This is the second half of the Lawn Care Business Facebook Marketing Guide. You can read the first part here.
Achieving Success With Facebook Marketing
In all businesses, the game plan and the execution are always the key to success. We must have a goal for our Facebook marketing, then a detailed plan, then monitor and adjust as needed.
To come up with a solid game plan and strategy in Facebook marketing, do not forget these easy steps:
When advertising your lawn or landscape business, it is important to have a clear mission and vision. A lot of brands’ success stories came from these two objectives. The mission and the vision must explain to potential customers the purpose of the company and why it exists.
In starting his Apple Company, Steve Jobs was motivated by supporting people’s creativity, not by selling computers. Before becoming the largest florist shop, Jim McCann’s 1-800-Flowers.com was motivated to help people express their feelings to others.
Planning Strategies
Therefore, before planning to do some social media marketing strategies, a company should:
- First, exactly know the type of business he will engage himself into, (Green Industry) and
- Second, fulfill other people’s desires and solve their problems. (Green weed-free healthy-looking lawn without any hassles).
Take the six Vitamin C’s of Facebook every day. In order to come up with a successful marketing campaign, keep all these 6 C’s in mind:
- Content: post stories that will gain a lot of shares, likes and comments. In short, it should be interesting.
- Clarity: clearly show what the fan page is all about and what it has to offer. Update the “About” section of the page and add taglines on the cover photo if necessary.
- Campaign: maximize the use of Facebook’s promotional tools in order to support a particular campaign.
- Connection: build and grow the page’s network.
- Culture: make the fan page as an extension of the company’s culture or a particular brand. The same look and feel of the fan page should not be used all over again. This will depend on proper page management which includes: the type of content shared, response time, way of response, humor and etc.
- Conversion: convert fans and followers into a network of paying customers.
Post shareable contents. Consider these basic rules on creating shareable contents:
Make it short. (a content with 80 characters will gain more shares) Vary the contents by using photos, videos, audios and links.
Reply to people who shared the content by liking their shares. Interact by asking questions
Visit other pages to know what people like
Determine when the best time of the day and week is to interact with the fans.
Consider experimenting and testing then, track the results. It is important to learn what Facebook marketing strategy is working and what’s not. Try variating the post frequency, contents and time zones.
Learn from the success of other Facebook fan pages. Oreo, Disney, Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Skittles are some of the popular consumer brands that are doing well in this social media platform. Look at other green industry pages.
Monitor their Facebook pages and view other fan pages to see what particular types of content could gain significant number of shares.
Examine everything on their fan page starting from updates up to the promotional campaigns used.
To become good at Facebook marketing, it takes time and patience. By following the above-mentioned steps and seeking the help of people who are knowledgeable in this field, success will be on its way!
Steps To Facebook Marketing Success
When dealing with a fast-paced environment such as social media, not all lawn care businesses fare well. Some may enjoy exceptionally high growth at first and end up slipping off later.
How do you succeed in Facebook marketing? Read on to find out the recipe towards growing your green.
Sponsored Stories
When it comes to Facebook marketing, a lot of people tend to give high regard to their friends' recommendations. This means that you should invest more in sponsored stories, where the ad appears with a corresponding story. For instance, when promoting an event, a sponsored story would say, "Friend 1 and 10 others are going." This would spark credibility in the eyes of the user.
Updates
If there's something that is very essential in social media marketing, it's the constant updates. Fresher contents would make your audience engage more and will ignite frequent visits to your page.
Keeping up with the recent trends is also a must to survive in the online world. Hence, you should always make sure to include updated posts on your page.
Curiosity
To further entice your audience on your posts, you can use a cliff hanger statement as your headline to spark curiosity. The posts will act like bait that will lead your customers to the desired page.
You can also include interesting thumbnail images that will convey a message without giving out the entire story.
Competition
Facebook marketing is all about competition, and to get ahead, you must know your equivalents. You can use the watch page feature of Facebook to consistently watch over certain pages.
You can use this to learn more about customer feedback on which works, and which does not.
Engagement
The key to a healthy and fruitful Facebook page is to engage your customers well on your posts. By engaging them, this means that your page must be conducive to activities and involves a lot of audience participation. You can add questions, or even start some promos to further invite more people to like your page.
Moreover, the more active your page is, the better chance it would be to fare better in SEO. Search engines can easily find their way to pages that are frequently shared by people.
Schedule
For more efficient page management, it is ideal to take advantage of the scheduled post feature. This means you can write type, edit or upload any photo in advance, and post it at a later date.
It can be editable and can be cancelled as you like. This is recommended especially when targeting certain day parts.
Sustain
Once you have established a group of followers and a strong fan base, you need to maintain a certain level of growth rate, just like in any other business. You need to constantly invite more people and extend your reach as much as possible.
With over a billion users, Facebook is indeed an excellent ground to promote and extend your network. By keeping in mind the steps to growing your green., you can easily win over your competitors, increase your site traffic and more importantly, translate every click into sales.
Benefits To Facebook Marketing For Your Lawn or Landscape Business
Facebook has its own unique advantages and benefits. Apart from personally connecting with the members of the family and friends, it can also be used for advertising and promoting a business.
