Episode 10 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how wildly successful companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple leverage subscription relationships to sustain their breathtaking growth.

Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple have a combined market cap (total market value of outstanding shares) of approximately $1.72 trillion US dollars.

This equates to the GDP of Canada, thereby making these four companies’ value equivalent to the 10th largest country in the world.

And they all have one thing in common that you can adapt to your company. Their business models are designed to capitalize on subscription relationships.

Show Notes

Thank you for listening and subscribing! We’ll greatly appreciate it if you head over to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes and give it an honest rating and review.

You can learn more about subscription relationships by listening to my interview with John Warrilow, author of Built to Sell: Creating a Business that Can Thrive Without You

Call to Action

In addition to renewing contracts with your customers, create subscription relationships with them by offering free content that enhances their lifestyle and experience with your business.

Consider going a step further to create paid subscription relationships like Amazon does with its Prime subscription. These paid subscription relationships are even more valuable because that financial investment literally has the subscribers invested in the relationship.

The post Subscription Relationships: How Wildly Successful Companies Do It appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 9 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how buyer personas help marketers to clearly understand their customers and create customer-facing marketing that speaks to them.

Buyer personas are invaluable for helping marketers discover the most compelling reasons buyers decide to invest in their solutions.

According to the Buyer Persona Institute, “Many buyers give up because nobody is really helping them.” Instead of being product or service focused, marketers are using buyer personas to address their customers’ unique pain points.

The Five Rings of Buying Insight for creating buyer personas

1. Priority Initiatives – Determine the most compelling reasons buyers invest in your solutions and develop strategies to trigger these actions.
2. Success Factors – Get clarity on the specific outcomes your customers expect to achieve from your products and services.
3. Perceived Barriers – Use your marketing to remove common barriers to buying by pulling back the curtain to reveal what customers need to know.
4. Buyers Journey – Discover the people that influence your customers’ buying behaviors, including friends, family, and possibly your competitors’ marketing.
5. Decision Criteria – Buying decisions are nearly always based more on emotion than logic. Use buyer personas to learn about your customers and how to activate those emotions.

Show Notes

Thank you for listening and subscribing! We’ll greatly appreciate it if you head over to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes and give it an honest rating and review.

You can gain additional insights on buyer personas from Adele Revella’s book, Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customers’ Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

Listen to Jeff Korhan’s interview with Adele Revela on This Old New Business Podcast.

Call to Action

Your landscape or lawn care business marketing may be missing the mark by taking the typical residential, commercial, or similar industry approach.

Instead, consider learning who those customers really are and how your business can create marketing that speaks to their challenges and aspirations.

Use the 5 Rings of Buying Insight to create personas that are customer-facing and build your marketing around them.

The post Buyer Personas: How to Create Customer-Facing Marketing appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 8 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to increase website engagement by getting buyers to take actions that are in their best interest. 

Imagine the home page of your website is a billboard and your prospective buyers are whizzing by at 60, 70, and 80 miles an hour. What are they going to see? And what action would you most like them to take if they do?

Many landscape industry websites are visually appealing but visitors are not at all clear about what to do next. This confusion is the result of too many choices or none at all.

It may seem obvious that visitors should engage with your website, but why leave that to chance? When you convert prospective buyers from visitors to subscribers you can nurture the relationship until they are ready to buy.

There are countless right and wrong ways to do this. But awareness and testing will most reliably lead to increased to the website engagement that is vital to your business growth.

Show Notes

In this episode, we referred to the empathy mapping too. You can learn more about it in the previous Episode 7.

Benchmark your business against industry peers and make new discoveries in the process by taking the First Annual Landscape Industry Digital Survey. Your contribution will give you full access to the report when it’s ready.

Call to Action

Revisit the empathy mapping to consider what you want website visitors to feel when they speed by that billboard that is the home page of your website. Curious, excited, impressed? It’s up to you.

Then determine the one action you want them to take and how you will guide them to it.

The post Website Engagement: Getting Buyers to Take Action appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 7 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to use the empathy mapping tool to create an exceptional website experience for your audience.

Now that digital experiences are replacing traditional selling, marketing, and customer service, you should enhance and streamline them with the empathy mapping planning tool website builders rely on.

You simply divide a whiteboard into 4 equal quadrants and label them seeing, thinking, feeling, and doing. Using sticky notes, jot down every interaction that buyers have with your website, seeking to guide the buyer toward the most favorable outcome.

