videos to 60 seconds or less. (Instagram allows longer videos, but users would have to bounce to a different player to watch them.)
Save longer videos for YouTube or your website.
For B2B content—if, for example, you’re a contractor targeting some commercial decision-makers—leverage LinkedIn.
Save outbound links for Facebook and LinkedIn.
It’s All About the Funnel
Consumers don’t act the first time they see an ad. That’s just a fact of life, and it’s something that every marketing plan needs to take into account.
As a renowned marketing guru, Seth Godin once said, “The goal of a marketing interaction isn’t to close the sale, any more than the goal of a first date is to get married. No, the opportunity is to move forward, to earn attention and trust and curiosity and conversation.”
But how do you do that on Facebook and Instagram? First of all, you have to understand that many of your prospects are searching for landscape and pool contractors like you online. You may be just one of two or three companies they’ve contacted, and the higher the price of the project they’re looking to complete the longer they’re going to spend looking.
In fact, research shows people spend an average of 79 days researching online before committing to a major purchase. The goal of your marketing efforts, then, should be to find opportunities that speak to those prospects at each stage in the customer journey, which can also be thought of as a funnel.
At the top of the funnel is the awareness stage, which is the point where you say hello and introduce yourself. The middle of the funnel is the consideration stage, where you retarget the people who have engaged with your content. And at the bottom of the funnel is the conversion stage; the fewest number of people make it to this stage, but it’s (hopefully) the point when people begin to contact you. They fill out a form, email you, call you, or text you; the touchpoint is less important than the fact that they’re reaching out. They’re now a lead.
Top of the Funnel: Awareness
At the top of the funnel, you’re really dealing with cold traffic—people who are idly or with some intent scrolling through their newsfeeds and search results. The whole point of the awareness funnel is to get the prospect to stop scrolling and look at your ad, post, or account. The point is merely to see your brand.
This is a difficult goal to pin down because it’s not evident in the number of clicks you get. At this stage, it’s more about whether or not people are pausing to simply view your ad. It may surprise you, but that is a metric that both Facebook and Instagram offer.
In targeting your market for a Facebook or Instagram ad, it’s important to be as broad as possible in terms of interests (such as landscape design, backyard lighting, pool architecture, etc.). For the location of the ad, however, focus only on regions where you want your business to operate. The same goes for age: Narrow the range to your ideal customer.
Keep in mind: The interest categories that Facebook and Instagram offer in their ad platform are always changing. That means your campaigns need to be continuously updated and monitored to ensure your ads are targeting the right markets.
Middle of the Funnel: Consideration
Once you’ve defined your audience, it’s time to retarget.
Let’s say you’ve cast a net with an ad campaign that reaches 10,000 people. (That number is different for everyone.) The next step is to bring some of those people further down the funnel to the middle stage: consideration. This is where your retargeting efforts begin.
Here, you could retarget those prospects who, for example, viewed a video ad for three seconds, or you could target individuals who visited your website within the past 90 days or even those who visited a specific page on your website.
All of those prospects can be retargeted—in that order. You might use video at the “hello” stage of the funnel, and then retarget folks who viewed at least three seconds of the video with an ad that brings them to your website page, and then, once again, retarget those visitors into a highly specific landing page or to a piece of content. The idea is to keep it going.
Bottom of the Funnel: Conversion
Now is the time to narrow down your retargeting efforts. The idea here is to target not merely the people who clicked on an ad for your page, but a more specific bracket. For example, retargeting the top 25 percent of people who spent the most time on your website can be effective. Applying the same metric to video helps retarget people who viewed one of your videos for a certain amount of time.
It’s important to realize that the view time you are targeting may be different for every company. For some, the top 25 percent may just be three minutes spent on a website, and for others, it may be 60 seconds. The point is you’re targeting the people who spend the most time on your website.
Eventually, out of all the people you’ve engaged through your ad campaign, you’ll have funneled your prospects down to a few interested candidates. Those who engaged with your content from the get-go will reach out to you, landing you a lead and potential conversion.
Content Is the Foundation
In short, there is no social presence without (good) content. Everyone else is competing for the attention and money of your target audience, and it’s only becoming a fiercer competition every year. The days of generic posts and shares are gone, and every post needs to be compelling enough to get noticed, get comments, and get shared. So, how are your posts going to stand out from the crowd?
Think about the experience of buying a new truck. When you enter a dealership or visit a car manufacturer’s page to learn about some new model, are you seeing random, poorly lit, unprofessional photos of these trucks? Of course not. They’re giving you beautifully lit, high-resolution, professional images and videos of their vehicles in action.
When shopping for a new truck, you have a plethora of creative content to look at and be convinced by. And as you engage, as you see the truck from different angles with different features and add-ons, you begin to fall in love with it. You want it.
If you, as a landscape contractor, are trying to sell a project that is even half the price of the truck but is only one-tenth of the quality of the creative, how can you expect to convert leads? It takes consumers so long to decide on a truck even when you have an abundance of creatives at your fingertips, so how can you expect someone else to make a decision about your offerings without beautiful videos, photos, brochures, or copy?
Moreover, this is what you love to do, right? You’re proud of your work, your team, your values, and your portfolio. So why wouldn’t you want to document the fruits of your labor in the best possible light?
The message is clear: Coming to the table with creative content that reflects the price of the project you’re trying to sell is essential. It’s simply non-negotiable.
So where to begin? There are three basic types of content: the written word, photo, and video. Each has its own set of guidelines and best practices.
