By Taylor Tuomie
Introduction
In the first two of our three part blog series on the 2016 Green Industry Benchmark Report, we covered the importance of hiring, training, and goal setting.
As a whole, the green industry is still struggling to find and retain quality employees. But there are a few things that we can learn from the businesses who don’t have trouble with hiring and keeping employees on board. One of the best things that you can do is to get in touch with local high schools, trade schools and colleges to find quality employees. And in order to keep those employees on, you need to continue on with training and development.
In our second post, we covered the importance of goal-setting. Green industry businesses who set both short term and long term goals are more prone to seeing higher growth. In part 3 of this blog series, we’ll cover the importance of marketing and what strategies businesses should be using.
Part 3 - Marketing and Profit
“Because the typical green industry business isn’t particularly large, they usually aren’t using the most sophisticated sales and marketing tactics to generate new sales. Simple word of mouth continues to drive revenue growth in the average green industry business.”
High performing businesses
Despite word of mouth continuing to be the biggest lead generation method, there is a shift. This year, we saw that the high performing green industry businesses were 10% more likely to have a website, to have a social media strategy, and to have a search engine optimization strategy. And the growth that they see is in excess of 20% year-over-year.
Websites
Having a website seems like a very basic thing to have in place for a business in 2016, however there are still those who don’t have one. Other than customer referrals, which is still the most popular form of lead generation, a website is the biggest source of creating leads and sales.
Along with having a website, it is also important to update it often. In this year’s report, we found that 63% of green industry businesses have updated their website in the past year.
Social Media Strategy
Along with having a website, a social media strategy is also indicative of high growth. Those that have a social media strategy in place tend to see higher growth. Instead of going into depth on this point, we figured we can give you a few resources to help create or strengthen your social media strategy. Here are a few helpful links.
- 3 Twitter Tips for your Field Service Business - This blog post details how you should be using Twitter. Keep your Tweets local, show who you are and keep a good focus.
- 5 Social Media Tips for you Green Industry Business - These tips will help you learn what your brand is, how to research what your prospects want and how to focus on quality.
- How to Turn your Green Industry Business into a Social Media Rock Star - In this eBook, we cover a large array of topics, but most importantly, how to increase your interaction with your audience.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization might seem intimidating to some people. And that is understandable because it can be very complex. Prior to a few years ago, only people who were very well versed in coding could build their own website. If you needed a website, you likely had to pay someone else to build it.
Now, there are a quite a few website building platforms that you can use that can help pretty much anyone create a website. But what do you do once it is created? Just because you have something on the web doesn’t mean that it will get found.
A local SEO strategy is the best way to ensure that you get found by people who are actually potential buyers of your services. For green industry businesses, it isn’t enough to just have a website, you need to be optimizing a few key things in order to help search engines and your customers find you.
We put together an eBook recently on this topic. We went in depth on how you can optimize your green industry website. Most of them are pretty easy to do as well. Check it out, Local SEO for Green Industry Businesses.
You can check out the Benchmark Report for yourself! Click below to download it now!
