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Marketing Tips For Landscapers To Reach New Clients

Placing an ad in the newspaper isn’t nearly enough for landscape marketing. Print ads might even give you the least return on your investment due to the digital age. If you add in social media marketing, there are many different and more effective ways landscapers can get in front of their clients. 

Investing in marketing is one of the best ways to scale your business. The problem is, many small landscaping companies don’t have a direct marketing team and have to handle the load of marketing on their own. That can be very time-consuming, especially if the owner is in the field working. 

With over 636,000 landscaping businesses in the United States in 2022, which was an increase from 2021 by 5.5%, there is plenty of competition. So, you need to stand out in your marketing efforts and offer value to your prospective clients to get them to call you or turn them into leads. 

Let’s look at some marketing strategies and tactics to help you reach new clients. 

Identify Who Your Ideal Clients Are

Before you start marketing, you need to know who you are marketing to. While it may seem like everyone with a home and yard could be your client for landscaping maintenance like lawn mowing, the reality is, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not every homeowner wants landscaping service, and truthfully, not every homeowner can afford landscaping services.

When starting your marketing, you need to define your personas. Who are your ideal clients– the ones that will eventually turn from leads in your sales funnel into clients that sign maintenance contracts or get landscaping construction project work completed? 

Some of the ways to identify your personas could be geographical location, such as the newer housing developments, or higher-priced homes in your business’s location. Affluent homeowners are more likely to buy landscaping services. 

Look at your past sales and find trends in the types of people have sold to. You may notice a persona that leads you to more success than others. You can also check your sales funnel to see where deals were lost and change your marketing technique for those personas.

This step is important because it will allow you to differentiate your message for different personas that will resonate with them. For example, don’t market images to smaller homeowners of large sprawling landscapes that don’t fit their own home style. A more tailored message will lead to great results. 

Build a Landscaping Website, Portfolio, and Blog

Having your own website should be on the top of every landscaper’s list of marketing must-haves. Websites need to be functional, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to navigate so your customers can find the information they need. It’s also where you should have plenty of portfolio images of the work you have done in the past. Prospective customers are going to look, now more than ever.

Today’s society spends more time on the Internet browsing websites before making decisions. They are looking for information, quotes, pictures, ideas, reviews, and referrals before contacting your company. Your website can be all that and the place to drive traffic. You can’t expect every person to just pick up the phone and ask for service. A website is one of the first touches you can make with prospects, eventually leading them into your sales cycle.

A blog is a great way to attract people, as the content created can answer questions people are searching for. By showcasing your knowledge, you build trust with prospective customers, while also ranking highly on Google search, as how-to questions and answers are most often some of the highest searched terms.

Your website can also be the quick link you send to someone to have them gain more information. Plaster your site on trucks, signage, or even buy smaller print ads with just the website address. 

Create Free Educational Materials for Prospective Clients

Educational material is a great way to lend credibility to your business, and also a great way to get someone’s contact information. Providing downloadable resources to prospective clients, such as checklists and guides, gives prospective clients knowledge. In exchange, it’s normal to ask for emails and even phone numbers so you can follow up, either through email campaigns, direct mailing, or phone calls.

Landscapers can provide downloadable checklists around topics such as: steps needed to get their yard ready for the spring season, how to maintain their gardens throughout the year, and even step-by-step guides for simple landscape project work. 

While it may seem like you are giving away your services for free, by collecting information from your customers, you can now target them with emails about the checklist or guide they downloaded. For example, if they downloaded your spring checklist, you can send them emails about your spring maintenance services. They have a clear desire to know how to do it themselves and maybe more willing to purchase services once they see what work goes into each task. 

If you establish email campaigns, these downloads feed email campaigns with new prospects that you can nurture. Often just a single piece of content is not enough to convert a prospect into a customer. So, you may need to send multiple follow-up emails around educational content, services, and even social proof such as videos and testimonials to finally get the prospect calling for service.

Branding Yourself to Become a Known Brand in Your Community

Do your company trucks and trailers have your logo, phone number, and website on them? Do you place yard signs when you are working on a job to let people know that the house got your service? Are you crews wearing branded gear when they mow lawns?

Branding is one of the most important elements of any marketing strategy because it makes people remember you. The more times they see your brand, the more they grow to trust it, and remember it when they themselves want landscaping completed.

Landscapers with large trailers should utilize the space as a moving billboard, putting plenty of information, including the services you perform on the trailer. Some landscapers even use photos and make the trailer eye-catching so as to draw the attention of passing motorists.

Your work is a marketing tool…

These simple techniques can often be the easiest marketing tactics, but many landscapers forget to put their brands on everything. Add signs to lawns you have worked on, and then blanket nearby houses with door hangers to let them know you were in the area. It’s simple, cost-effective, and won’t take crews much time to deliver to a few houses around the neighborhood. 

Marketing your landscaping business creates opportunity

By putting effort into your marketing, you’ll see your sales funnel grow with fresh prospective clients that you can contact. With marketing today, long-term strategies like email campaigns and websites are highly effective and bring prospects into the sales funnel. It’s about nurturing your leads and creating an opportunity for a sale.