Marketing strategies play a vital role in the success and growth of a business because they are used to draw customers’ attention. This is where a Facebook business page has the advantage over an existing company website.
Without going for expensive marketing activities that cost about thousands of dollars, these companies like your green industry company can target millions of audiences which can turn into potential paying customers as they go along.
Large businesses also take the opportunity to use Facebook for their trial marketing plans and concepts before stepping up on bigger campaigns.
- Business information can be shared. Since Facebook is the right avenue to promote a business, it is important to provide information about the business name, address and its contact details.
To draw more customers, a business page should also contain brief descriptions on every aspect including its products and services as well as its history and staff listing. Schedule a post about each service you offer and set each one to repeat every 3 months to catch new customers and potential customers.
- It is interactive. Apart from posting texts, uploading of photos and videos is also allowed, thus, making Facebook easier to personalize than a company website.
There are no technical skills needed in order to maintain, customize and personalize a Facebook business page because it’s pretty much the same as managing a personal Facebook account.
Interaction
Interaction takes place when audiences tag themselves in the photo that is used to advertise and promote a business.
- It allows communication with current and prospective customers through the exchange of messages. Listening to their feedbacks regarding the products and services is essential in Facebook marketing.
- It is easier to provide customer support on Facebook. Questions can be posted directly based on the customers’ experience in using a particular product or service. This is more effective than taking phone calls as customers can already see common queries and responses from other people. As a result, problems and issues can be quickly resolved. In addition, these can increase the satisfaction level of customers.
- Brand awareness can be raised through Facebook likes. Apart from word of mouth, liking the Facebook page will increase the popularity of a business page.
- It can increase website traffic by including Facebook page URLs on posts. Exposing these links to Facebook users can also convert visits into potential business purchases.
Maximize this advantage especially when people are motivated to buy products or services as consumers.
- Advertising can be targeted to a particular group of people. Marketers can maximize the creation of Facebook ads for certain people that have listed a particular interest by making these ads appear on the right side of their Facebook pages.
Facebook is the only social media platform that can provide these advantages. Therefore, take the opportunity to use Facebook marketing while Facebook is still not going anywhere.
Using Curated Content
Using curated content is not stealing content. I’m not at all saying that you should be lazy and just rip off or copy your competitors wholesale. I’m not saying that you should be involved in some sort of copy and paste marketing because that’s not going to work. Sadly, that’s precisely how too many Facebook marketers defined ‘curated content.’ They just find content that seems to be related to their niche and run with it.
In fact, many think that if a piece of content has their target keywords in the titles of blog posts and articles, these are ‘good enough.’ Unfortunately, ‘good
enough’ is never good enough in the dog-eat-dog world of Facebook content marketing. Nothing but the best will do.
Identify Your Competitors Popular Content
Instead, you need to identify your competitors’ best content, as well as highly popular content produced by third parties. You use these materials to test your page in terms of response. If you notice that a lot of your page fans respond better to a specific type of content, then you need to produce more of that content.
You need to either find other third-party content you can curate, or you can come up with your own stuff. Whatever the case may be, this is a simple example of finding what works. When you start your page, you really don’t know what will work. You don’t even know if enough people would like your page.
What’s important is you keep showing content out there to the extent that some people would engage with it. Some people might like it enough, that they would like your page. When enough time passes, you should be able to see certain patterns. You should be able to see which pieces of content your most successful posts are.
You publish this type of content more often to see if you can maintain your engagement level. If that’s the case, then find more of the same type of content, come up with your own version, and increase your engagement levels.
This will also enable you to get more likes to your page. How? Since you know what type of content popular and what kind of themes and topics is keep coming up, you can target the interests of your average user and drive traffic using Facebook’s lookalike audience feature. Engagement is the linchpin of successful content.
Don’t just focus on getting likes though. You should scale up your engagement types and intensity. Focus first on likes. Once you achieve a high enough level, encourage your readers to post comments. Keep running experiments.
Once you get them to post lots of comments, go to the next level and encourage them to share. Make no mistake, user engagement is no different than traffic-you must optimize it.
You must scale it up. You have to fine tune is to it eventually leads to your goal: conversions. This is the part of the process that produces money in your bank account. This is where things get real.
Pick Winning Curated Content for Facebook Page Marketing
As I mentioned previously, one of the best ways to build up your Lawn and Landscape business Facebook page is to not come up with original content. At least, not in the beginning. You should look at your competitors’ Facebook pages and find their very best content.
You should then publish these pieces of content on your page and study your statistics very carefully. Which of your posts gets shared the most? Which ones get commented on the most? Which ones get liked the most?
Once you’re able to figure out the specific pieces of content that get the most engagement, you should be able to see a larger pattern. You should be able to see that certain pieces of content simply draw a lot more attention. They engage your users more.
Your job then is to pick out these winning pieces of content. You look for related or similar types of content and publish those on your site. Eventually, you come up with your own version.
If you did it right, your engagement level will be the same as the materials produced by third party publishers. That’s how you will know that you’re doing this right.
