Studies conducted by Ibisworld.com show that the market size of the landscape services industry was valued at $105.1 billion in 2021 with a growth rate of 4.9 percent from 2020.
While research group Statista has reported that 21% of garden and plant sales and services are sought out online. This equates to a market opportunity of over 20 billion dollars accessible only by digital marketing of some form.
Marketing your landscaping company online has never been more relevant.
What is landscape marketing?
Marketing is the best way to increase the sales of your landscape company. In this article, we look at battle-tested marketing strategies that help you implement advertising techniques, generate leads, and find new business.
And while marketing for your landscape business is not unlike marketing for any other industry, there are a few opportunities unique to the landscaping industry.
In 2022, digital marketing is king, and if you’re not on Google, the sad truth is that your traditional marketing efforts will have to work twice as hard to get similar results.
Why should I invest in landscape marketing?
A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops the clock to save time.
Henry Ford
The best answer to this question is: if you don’t invest, and your competitors do, that leaves you in last place. Digital marketing in 2022 has become so easy that everyone is doing it, and it doesn’t take much work.
Where to start? Try considering the needs and problems of the client.
First: analyze your existing customers
Your current customer base is the ideal pool to do market research from, that is if they are your target customers. You need to understand your current and potential clients in order to meet their needs.
Start by creating an ‘avatar‘ of their persona. This includes their job, likes & dislikes, and more importantly, their pain points when looking for a landscaping company.
Outlining their frustrations and fears gives you an arsenal of ammo when creating sales copy, content, and ads. Let’s face it, how can you say no when a company talks directly to your problems and addresses them one by one?
Now that you’ve narrowed down your message, let’s look at the best ways to deliver that to your potential customers.
7 Best landscaping marketing strategies for 2022
1. Do you have a landscaping website? No? You need one.
In 2022, landscape and lawn care marketing requires an internet presence. Having a website is the cornerstone of these efforts.
While Facebook is a great way to reach new customers who aren’t looking for landscaping services, websites are there for those who know what they want and are trying to qualify their decision.
These customers may come to your website from other sources such as social media ads, but once on the website, often they will look at your About pages in search of evidence of trust and authority.
Therefore, it’s good practice to include the following elements on your company website:
- Mission Statement, Value Statement, Vision Statement – What you do and the value you supply.
- Testimonials and online reviews – encourage your satisfied customers to leave a review, or better yet, supply a testimonial to highlight on your website.
- Links to your social media pages – Keep potential customers in your loop. Offer them other ways to engage with your brand.
86% of Americans use Google when they search for products and services. This brings us to the next digital marketing strategy – SEO
2. SEO – Search Engine Optimization
In order to find more landscaping customers, you will need to increase brand awareness and online visibility. In fact, 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine, according to Search Engine Journal.
Having strong brand awareness will bring ‘branded’ search queries to your website e.g. a customer knows your business offline and searches for ‘[company name] landscaping’. Your website will likely be top of the list. The list is also known as the SERP (Search Engine Ranking Pages).
Having good online visibility will bring ‘unbranded’ search visitors to your website, and here lies the biggest market share of untapped customers. They don’t know your brand and they might not even know they want landscaping services.
They arrived at your website by searching for transactional keywords such as ‘landscaping service’ or informational keywords such as ‘brown patch fungus’.
According to tools like Semrush, 1300 people search this word every month. Not surprising then that landscaping company Bright View targeted this keyword with this article which now appears first on Google search results and brings them traffic all year round for free!
That is the power of good SEO. To do it yourself, do keyword research using Semrush or Google Trends, pick a keyword and write an article about it. Make sure it’s related to your niche and watch it bring in ‘organic traffic’ – or in other words – new potential customers.
3. Connect to local customers with GMB
As a local landscaping business, you probably have lots of potential clients within a few miles. These people are probably searching Google for ‘landscaping business near me’. If you have good SEO, your website will rise to the top of the search results.
Searches of this nature are also usually met with the Google My Business feature (GMB) – a map of the local area with a shortlist of local services. Here customers can compare the location, ratings, and reviews of competing landscaping businesses. And then conveniently find links to phone numbers, email addresses, and your website, all without leaving Google.
To create your own GMB profile simply create an account on the Google Business Profile Manager. Add your business hours, photos, and a short description, and let your customers fill in the rest i.e. reviews!
Here are the results for the keywords: ‘landscapers in Florida’
4. Create a referral program
You probably thought word-of-mouth was effective. It is, Nielsen found that 77% of consumers trust referrals from friends. Word-of-mouth referrals are an excellent way to increase sales for lawn and landscaping companies.
