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Episode 90 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why entrepreneurs Richard Branson and Steve Jobs focus on customer relationships to make peoples lives better.
I recently listened to an interview with Richard Branson about his journey to becoming a self-made billionaire. He admits to having lost count of exactly how many companies his Virgin brand owns, though he s sure its somewhere north of 200.
When asked where he gets his inspiration for starting or buying into a business, Branson gave this.
A business is an idea that makes people’s lives better. ~ Richard Branson
That mindset of putting customers first is where most entrepreneurs start. It s what powers early innovation. But over time the energy of that focusing vision begins to lose its spark as the business seeks to scale customer relationships.
Start with The Customer Experience and Work Backward In a recent article published by Google, a CMO made this statement.
People don t just want a product to buy, they want an idea to buy into. ~ Unilever CMO Keith Weed
That idea is the brand and customer experience that it represents. And that brand experience is bigger than any product because there are potentially millions of possibilities that it can become.
How do you make experiences that unlock possibilities for making people s lives better?
You have to start with the customer experience and work backward. What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? If mistakes are made it means decisions are being made, and that s good. Support customers and learn from these mistakes. Some will be unhappy but it s a proven way of getting there. ~ Steve Jobs
In business, the debate is whether customers have a relationship with products or the business. Many would say that Apple s strength is its products. However, in addition to product innovation, Apple revolutionized retail by changing how people buy.
Did you know that Apple s sales per square foot of retail space are more than double that of any other retailer?
That intentional sales intimacy makes Apple better for its customers by understanding how its customers like to buy.
Fall in Love with Personas That Become Customers Enterprises like Apple love to accumulate data about customer experiences. Your company can too by mining the data from its customers, and one of the best ways to do this is having one-to-one conversations that generate meaningful information that doesn t necessarily fit into a checkbox.
This is how audience or buyer personas are made.
According to the Buyer Persona Institute, Many buyers give up because nobody is really helping them. This is the big opportunity for any size business that takes the time to explore these five buyer insights to create descriptive buyer personas that get to the heart of what its customers want.
#1. Priority Initiative
Determine the most compelling reasons that buyers decided to invest in your solution and develop strategies that trigger these actions.
#2. Success Factors
The outcomes a buyer persona expects to achieve from a solution like yours, and the risks involved with achieving it, must be clearly understood.
#3. Perceived Barriers
Every industry has its perceived barriers. Use content marketing to remove obstacles by pulling back the curtain and sharing true and relevant stories that resonate with buyers.
#4. Buyer s Journey
Buyers seldom make decisions in isolation. Family, friends, and others influence their decisions. Understanding these influences enables a business to allocate resources to address these needs.
#5. Decision Criteria
What motivates buyers can be a complex process, or a decision based almost entirely on emotion. Decision criteria often surprise companies that are in love with their products and services.
More important is to fall in love with the buyer personas that become customers.
You want to discover what your customers are seeing, thinking, feeling, and doing at each and every touchpoint with your business. Thi

