Marketing for planning, land and development businesses
Planning and land work is high-value, technically dense and hard to buy. The marketing problem is almost never awareness — it is that the offer has no shape, so the prospect cannot tell what they are buying, what it costs, or whether their site even qualifies.
How do you market a planning or land development consultancy?
Turn technical judgement into a product: a named score, check or report the prospect can buy without a meeting. Publish a free version to capture intent, price the paid tier against the value of the decision, and structure the site so each policy question you answer earns its own search entry.
At a glance
- Sector
- Planning and development
- Featured work
- Logical Planning, Part 1 Claims, The 1954 Act
- Services used
- Proposition and positioning, Pricing and offer design, SEO and content architecture, Enquiry funnel and qualification
- Based
- Cheshire, working with clients across the UK
What keeps blocking growth in planning and development
Three problems recur in almost every engagement in this sector. None of them are solved by spending more.
Expertise with no product shape
The knowledge is real and the fee potential is high, but there is nothing to buy short of a bespoke engagement. Every enquiry becomes a scoping conversation, most of which never convert.
Nobody can self-qualify
Prospects do not know whether their site, claim or lease is worth pursuing, so they either do not enquire or they enquire when they should not. Both outcomes waste the practice's most expensive hours.
Policy questions are search demand
The statutory and policy questions clients ask in meetings are being typed into Google and asked of ChatGPT every day. Answered properly on the page, they become the acquisition channel.
The services this sector actually needs
Each link goes to the service page that explains the scope, the deliverables and how it is priced.
Proposition and positioning
Decide what the business claims and who it claims it for, before a penny goes into a channel.
Pricing and offer design
Build the ladder from free to paid so the first sale is easy and the second is bigger.
SEO and content architecture
Structure the site around how people actually search, not how the business is organised.
Enquiry funnel and qualification
Replace the contact form with checks and calculators that qualify before anyone speaks.
Featured planning and development engagements
What I was asked to do, what I decided, and what shipped. Every link goes to the client's live site.
Logical Planning
3-stepfree search to subscription ladder
logical-planning.com- The situation
- A planning-data product with genuinely useful output — a Planning Potential Score for any UK site — and no commercial story. Landowners, developers and agents all wanted different things from it, and the pricing model had not been decided.
- What I did
- Named one primary audience and one job to be done, rewrote the proposition around 'what could my land be worth', then built the acquisition path: a free first search, a £29 single Site Check and a monthly subscription for repeat users, with search content mapped to how people actually ask about planning potential.
- What shipped
- Launched with a clear ladder from free search to subscription, and a content structure that targets planning, Green Belt, change-of-use and permitted development questions rather than competing on the word 'planning consultant'.
“We had the data and the technology. What we did not have was a way of explaining it that made someone reach for their card. Sam turned it into an offer, decided the pricing with us and built the route people take to get there.”
Part 1 Claims
<1 mineligibility check replaces the contact form
part1claims.com- The situation
- Part 1 compensation under the Land Compensation Act 1973 is a real entitlement almost nobody knows exists. There was no demand to capture — it had to be created from people searching about noise, new roads and falling property values.
- What I did
- Built the proposition around the two objections that stop people enquiring: cost and disruption. 'No win, no fee' and 'you keep your home' lead the page. Then a one-minute eligibility check and a valuation estimator replace the contact form, so a visitor self-qualifies before anyone speaks to them.
- What shipped
- A launch site that converts unaware, high-intent search traffic into qualified claim enquiries, with the technical detail — Ryde's Scale, physical factors, the claim window — carried by supporting pages instead of the homepage.
“Nobody wakes up looking for Part 1 compensation, so the whole thing hinged on explaining it in plain English and proving there was no risk. The eligibility check does the qualifying for us — the enquiries that reach me are worth having.”
The 1954 Act
17statutory provisions built for citation
1954act.com- The situation
- Lease renewal questions are increasingly answered inside ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews rather than on a law firm's site. The opportunity was to be the source those answers quote, not another blog competing for clicks.
- What I did
- Structured the whole of Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 as a searchable reference — one page per provision, each with a plain-English explanation tied back to the section it comes from — plus an assistant that answers lease-specific questions. Every page is written to be quotable in a single passage.
- What shipped
- A reference asset covering the provisions that decide a renewal, built for citation by answer engines and used as the credibility anchor for the surveying practice behind it.
“The brief was unusual: build something the AI tools would rather quote than paraphrase. It now gets referenced in answers about section 25 notices and renewal deadlines, which brings us the enquiries a normal blog never would.”
Planning and development: common questions
Other sectors I work in
The sequence is the same everywhere, but the pattern that blocks growth is not. Each hub sets out the recurring problem in that sector, what I do about it, and which engagements prove it.
Working in planning and development? Start with the diagnosis.
Book a one-hour discovery call. I will tell you which of these problems yours actually is — proposition, pricing, demand or visibility — before you spend anything.