The key is delivering the right content in the right way and at the right time. Knowing that buyers make decisions more on emotion than logic, you want to be especially sensitive to guiding their journey to ultimately develop trust.

Show Notes

Learn more about empathy mapping and get access to a template.

Benchmark your business against industry peers and make new discoveries in the process by taking the First Annual Landscape Industry Digital Survey. Your contribution will give you full access to the report when it’s ready.

If you have not done so already, register with Landscape Digital Institute to free access to future premium content.

Call to Action

Use the empathy mapping tool to better understand what prospective buyers are seeing, thinking, feeling, and doing when they interact with your website.

Then do the same with your competitors’ websites. And then make the necessary changes over time to consistently enhance that website experience for your ideal customer.

The post Empathy Mapping: How to Create The Ideal Website Experience appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 6 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why marketing consistency that shows up for an audience gets progressively better and grows that audience.

If your marketing shows up at the same time and day on whatever frequency you choose, you will build an audience. It’s as simple as that.

You have to be there for your audience. That’s what professionals do. When it’s game time or show time the audience expects the host or performer to be there no matter what.

And that’s the point. You do not have to be a great marketer. Although, that helps, most important is doing the one thing that everyone recognizes and respects because we all know how hard it is to consistently show up.

Over time your marketing muscles will get stronger with use. You will get better at coming up with good ideas and refining your systems for growing an audience.

Show Notes

Check out our first webinar, 9 Advanced LinkedIn Profile Tips for Boosting Your Visibility and Growing Your Audience with Stephanie Sammons, in the Member Area of Landscape Digital Institute.

If you have not done so already, register to get free access to this and future premium content.

Call to Action

Choose one marketing channel where you will set a schedule and show up to build your reputation for marketing consistency. That could be YouTube, LinkedIn, or an email newsletter.

The newsletter is my top recommendation for clients because it’s the most intimate channel. For those that don’t like that idea, my next choice is publishing articles on LinkedIn Publisher for your personal profile.

Regardless of the channel, using your expertise and experience to consistently add value for your audience is going to strengthen your relationship and build trust with it.

The post Marketing Consistency: Everything Starts with Showing Up appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 5 of Landscape Digital Show reveals two mobile apps that make it easy to listen and subscribe to podcast shows on your mobile device. We also get into how and why to rate and review them too.

Podcasters upload audio podcast shows to hosts like Libsyn and Rainmaker, which are then syndicated to directories, including iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play Music. While you can listen to these podcast shows with their respective mobile apps, there are 3rd party apps with greater functionality.

Overcast and Pocket Cast are mobile players that enhance the overall experience of listening to podcast shows. Audio quality is enhanced, you have more control with playlists and favorites, and discovery and sharing are simplified.

If you enjoy a podcast show, taking a moment to provide feedback in the form of a rating and review helps the show get discovered on iTunes and other directories. It also builds a relationship with the host(s) and helps them develop more targeted content for your enjoyment.

The Show Notes

• Overcast Podcast Player
• Pocket Cast
• This Old New Business. Jeff Korhan interviews guest experts, including Mike Rorie, Marty Grunder, Jason Cupp and Ed LaFlamme.

Call to Action

Make a small investment in either the Overcast or Pocket Cast players to simplify subscribing and listening to podcasts.

And swing over Landscape Digital Show on iTunes and give us an honest rating and review. We’ll greatly appreciate it.

The post Podcast Shows: How to Listen, Subscribe, and Rate on Mobile appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 4 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to sell more work and win more landscape awards by learning how to tell better stories.

Winning landscape awards obviously requires high-quality photos of exceptional work. But that’s not nearly enough. The judges are reviewing many projects, and often very quickly.

You need to give them a reason to vote your project a winner, and that possibility is significantly increased when you use story to make it meaningful.

Stories are about change, progress, moving forward. In short, they are about transformation, and isn’t that what landscape and lawn care companies do for their customers?

To make that transformation real, there has to be conflict and resolution. This is your company overcoming the obstacles that test the talents of your team, with your solutions resulting in an amazing landscape and a delighted customer.

The Show Notes

• Nobody Wants to Ready Your Sh*t, by Steven Pressfield.

Call to Action

Learn to use your digital marketing to tell better stories, because stories sell. They not only help to win landscape awards, they are essential for getting the work in the first place.

In the audio, I said it may still be possible to get a free digital copy of Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*T, by Steven Pressfield. That introductory offer evidently expired yesterday.