Episode 88 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why recent Facebook News Feed changes are indicators of audience engagement expectations on every platform.
The recent Facebook News Feed updates are more than signals to change how you market on Facebook.
They are indicators of what your audience expects on every platform.
If you speak to live audiences you know people will only wait so long for you to engage them before they start making a path to the door.
Asking for a show of hands, by the way, is not engagement.
That’s the equivalent of a Facebook like, which Facebook has said is no longer relevant. What is? Comments, because comments are deliberate and thoughtful actions, as compared to shares and likes that are passive and less likely to spark audience engagement.
Facebook Zero Teaches What Works The most recent batch Facebook changes that will be rolling out over the coming months have been referred to as Facebook Apocalypse or Facebook Zero. I like Facebook Zero because it’s easier to spell and it reminds us of the reach our content will get if we don’t change our ways — zero.
Mark Zuckerberg announced posts that spark meaningful conversations between people will have a prominent place in your News Feed. This will be measured by both the number and depth of the comments.
It’s necessary to develop a strategy that gets people talking to each other, but without using click bait. For example, if you ask people to comment you are technically baiting them and Facebook is saying they will demote that type of content.
In addition to click bait, actions to minimize or avoid completely are posting content from outside links, such as your blog or other news sources. Facebook s rationale for this about-face is apparently to make room in the News Feed for content people really care about, which surprisingly is not video.
According to Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s Head of News Feed, “Video is primarily a passive experience” because when you are watching it you are not typically talking (engaging) with friends. Interactions between people make memorable experiences whether that experience is Facebook or face-to-face at a live event.
To understand why meaningful conversations are the benchmark for assessing the value of content you only have to consider how algorithms and machine learning drive Facebook s advertising model. Comments are content that makes Facebook increasingly smarter and that makes it more valuable for targeting audiences with Facebook ads.
Here are three ways to make encourage engagement to make your business smarter and better for its customers.
#1. Social Listening Is Good for Business For more than a decade I’ve studied how social media influences business marketing. Social media’s greatest value is giving people a voice that adds context for people that are listening — and the platform or business that is mining that data.
Businesses only need to help their customers feel safe and in control to encourage these conversations. That’s what Facebook and YouTube have recently done. When customers feel truly valued they will open up about the experiences they desire most.
And that’s what businesses want to know.
#2. Collaboration Makes Experiences Better Nobody wants to be sold to but everyone likes to buy. For that to happen you have to give them opportunities to test-drive your product or service because everybody makes decisions in her or her own way.
This is how content marketing moves people to action. It helps them take intermediary steps that guide them along the buyer’s journey with relevant, interactive content.
My landscaping business planned for collaboration with our customers because actively engaging them got them to take ownership. They showed up prepared to get the full value of our expertise and experience because we built a process that showed them how and why that works for them.
When you make customers collaborators the co-creation process always leads

Episode 89 of Landscape Digital Show reveals a content audit plan for closing the gaps in your content marketing process and closing more sales.
We’ve talked about how to perform a content audit in episode 28. This is something every business should begin right now because depending on how long you ve been in business it may take a while to complete.
What should happen next is implementing a content audit plan to make the best use of that content.
Your content is a body of work that attracts everything your business needs to thrive, provided it is put to work in the right places.
The common perception is that content sells. Some of it will but not in the way that many people think. For example, people don t watch one YouTube video and then say, I want to work with this landscaping company.
There are only two types of content, conversion content and intermediary content. Conversion content converts to a sale and intermediary content accomplishes everything that leads up to that.
Your content has to attract the attention of buyers and move them along a prescribed path or journey, taking them all the way to the finish line, a sales conversion.
Unless you are converting 100% of your leads that path or journey is a process that has gaps in it, but don’t worry about that because you can close them by organizing the content from your audit to fix that leaky boat.
Here s how that works.
Organize Your Content by Intent Every piece of content has a job to do and the more specific it is the better.
When companies think about SEO it is because they want to be discovered online, right? So, they seek to rank for keywords and often pay top dollar to make that happen.
The problem is they fail to consider the intent behind those keywords. And this is why they have trouble converting those leads into customers.
Let s say your website ranks for lawn care services. You need to understand the intent of the people searching for those keywords, what they want to know so that your content delivers on that expectation.
This is why you want to study your analytics and test your content.
Think about the decisions buyers have to make throughout their journey to ultimately work with your company. Now organize your content to close the gaps along that journey to keep everything moving silky smoothly.
You can start by breaking your process into three phases, beginning, middle and ending or conversion. Within each phase there are specific needs your content must address, such as the following.
Phase I Attraction
Give people ideas List problems you solve Identify who is not right for you Phase II Engagement
Show how you solve problems Asks for feedback Offer relevant suggestions Phase III Conversion
Profile award-winning projects Explain why investing in quality now pays off later Highlight industry leadership This is how you make your marketing, selling, service and even recruiting better.
You close the gaps in your process by putting a theme or purpose to all of your content so that it can be used where and when it’s needed, whether that is on or offline. Incidentally, these themes should be represented in your content marketing editorial calendar.
Hold Your Content Accountable The value of content is its intent or purpose and you should hold it accountable to that by assigning it a job it can do well.
If the intent of your website it to convert buyers into customers, then you want to focus on putting your best converting content on it.
You will discover your non-converting or intermediary content is probably best distributed with a vehicle like a newsletter that gradually moves people along that buyer s journey.
If you really want to get the most out of your content, especially what you already have now, get it organized so that it can be employed for its best use.
Your business hires the best talent and trains them to keep your customers happy.
Why not take that same approach to getting your content worki

