Marketing your lawn care and landscape business is an ongoing endeavor.
Tony Ricketts, founder and CEO of Lawnline Marketing, and Joe Shooner, president of Focal Point Communications, offer up additional tips on how landscape pros can best do so.
Editor's Note: Follow this link to check out this additional article for the who, what, where, when and why of marketing.
1. Be consistent and know that marketing is a long-term game.
While there are both long- and short-term strategies involved in marketing, most landscape and lawn care companies will want to have a mix of both, Ricketts says.
“Things like your paid advertising on Google ads, Facebook ads are all short-term marketing strategies, meaning that you can start generating leads right away, but keep in mind, you're always paying for those leads," Ricketts says.
He notes that the end goal, or the long-term strategy, would be to generate about 80% of leads through SEO.
"The reason we use 80% is because that's about the number of percentage of searchers that go to the organic results in Google," Ricketts says. "That 80%, which will make up the large volume of your leads, can take anywhere from six to 12 months to start seeing real results.”
2. Don't overlook the value of online reviews.
Ricketts says online reviews can also impact Google rankings.
He recommends asking clients to leave a review after a company has performed a service The process can be set up in a way that if the client has a negative review, the issue can be addressed internally, but if they leave a positive review, it can redirect them to Google.
He adds that it's important the reviews come in consistently as well.
"You don't want to build reviews in one big batch. For example, you don't want to get 100 reviews all at one time and then not get any more for the rest of the year," Ricketts says. "You want to consistently see them being built all the time over time.”
3. Structure your marketing plan to your ideal client.
To be sure you're reaching the people you're targeting, Shooner recommends first picturing your ideal client and then building a marketing plan based on that profile.
"If you're in a market that is going to be a little bit younger, more tech driven, then text communication, email communication, digital marketing and digital advertising is probably a little bit more critical," Shooner says. "A lot of that just comes down to the contractor having some sort of a clear mental picture about who their clients are."
He says the better a business understands how a client prefers to be communicated with, the easier it is to make decisions on marketing and streamline the entire process with a marketing and communication plan.
Follow this look for more advice on how to market your business.