What’s the Word?
When writing or sourcing copy, think about where it’s going to live. Most industry leaders outsource their marketing and work with writers to develop a voice and tone that reflects their brand.
If, for example, you’re making a post on LinkedIn, it’s likely going to be for the B2B crowd, so think about how you would talk to that kind of audience. It may mean using more industry language that speaks directly to the interests of commercial players.
If the copy is to be posted on Instagram, you’re going to want to be more casual and informal. If it’s on Facebook, where unlike Instagram you can include outbound links, the post may be as simple as a word or two alongside an image or video. Alternatively, you might link to an article on your website with a polished and alluring summary of the content.
The right words, the right rhythm, the right slang, the right turns of phrase—all of this in the right balance is the goal of all good copywriters. It should be for you, too.
The King and Queen of Social Ads: Photo and Video
If everyone is creating content, how can you expect to stand out from the competition? What reason do potential customers have to contact and hire you?
Well, your work is the reason. At the top of the funnel—before customers have even considered your brand—you need to supply them with gorgeous imagery of your most beautiful and accomplished projects. You want to showcase work that evokes certain emotions and makes people feel things. If your goal is recruiting, consistently posting team photos and videos that show off your workplace culture can be especially impactful.
Years ago, you could probably get away with producing pictures and videos of underlit or unfurnished projects. But not today. The outdoor living and pool builder market has matured too much, and the competition is now too fierce to cut corners. In addition, photos and videos need to be used to attract talented crew members simply because it’s expected in today’s market.
One of the challenges, then, is to produce a steady stream of content from what may be a limited spring of qualified work. Maybe you have only a few “pillar” projects in a given year— “pillar” referring to the kinds of big-ticket, brand-building jobs that you want your company to be known for. Those projects may be stunning to behold, but you can’t use the same ones over and over again. So how do you develop ongoing, regular content while drawing from a limited number of projects?
The solution can be found in a mindset shift. When it comes to your photo and video output, you have your pillar content, and you have your “everyday” content.
First, you have content gathered from a professional photo or video shoot—good for ads, your website, and posts on all social platforms.
Second, you have your “daily diary” entries, which are the stuff you post to Instagram or Facebook. For this type of content, you’re only showing your day-to-day work and activities, offering a window into how your company operates. Complex installations, truck load-outs, spring/fall cleanup, commercial lawn mowing, worker antics—all of this is meant to showcase your craftsmanship while humanizing your brand.
This two-fold approach to content has an interesting effect: The pillar content you capture of finished projects shows off the emotional impact of what you can offer your customers, while the daily documentation of a job offers a reason for why those customers should choose you.
The nice thing about the daily diary is that it doesn’t have to be flashy. If, for example, you spent the day designing a 3D render of a residential hardscape, you can snap a photo of your workspace with your smartphone and quickly post it to Instagram. The next day, you can continue the story by capturing a photo of your workers installing the base for a retaining wall that’s part of the same project. Or perhaps you could post a “before” photo of a lawn covered in weeds, a “during” photo of your crew fertilizing and applying weed killer, and then post an “after” photo showing the now healthy lawn. The idea is to show the little details that may not be evident in the professional photos and videos of the finished project.
All the love, passion, craft, education, and experience that went into creating a beautiful pool or hardscape is, in some ways, better represented by the process than the finished product. Your content needs to reflect that passion, and Facebook and Instagram offer the ideal platform for sharing it.
Overview: Tips for Posting on Social Media for Landscape and Pool Contractors
How do you generate eye-catching, shareable, and interesting content that your audience will engage with? It’s a four-step process.
Step 1: Strive for a Combination of Professional Pillar Content and the Daily Diary
Pillar content could be informative and educational, loaded with information, and designed to empower your audience to make the best decision for their needs. Explainer videos (including “how to” videos) and blog posts are examples of pillar content. It’s an opportunity to showcase your expertise and position yourself as an undisputed industry leader.
The daily diary could be video and still imagery that chronicles how a recent landscape project came together, and the brands of materials used. Prospects will see the products you love and your services in action, as they solve real people’s needs.
Step 2: Empower Your Team
You will curate completely different content if it comes from the top down versus the bottom up, as every team member in your business has something of value to share. Similarly, the content you create collaboratively with dealers or manufacturers will be different from the content you create single-handedly.
Slice-of-life nuggets that depict a member of your crew putting the finishing touches on carrying out your plans, or showcase what it’s like behind the scenes when conceptualizing a backyard revamp, are absolute gold in the world of social media. Depending on the audience on the receiving end, they can build engagement and trust far more effectively than a slick and salesy-sounding ad.
Empowering your team to share their daily experiences and ideas for social media content makes them feel engaged and important to the company's vision. Involving everyone in producing content is one way to ensure you’re on the same page, and it creates amazing team spirit in the process.
Step 3: Understand and Commit
Social media requires strategy, with consistent actions taken over time. It’s not something you can do randomly or sporadically. Understanding this, and committing to it, helps you allocate the right resources and people to a strategy that will ultimately yield a significant ROI.
Step 4: Design the System
This is where most businesses are stumped. Generating enough high-quality content, consistently sharing it on the relevant platforms, and engaging with the audience is basically a full-time gig. Some businesses build up a stockpile of content while others prefer a more consistent and gradual approach. Either way, prepare to design a systematic way of creating and sharing content (and engaging with the audience) so that your social media presence is timely, relevant, and noteworthy.