Episode 87 of Landscape Digital Show reveals the recent Facebook News Feed updates and why content with a voice is Facebook newsworthy.
As he has done many times before, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped a bombshell on the Facebook community that sparked exactly what Facebook wants from it’s 2+ billion active users more meaningful conversations on topics that matter to them.
Like every other Facebook update more has gone unsaid than said, and that is probably by design. I agree with Mark Schaefer that Facebook may not be sure about how these changes will play out. But it’s our job as marketers to figure them out.
Here s What We Know #1. This is a major refresh. Facebook wants to steady the Facebook brand by addressing the top user concerns, such as seeing too many ads in our newsfeed and not seeing more from our family and friends.
#2. Person to person interactions will be prioritized. You will see fewer page posts in your feed, but it s not clear if that means fewer ads too.
#3. Posts that earn lots of meaningful comments will be moved up in the newsfeed. Longer, more thoughtful replies to posts will give content an even greater boost.
#4. Content that earns passive engagement will rank lower. Content that is viewed or read but receives few comments will rank below content that earns active engagement.
#5. Engagement-bait content will be demoted. This includes click-bait, vote-bait, and comment-bait. You will have to earn engagement by being an authentic and original voice.
In interviews following the first announcement, Facebook acknowledged the challenges it faces, including fake news, accountability to shareholders, and apparently, it s role in society for contributing to a greater good.
Putting people first seems to be Facebook s strategy for making everything happen. Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement states, Research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long-term measures of happiness and health.
This is great news for Facebook users, but how about Facebook marketers?
People Before Public Content In a massively popular Facebook live video, Michael Stelzner, CEO of Social Media Examiner calls this statement from Adam Mosseri, Facebook s Head of News Feed the money shot.
“There will be less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.” ~ Adam Mosseri
This is the heart of the uproar from businesses that have pumped millions of dollars into Facebook ads to target Facebook users. Less publisher and business content clean up our personal news feeds, but since most of us use Facebook to build our business or personal brands, we may have to reconsider our priorities.
It’s possible Facebook pages are dead for most of us, but weren t they already? Research indicates Facebook organic reach (the people you reach for free) has declined from 26% in 2011 to close to 1% today.
This Facebook update may be the wake-up call small businesses needed. What are Facebook marketers planning to do about this? My informal survey from Facebook comments indicates the following.
#1. Run more ads. Facebook has not been clear about how ads will be affected, so many are planning to move ahead with business as usual.
#2. Reallocate resources to LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and other channels. All of these social platforms can and will continue to change. It makes sense to spread out resources to unlock new opportunities and minimize risk.
#3. Go all in on live video. Many businesses are taking this comment from Mark Zuckerberg to heart: We’ve seen people interact way more around live videos than regular ones.
#4. Consider Facebook groups.  Here s another quote from Zuckerberg’s announcement: The first changes you ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family, and groups.
The one strategy I ve

