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The landscaping industry contributes over $221.89 billion in sales revenue and provides over 1.5 million jobs to US citizens. And on average landscaping companies spend 5.6% of their total sales on marketing strategies to influence demand for their services.
Growing your landscape business can be a hard nut to crack, especially if you don't have a proper landscaping marketing strategy. There are many landscape marketing ideas that you can incorporate into your digital marketing strategy to attract potential customers. But let's look at a holistic approach.
Implement a Branding Strategy
The first step to attracting more landscaping customers is building a professional and refreshing brand.
A branding strategy encompasses your company name, logo, color scheme, tone, and messaging. It's essentially the personality of your brand if it was a person.
Oftentimes, new business owners will start by selecting a name. But thinking about the personality of the company you want to own and the impression you want to leave on customers can help drive your name.
Ideally, you pick a company name that differentiates your business from competitors, leads to positive customer perception, and reinforces its positioning.
Once you've selected a personality, you need to design a clean, simple, but modern business logo that follows the best logo design practices. Color choice is very important here. See how the color changes the personality of these brand examples:
By this point, you probably have some ideas of what your brand messaging is going to be. But it's good practice to have this formally documented and shared with your employees or any freelancers helping you with the following marketing tactics.
Then go nuts! Brand all the company's marketing materials like crew t-shirts, equipment, and trucks to imprint your company's name and message in your future customers' minds.
Create a Lead Generating Landscaping Website
For your business to take off, you then need a digital platform where prospective customers can easily find you. A user-friendly and interactive website is essential to build trust and reassure your potential clients that you're a landscaping professional.
Here is what you need to do to ensure that your landscaping website is a lead generation machine:
Provide your contact information, including your business phone number
Include concise information about your services
Offer an easy navigation tool for potential customers to request a quote
Publish educational and high-quality visual and written blog content
Ensure that your landscaping website is search engine optimized
Studies show that 85 percent of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase. During their initial visit to a website, nearly half of potential clients are searching for a service, 26 percent are comparing prices, and 11 percent are looking for business details like hours, location, and contact information.
At a minimum, you need to ensure your website makes each of these types of information available. You're crushing it if you have photos and videos available to showcase your products and an online booking tool.
Leverage Social Media Advertising
Digital ads are one of the most effective marketing tactics that you can use to reach your targeted audience. Social media ads allow you to create a highly targeted audience based on their location, demographics, and interests.
If you've completed the first step of generating compelling brand messaging, you have 75 percent of what you need to start running social media ads. Then if you have photos and videos already created for your website, you're 95 percent done. If you're a new business starting out and don't have many examples photos yet, you can use stock imagery instead.
When targeting residential clients, I recommend advertising platforms like Instagram and Facebook. You can create and manage ads for both accounts in the Facebook Ads Manager.
When targeting commercial clients, I recommend advertising on LinkedIn. Their audience targeting allows you to specify by company size and job title. This allows you to target your ad to the typical job titles that would make decisions regarding hiring landscaping professionals.
Then you just need to create the ads with Facebook Ads Manager or LinkedIn Campaign Manager. We recommend you create ads specific to each service you offer, i.e. landscape design, landscape maintenance, hardscape installation, etc.
For most platforms, you start by choosing your goal for your ad. You may have different objectives for each service. Options include awareness, website traffic, lead generation, etc.
Then you upload your photo or video and add in the brand messaging. Here you can again use customized messaging and graphics based on the service you're advertising.
Then set your budget, target audience, and ad schedule. We recommend no less than $5/day per ad. Run the campaigns for at least a month to have enough data to evaluate their performance.
Nurture Leads with Email Marketing
Imagine you've had 25 people see your ad on social media and fill out a lead generation form. Or perhaps they visited your website from a social media ad and then submitted a contact form on your homepage.
Email marketing is the next tactic you can utilize to get more landscaping customers to flock to your business. And better yet, you can even use email automation tools to make this step effortless.
First, you need to have an automated email thanking potential clients for their interest in your services. This can be generic and mention that you will follow up on the next business day or within one business day. Most users expect an email or response to a form submission within 24 hours. So this buys you time if they happen to submit a message on the weekend or while you're busy.
Then follow up with a customized email addressing any comments they may have left in your contact form or as a reply to the thank you email.
Follow these three steps to guarantee your email marketing strategy is effective.
Profile your contact list according to your target audiences' interests. Have a sequence of emails for people who clicked on your landscape maintenance ads that are different from your hardscape installation ads.
Don't go straight for the hard sell. Use your automated emails to provide value or additional education about your services and work. Link to any of those educational and high-quality visuals or blog content you've added to your website already. Remember, a potential customer likely needs to visit your website several times before they're ready to purchase from you.
Stick to a regular email cadence. Email is about building relationships and can take time. Don't rush the sale either. Use the 3:1 ratio. Send three value-building emails to one promotional email.
Ask for Customer Reviews Online
Nearly 90% of homeowners go through online reviews before spending their money on landscaping services. And 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. But more on those personal recommendations later.
As soon as you have customers, you need to create and claim your business profile on popular review websites like Yelp, Google Business Profile, Angie's List, or HomeAdvisor. Then ask your satisfied customers to leave reviews to build positive customer relations for your landscape business.
There are many ways to ask customers for reviews throughout your business communication, such as:
Via email (directly and/or via email signature)
In person when you've completed the job
Over the phone (or via text)
Through your website (via a reviews page)
Via social media (direct message or post to all followers)
On receipts/invoices
You'd be surprised how willing customers are to write a review for your small business. A BrightLocal study showed that 76% of those who are asked to leave reviews go on to do so. You just have to ask!
Plus there are full circle benefits to search engine optimization if your Google Business Profile has quality reviews.
Create a Landscaping Referral Program
Similar to requesting reviews, you can ask for referrals. Even better, you can create a referral program that generates many qualifying leads at a low cost and facilitate word-of-mouth advertising.
Build an effective landscaping referral program by offering your existing clients incentives to vouch for your business to their friends and family. In addition, give discounts to your current customers for every client they refer. And reward those new clients on the first landscaping service they purchase too.
The Best Way to Get Landscaping Customers
Your landscape business needs an effective marketing strategy to attract more customers and maximize profits. This sample marketing strategy outlined above is tested and proven to work in small and large landscaping businesses successfully.
Even so, implementing all these strategies on your own can be an uphill task, especially if you're not a marketing expert. Our seasoned marketing consultants can analyze your competition and establish a custom marketing plan and budget to help you grow your business. Schedule a call with us today!