Get it anyway. As the title suggests, it’s no ordinary book about writing. It’s street smart, witty, and practical. In its short one or two-page chapters Pressfield shares tips and advice from his celebrated career as an advertising copywriter, screenwriter, novelist, and more.

And he helps you apply them to your business.

The post Landscape Awards: The Best Story Wins appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 3 of Landscape Digital Show reveals proven content creation productivity practices, tools, and resources from the pros.

Writing is the foundation of all content creation because you have to capture, organize, and breathe life into those ideas.

When it comes to favorite practices and tools, writers are much like golfers. While most of their methods are logical, others are based on hunches and superstition. It doesn’t matter. Just find what feels right and works for you.

In addition to these tools and writing resources, the majority of this episode discusses methods and practices authors like Stephen King have used to build impressive bodies of work.

You can too.

The Show Notes

Tools

• OmmWriter
• Focus@Will
• ByWord
• Genius Scan

Books

• On Writing, by Stephen King
• Why We Write, by Merideth Maran
• The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield

Call to Action

Get a copy of Steven Pressfield’s follow-up to The War of Art.

The War of Art was about overcoming obstacles that prevent us from creating our art, what we were put on this planet to accomplish. That may be designing websites, excelling in athletics, building and maintaining landscapes, or writing.

The follow-up is Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*T. As the title suggests, it’s no ordinary book about writing. It’s street smart, witty, and practical. In its short one or two-page chapters Pressfield shares tips and advice from his celebrated career as an advertising copywriter, screenwriter, novelist, and more.

And he helps you apply them to your business.

You can download the digital book here for free. But do it soon because it was supposed to expire on July 1st but has been extended for an undetermined time.  Sometime soon it goes on sale for a price.

The post Content Creation: Productivity Practices, Tools, and Resources appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 2 of Landscape Digital Show reveals the distinction between content marketing and inbound marketing.

One of the reasons inbound and content marketing are often considered the same as they both use similar tactics at the visible lead attractions stage. What happens after that often sets the two apart.

If you doubt this, simply subscribe to any site that offers an e-book or free report. You are added to at least one email marketing list and soon your inbox fills with emails designed to convert your interest into a sale as quickly as possible.

That’s inbound marketing.

In contrast, content marketing seeks to add value to every stage of the buyer’s journey, with the best content marketers understanding the nature and duration of that experience is buyer dependent. Thus, some leads will convert quickly while others may need nurturing for weeks, months or years.

That’s what content marketing does so well.

If attracting leads is important to your green industry business, both inbound and content marketing can help. Yet, without a strategic content marketing plan, only a fraction of those inbound leads will become long-standing customers.

The Show Notes

• If you would like to get the full content experience, including upcoming webinars and more, register to join Landscape Digital Institute for free.

Call to Action

Discover how I successfully used the principles of content marketing to launch my landscape business in 1988, long before digital and social media. I describe exactly how it happened in the introduction to my book, Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business. 

You can download it for free from this page.

You’ll also get the first chapter that further discusses the relevance of content for establishing relevance and authority by driving traffic to your website.

The post Content Marketing: It’s More Than Inbound appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 1 of Landscape Digital Show reveals the true obstacle to successful digital marketing is not time, but a lack of training in the fundamentals.

Welcome to Episode 1 of Landscape Digital Show, where twice a week you get one actionable tip in less than ten minutes for growing your landscape and lawn care business.

Landscape Digital Show is just one of the content channels from the newly formed Landscape Digital Institute, but it is an important one because you can discover inspiring ideas by listening from your mobile device when you have downtime.

Our mission with Landscape Digital Institute is to help green industry professionals attract and grow their business audience, especially online where the majority of buyers are doing their research and discovery.

If you own or work for a landscaping, lawn care, or related company like snow and ice management, this is the place to discover what works with digital marketing.

The Show Notes

• If you would like to get the full content experience, including upcoming webinars and more, register to join Landscape Digital Institute for free.

Call to Action

Take a moment to let us know how this show and Landscape Digital Institute can help you.

Even if your challenges are seemingly outside of the digital space, such as attracting and retaining talented and hard-working people, we’ll do the work to find the solutions.

You may be surprised what we come up with. Once again, we are squarely in a digital first economy, so it’s highly likely the solutions are right here.

So, take a moment to let us know how we can help. You’ll be helping yourself and this community.

The post Digital Marketing: Time is Not the Obstacle appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.