Episode 86 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how the web runs on writing and why the right words, voice, and tone will make your marketing better too 
When you consider how much effort a business invests in getting discovered on the web, it’s surprising that few dig deep enough to understand the essential components responsible for making that happen.
People use words to search the web.
They may be spoken or typed, but they are words nonetheless. If they happen to be the right words, and they probably are if your ideal buyers are using them, then you need to develop an intimate relationship with those words and discover how to use them in your writing, videos and other content.
Of course, there’s more to writing for the web than just plugging in keywords. If you want to win with Google you want to aim for the best human experience possible for your target audience.
This is why the best copywriters are handsomely compensated for their work. People can tell. They may not know why they know, they just know.
Writing copy is seldom easy, but when it works it becomes your superpower.  You can achieve that goal by respecting your brand story and finding that signature voice that best communicates it.
Hold on, there s one more detail that trips up many marketers. Every piece of communication must have the right tone for the platform and the audience it is targeting. That awareness is key.
Words Tell a Story The words your business uses to tell its story in many ways is the story because words reveal a great deal about who we are and our communication preferences.
For example, whether your marketing copy says landscaper or landscape company matters to your audience just as much as if it says y’all or you guys. What s right is what connects with your audience.
The right words are like magnets that attract customers. That’s why your most valued keywords should be in the headlines of your content, as well as the subheadings and the body content. The same is true for your social media postings.
In addition to understanding how to use keywords to optimize your content, always take a step back to study the promise of your words, that is, the story they tell.
~ Does your headline make a promise that matters to your audience?
~ Does the copy that follows deliver on that promise?
~ Are there examples and anecdotes that make the story interesting?
~ Is there a call to action to bring that audience closer?
~ Does your company have people prepped and available to guide those relationships?
Once again, people can tell. They intuitively know if there is a real person behind a social media posting. And they get a sense of his or her age, background, and personality.
~ What is said when your business telephone is answered?
~ How does your company reply to emails?
~ How about angry emails from unhappy customers?
~ Or social media comments from engaged customers that are ready to do more?
The holy grail of web copywriting is to sell people before they call your office or walk into your business, but there are many other touchpoints along their journey where words can make or break the deal.
All of it tells a story, and that story should be part of a grand plan.
Words are The Voice of The Business SEO attracts attention with words. Voice makes that communication human by describing who you are as a company, your core values and how you go about helping customers.
Think of your voice like fashion style. Does your style say you are light-hearted or all business? You certainly want to be perceived as professional, but it s hard to deny the fact that most people want to work with companies that make the experience enjoyable.
Make a list of words that express your business culture and style. They will help you discover your writing voice. It may include words like these.
Smart Friendly Innovative Established Easy Certified Discounted Guaranteed Words Also Set the Tone or Feeling One of the tricky things about writi

Episode 85 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how buyer personas are used to create laser-focused marketing that connects a business with its ideal customers.
This is our final Landscape Digital Show episode of the 2017 calendar year and the first in which I interview a subject matter expert – but don’t worry, this is far from my 1st expert interview.
This content is an update of the 51st episode of This Old New Business podcast that was previously published at JeffKorhan.com. You can expect more expert guest interviews in the future right here at Landscape Digital Show.
We have discussed buyer personas a great deal on this show. Now you can take a deep dive into how they work to create laser-focused marketing with Adele Revella, the CEO, and founder of The Buyer Persona Institute.
Adele is also the author of Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business. She offers a compelling strategy for marketers seeking the confidence to say: This is what really matters to our buyers. So here s the plan.
What Do Your Buyers Really Want to Know? Adele Revella contends that marketers and companies, in general, are too isolated from what their buyers really think about as they are going through the customer experience.
She suggests interviewing buyers one-on-one to gain insights from their stories that can become case studies.

5 Rings of Buying Insight Using The Five Rings of Buying Insight, Adele Revella lays out a predictable structure for creating experience-driven marketing that helps buyers that often feel lost. She says:
 Many buyers give up because nobody is really helping them. This is the big opportunity. ~ Adele Revella
Insight 1 – Priority Initiative Determine the most compelling reasons that a buyer decides to invest in your solutions and develop strategies that trigger those actions.
Insight 2 – Success Factors The results a buyer expects to achieve from your business and the risks involved with achieving it must be clearly understood.
Insight 3 – Perceived Barriers Every industry has its perceived barriers. Using content marketing to remove obstacles often involves pulling back the curtain and sharing true and relevant stories that resonate with buyers.
Insight 4 – Buyer’s Journey Buyers seldom make decisions in isolation. Family, friends, and others influence their decisions. Understanding these influences enables a business to allocate resources to address those relevant needs.
Insight 5 – Decision Criteria What motivates buyers can be a complex process, or a decision based almost entirely on emotion.
Decision criteria often surprise companies that are in love with their products and services. More important is to fall in love with the buyer personas that become your customers.
Show Notes Learn more about Adele’s work with buyer personas at Buyer Persona Institute Connect with Adele on Twitter at @buyerpersona The buyer persona is not the ideal customer. Listen in to learn more. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action This is your last chance to take action before we close this special offer.
If you are a landscaping industry professional in the United States or Canada, I m offering a limited number of free 30-minute telephone consultations. You can use this link to schedule that call.
You’ll get a lot of ideas and maybe we’ll decide to work together or not. There’s no risk – only upside potential.



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