How To Pick The Best Content For Lawn Care Marketing
Now it’s one thing to say that you’re going to pick the best content your competitors have, it’s another to actually do it the right way. You see, the big danger here is you’re going to be using your opinion as to what “the best content” means.
I’m telling you, it’s not about you. People don’t care about what you like or don’t like. What they care about is what they like. It’s all about them. So, how do you use this as a winning strategy?
It’s actually very simple. You look at your competitors’ Facebook pages and scan through their posts. Which of their posts is the most popular? Which of their posts gets shared a lot, get the most likes, or get the most comments?
Pull the link for those posts and post those on your website. See if you get the same level of engagement. If you do this enough time with many different competitors’ contents, certain patterns emerge.
You would quickly realize that the audience you’ve built up, up to this point, are more likely to engage with certain types of content than others. You figure out what works, and you ditch everything else. That’s right. You forget about them, you focus on the stuff that works, and then you scale them up.
You publish more of it and eventually, you come up with your own version. That’s how you play the game. It’s not a question of hunches or guesses. You must look at objective indications of popularity such as page likes, comments, shares, and other types of engagement.
I hope you see how this works. If you do this right, you will be able to put up a compelling Facebook page that can lead to conversions later.
Reverse Engineer Success
A lot of people who try their hand at Facebook marketing are quick to say that it’s a failure and that it doesn’t really work.
The good news is you don’t have to be one of those people. They struggle because they tried to figure out Facebook from scratch. They basically tried to learn Facebook on their own and they ended up spending too much money while getting very little results and eventually, failing.
You don’t have to do that. There is an alternative path for you. There is an easy way to achieve success on Facebook. How? Reverse engineering. To put it simply, you figure out what your competitors are doing, and you learn important lessons from the way they run their Facebook pages, as well as the content that they share so you can achieve better results. Here’s how you do it.
Find And Like Your Competitors’ Pages And Groups
The first thing that you need to do is get a massive list of your competitors. Find them on Facebook and join them. Of course, you’re going to use an individual account for this.
You’re not going to use an account that is somehow, someway linked to your fan page. You’re going to have to do this incognito. Find as many of their pages as possible and like them. Find all their groups and join those.
Sit Back And Pay Attention To Their Content
Once you’ve joined all these places, sit back and pay attention to the content they’re receiving. You should be able to see some patterns. You should be able to connect the dots.
You would notice that nine times out of ten, they share the same type of content. Maybe this content talks about a common theme. Maybe it focuses on certain common topics. Whatever the case may be, the same stuff crops up again and again. Pay attention to that pattern. If everyone is talking about wild violets in their lawn or Poa Annua everywhere, give them the information they need on that topic.
Analyze Their Most Engaged Users
Now that you have a clear idea of the type of content your competitors keep talking about, the next step is to look at the users that always keep commenting. Pay attention to the users that keep liking and keep sharing.
What are their interests? Do they share common interests? You’d be surprised as to what you will find because you will notice that the most engaged people,
seemingly different as they are, share a handful of common interests. That is a very important clue. In fact, that clue can make you a lot of money.
How To Take Advantage Of Reverse Engineered Consumer Intelligence Information Using Free Promotions
Use the following free promotions to take advantage of the information you got through reverse engineering. First, you can post similar content. When you do this, your engagement levels go up because you are sharing the content that you know your target audience members would be more likely to engage with.
Second, look at your content patterns and figure out your most popular content. Once you’ve identified this popular content, share similar types of content. This enables you to increase the engagement level of your page, pretty much uniformly.
This doesn’t happen overnight, but with enough attention to detail, this will happen. You just scale up the amount of very popular content that you’re already sharing.
You then republish the same type of content over an extended period, so you can reach more people as more and more of your audience members engage with your content at a higher level.
How to leverage this information with paid ad campaigns
If you’re paying for your ads, you use your audience insights to get clues as to how to target new eyeballs for your direct ad links or your page posts. Make sure that they share common interests with your competitors’ users.
Also, when you profile the most engaged users that your competitors have, you should use the same common set of interests when targeting your ads. This can increase your click through rate and ultimately, your conversion.
Conclusion
Each time the internet changes, businesses need to change, too or else they won't get the sales they want.
Now, to find success with sites like Facebook, a business needs to think about the very elements that make the site special and unique. The site is a place for people to socialize and participate in communities. If the business wants to sell their product or service, they need to build a community around it. People come to learn, so teach them about their lawn, landscape, garden, and everything related.
One huge advantage to using Facebook for lawn or landscape business is that you have access to the profiles and information for a lot of users. For a business owner, this will help you target the demographics of those who will be interested in your product or service.
Facebook Is Growing
Unlike some social sites, Facebook embraces the idea that people can use their site to build their businesses. The founder and developers are devoted to providing a positive user experience for everyone on the site, business owners included.
Facebook is the largest social networking and Web 2.0 sites out there right now, and it just keeps growing. It started out as a site primarily for college students and has grown into a world-wide phenomenon. If you follow this guide and use some of the other free trainings out there, Facebook can be a huge boost to your lawn care business. Even if you stick with all the free pages, groups, and other tools, it can skyrocket your business.