If you are in the landscaping business, you need Landscaping Web Design. The opportunities for your business are unbelievable on the web. Even in small markets, your customers are looking for you on the web. They want to see the projects you have completed, the designs that you have created and all of the positive things your customers are saying about you.
It is important to understand the importance of a web presence for your business. The yellow pages are reaching a much more diluted mix of people and the fact is the price keeps going up. Year after year the competition gets thicker, margins seem to get smaller and it becomes harder and harder to differentiate your business from your competitors. The Internet is the opportunity of a lifetime. I'm not suggesting that you terminate your yellow page ads completely, but what if you could have a top class website to refer people to the phone book? It absolutely creates the difference in being washed away by your competitors, over sized, over priced ad, and the prospect selecting you instead because he was able to see the expertise of your work on your website. The yellow pages only offers you a single page, and heaven knows what a full page in the yellow pages costs, while the web offers as many pages as you would like or need in order to pre-sell your customers before they even call you to set up an appointment.
We have seen it time and time again, customers who have clicked on a properly designed landscaping website and been sold before they called to get a price! It's true. When you build a website, it is important to gather all of the important information. Things that a sales person would normally take to a sales call, like glossy foldouts, marketing propaganda, before and after photos and a list of testimonials from customers that are head-over-heals in love with projects that your company has done. Add to this the proper keywords and the research to insure where the market is and poof, you have a successful web site.
How to make your web site work.
It is important to incorporate everything that you need in your site to capitalize on traffic that is free. Meaning search engine traffic, directory traffic and other complimentary traffic from non competitive sites. This is important because as you develop your web presence, you do not want to have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to buy clicks. It is much more cost effective to develop the site to incorporate the search words or key phrases that will garner the traffic target you're looking for. Understand, the traffic can not be general traffic. To use an old marketing phrase, the "shotgun approach", is not an effective way to generate quality leads to your site. Try focusing your search efforts in very specific customers that are actually in the act of searching for a company to solve an existing problem or handle a service that they need. You are looking for the needle in the hay stack and regularly find it. When building your site, do not just brand your business, look for ways to go much further than that and have a quantifiable way to determine success. That being live prospects that find you in the search engines or elsewhere. Those prospects then come to your site, are given the information they need to make a buying decision through the content that has been provided on your site, and then engage you to close the sale. With the exception of the closing, all of this is done in an automated system. This dramatically shortens the sales cycle in almost all businesses. This is the difference, most web designers do not understand the nature of your business. We have owned successful contracting and building trade businesses ourselves. We know how the Internet works and can share that with you. The fact is, most web designers are graphic artists. They generally do not have any practical experience in running a contracting business.
Development of your website.
The development of your website is done with basic input. Gather information that is necessary to build a story or theme for your site. For example, if you are a general contractor and your specialty is churches as an example build the content of the site around the construction of churches. Not that churches would be the only topic for drawing traffic, just one on many. Let's say for example you're an HVAC contractor and you specialize in duct cleaning. The focus topic on your site might be duct cleaning. Each site is different in its development of a theme.
We developed a site for a paving contractor that had the specialty of municipal work. Their site was developed to have focus on who we were going to have as visitors, municipal buyers. Based on who your target is and what service or product you are marketing to them will absolutely determine what the content of your site is.
Sharing infinite amounts of information without additional cost!
What about delivering information to existing customers & prospects? Think of it this way, how much does your company spend in glossy marketing handouts and other printed literature in a years time? What if you could deliver, to your customers and prospects, a way to get updated information that may drive them to engaging a new service that you provide or a new product? What if you gathered not only US Postal service addresses, but also email addresses that allowed you to share, in a captive way, your goods and services repeated to your customers and prospects? Delivering your entire marketing plan in a web format will dramatically reduce your annual printing costs along with increasing the number of touches you can have with a prospect or customer with basically no incremental cost to you. Imagine your closing percentage doubling or more! We have clients that have no other marketing budget other than their websites. They're marketing impact is dynamic because as traffic is generated, leads are extracted. Even if those leads are not at the point of buying, they have in most cases captured their contact information through the use of a "free information" form. With the contact information in hand, the site owners can then take a much more direct approach to selling the prospect on the services or products bought. It is a marketers dream. Prospects that tell you what they are looking for or are in need of, giving to you, and then giving you permission to market to them directly via email! We have developed auto responders that will in some cases, based on the information that has been requested, send an automated response or series of responses to that prospect that deliver the specific information that they requested while still captivating their contact information for future follow up. Email is rapidly becoming as powerful if not more so than direct mail has been for quite some time. Building an email customer list will be imperative to all contractors success in the coming years. As your email address list of customers is building, you have the opportunity to contact them with new, unrelated information about your company and the products and services that you offer. And the contact is basically free, meaning you have no postage expense, no list expense because you have built the list yourself, and no printing expense because there is no need to produce thousands of printed pieces. Understand, if you're not marketing to the Internet, your competition will certainly be. It is better to beat them to the market and build a presence sooner rather than later. Establish your company as the leader in your field
How important is landscaping web design? As a landscaper it can convert markets that most certainly would have gone with your competition.
