2 min read
How to make before-and-after posts without hiring a photographer
One habit on day one, one set at the end, and a phone. That is the whole method.
Design and build · Hardscape · Outdoor living
You build the most photogenic work in the trades.
A patio, a retaining wall, a planting scheme at the end of its first season: this is work that photographs better than anything else a contractor does, done by companies that mostly post nothing at all.
From the job
A photo your crew
already uploaded
Instagram
Kitchen, Manalapan
Cabinets in, tile Thursday.
Lic. #13VH00000000
How it works, drawn. Posts from real customer jobs go here once they are cleared for use.
The install is a story
Excavation to first summer.
A hardscape job has a better arc than a kitchen: the yard is a mess, then it is a shape, then it is a place people sit. And it keeps going after you leave, which is the part almost nobody uses. A planting photographed again in July is proof that what you install actually establishes.
The mess is the drama
Excavation photographs make the finished patio mean something.
Come back in a season
The same bed in June is a post nobody else in your market is making.
Neighbors are the audience
Outdoor work is visible from the street, and the tagging happens on its own.
Where the calls come from
Your Google Business Profile is doing the deciding.
Landscape work is seasonal and searched seasonally, and the profile is what catches the search. Posting through the season keeps it current at the moment demand arrives, rather than the week you remember it in March.
The argument that is not aesthetic
Drainage, water and the parts a homeowner is nervous about.
Half of what a landscape contractor is actually being hired to solve is water: where it goes, what it does to a foundation, what a municipality allows. Posts that show that work being done properly reach a different buyer from the one shopping for a patio, and they reach one who is comparing fewer companies.
Written for Landscapers and hardscapers
Read before you decide
3 min read
You already take the photos. Here's how remodelers turn them into marketing.
The hardest problem in contractor marketing is getting content out of the field. If your crew uploads to JobTread, you have already solved it.
Terms
Worth knowing
- Before-and-after post
- A pair of photographs of the same space, taken from the same position before work started and after it finished.
- Project story arc
- A sequence of posts that follows one job from demolition to reveal, published over the weeks the work actually takes.
- AI chatbot
- A chat window on your website answering visitors' questions with an AI model, usually with the goal of capturing a name and number.
- AI Overviews
- The AI-written answer Google shows above the ordinary search results, assembled from pages it has crawled and frequently citing a handful of them.
- AI photo tagging
- Software that looks at job site photographs and labels them automatically — by phase, trade, room, condition or damage — so they can be found later without anybody sorting them.
- AI receptionist
- Software that answers your phone in a synthetic voice, works out what the caller wants, and books, qualifies or routes the call without a person on the line.
Questions
The ones we get asked
We do maintenance as well as design-build. Which does this help?
Design-build, mostly. Maintenance is won on route density and price, and we would rather say so than sell you something that will not move it.
Our season is five months long.
Then the off-season is when the profile goes stale and the spring search finds somebody else. Posting through winter is cheap and it is what makes March work.
Do you post plant lists and specifications?
If you want. Most of the value is in the photographs, but a caption that names what was planted and why is the kind of thing that gets shared between neighbors.
Not what you do?
The other business types we write for
Two minutes on the phone is enough to know.
Tell us what you build and where. We will tell you what we would post, and what it would cost.
By location
Where we work
What marketing for Landscapers looks like in each area we cover.