Referrals inform the client of your services, put you above competitors, and eliminate any objections the client may face. The best way to encourage customers to refer? Build a referral program!
But what’s the best way to make referral programs work? Offer a reward. This could be a discount for future services if they refer a friend. The result? You have brought in new customers while encouraging repeat business from your current clients.
Based on the feedback from various leaders in the lawn care services industry, Landscapeleadership.com offers a number of lawn care marketing strategies to use with a referral program.
5. Close more sales with email marketing
Most marketing campaigns for landscaping businesses will not close all leads at the beginning. There’s often a quick response but people are busy and can’t commit to your service on the first email. It’s not your sales team that are boring!
44% of salespeople give up after following up once while 80% of sales are made after five follow-ups.
HubSpot
The solution to keeping up your visibility? Using automated email campaigns that are highly segmented to the type of lead.
These may not necessarily be sales-focused too. Industries like landscaping benefit from having lots of informational content to share using mailing lists or gated content.
In fact, 4 out of the 6 best landscaping companies for 2022, according to The Spruce, have some kind of email capture form designed to engage email subscribers with periodic emails.
We can segment these people into the category of ‘marketing ready leads’. Sharing informational content with these willing subscribers keeps them aware of your brand while titillating them with the topic that they’re interested in. And, after a short time, you are the first name they think of when they need a lawn care business!
6. Reach 79% of potential landscaping customers on social media such as Facebook or Instagram
According to Pew Research, 79% of Americans are active on Facebook. The reason?
People love to join an online community, especially one that is updated regularly.
Having a social media presence is the same concept as having a mailing list – the goal is to keep your prospects engaged with your brand and hopefully gain new prospects.
You can do this by starting a Facebook Business page. From here, there are a number of marketing ideas to try:
Social media ads
The purpose of running social media ads is to increase brand awareness and talk directly to ‘warm’ prospects to earn a website visit, phone call, or some other goal aimed at conversion.
When you set up your Facebook campaign, you need to choose between two-four pricing options.
CPC (cost-per-click): You only pay when someone clicks on your Facebook Ad.
CPM (cost-per-impression): You pay when Facebook shows your ad 1000 times. (Impressions are the number of times your ad is shown to a user on Facebook).
CPA (cost-per-action): You get charged by the number of conversions from your ad for actions such as a signup or purchase on your website.
CPL (cost-per-like): You pay when someone “Likes” your Facebook Page after clicking your ad.
As a landscaping business owner, you may need a social media marketing manager to help you run paid ads or handle it yourself if you feel confident.
Luckily for a landscaping business with a limited service area, Facebook advertising is so flexible that you can specify your local market to just target more businesses within your reach.
Organic social media strategies
Part of your landscape marketing strategy should be to increase the ‘awareness’ of your brand to customers who aren’t yet looking for a landscape or lawn care company. This needs a different tactic than running social media ads as the goal here is to entertain, not convert.
When your landscaping business creates and shares useful content, followers are likely to re-share this content to their feed and become visible to their friends. In doing so, your brand is organically ‘referred’ to those outside your sphere of influence
Content could be as simple as just simply sharing lawn care and gardening tips and tricks or curating information already in the public domain such as news articles and guides. This is especially effective if you link to your own content on your website and therefore keep these users in your engaged with your brand.
7. Reach all your potential customers with Google pay-per-click ads
Remember 93% of the online experiences start from searching on Google? Unfortunately, it’s the top 10 results on Google that get a click. According to HubSpot, only 25% of people make it to the second page!
On the second page of Google?
With paid ad campaigns from PPC, your lawn care ads will appear 1st on Google searches when people are looking for your services. Here is Google’s guide to Google Ads.
Is there a disadvantage of PPC advertising?
Yes, it’s easy to waste money on unqualified clicks (uninterested users) if you don’t optimize the ad to appear in front of your target audience.
To avoid a low marketing ROI (return on investment) simply:
- Make sure you carefully research the pain points and opportunities that your customers are faced with when choosing a landscaping business.
- Secondly, create a landing page specifically designed to work with your PPC campaign based on the profiles you created in step 1. This landing page should have some kind of value proposition and mechanisms to gather people’s interest (such as using an email capture form).
- Start with a small investment (around $15 per day) and continually test the effectiveness of your campaign by measuring the CTR (click-through rate – a low number indicates that your ad isn’t catchy enough for people to click), and the conversion rate (a low number means people click but they don’t convert into customers indicating a problem with your landing page).
More lawn care marketing ideas
For more lawn care marketing ideas and tips, check out The Lawn Care Marketing Podcast.
GreenPal also offers a pros-only lawn care business & marketing blog here.
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