Marketing & Sales Insight for the Lawn & Landscape Industry

Roll back the calendar...it’s 2016. I’ve had my own frustrating experiences marketing at a $13 million lawn and landscape company and now, after coming to work at Landscape Leadership, I have realized my misfortune was a common green industry marketing epidemic.

Ask me the question, “Is Pay-Per-Click (PPC), specifically with Google Adwords, a good idea for a lawn care company?”

The answer then was, “No. Stop wasting your money.”

But...now I would say, “Maybe…” Let me explain why.

“Yeah, we tried postcards and mailers and they didn’t work. Oh, and we spent all this money to put ads in this magazine and that was a bust too.”

I get it. I managed an annual marketing budget of over $300,000 for many years for a full-service lawn and landscape company and tried all sorts of mailers and ads. Unfortunately, it’s a lot of trial and error.

But, I may be able to spare you some frustration. After all, if you’re dropping tens of thousands of dollars each year on lawn care and landscaping mailers or advertisements, you should be able to achieve and measure success, right?

Just as photography has the potential for a positive reaction, it also carries the tremendous capacity to leave a very bad taste in your mouth. As our friends at Greenbelt Outdoor Services in this week’s Green Ways comic are realizing, what they expected is not what they got. It’s like when a cook substitutes, miscalculates or completely omits an ingredient. Yuck!

The old saying of, “A picture’s worth a thousand words”, definitely holds true. If you’ve been following our content for some time, you’ve heard us advocating for the value of professional photography for marketing landscaping, lawn care, and tree services.

But your picture’s “thousand words” are going to come across as  bitter, dry, flat chocolate cake if you leave out the necessary ingredients or don’t execute them in a specific manner.

If I gave you three guesses of what activity occupies the most time on my 13-year-old son’s smartphone, I’d be willing to bet that you wouldn’t be able to even nail it with three tries. It’s not games nor social media. It’s researching prices on Amazon, Craigslist, and Google.

Even if we drive to a physical store, my boy knows what the item costs elsewhere and where he could even get an upgraded version of it for a smarter purchase. In fact, it’s probable that we won’t even leave the store with the said item in-hand, and it will be ordered online before we even walk out the door. It happens all of the time.

He’s the personification of the modern, educated consumer. Guess what...he’s going to be your customer in the years to come.

It’s been a hard day of work. You put out work-fires and your easy chair and the evening news seems just the prescription to escape your business woes, realizing there are tougher things going on in the world. But it continues. Wedged in between the latest political scandal and the traffic report appears your nemesis on the local news.

There’s your competitor, smiling in all their interview-giving glory. All of a sudden, they’re the go-to expert?! You scoff and shake your head. Every day you pour your heart and soul into your company, team, and clients. You live for this stuff, and yet somehow you don’t get the publicity and brand awareness you deserve.

I’ve been in your seat...scratching my head at meetings with a local digital agency, begging them to just make some sort of sense of it to me. I’m not naturally a “numbers guy”. If you throw too many website analytic figures and percentages onto a report, my brain turns to mush. Give me the big picture then tell me how to fix it!

Although I’ve learned how to understand more of these numbers over the years, I’m still amazed at how many digital marketing experts and landscaping professionals are still content with mushed brains. You should be able to more easily understand what really matters to grow your business.

Everyone and your mother keeps talking about social media. You hoped it was just a fad but the craze keeps building each year. Maybe you dabbled, got on the bandwagon, and tried your best to post, tweet, pin, update, snap, and whatever else people are doing these days.

Maybe you got so busy with your lawn care or landscaping business that you got someone else to do it for you. Or maybe it fell to the wayside and you’re now realizing it’s time to spring back into action.

Deep down inside, you’re concerned. You love the concept of building a loyal online community and getting new clients from social media, yet you want to make smart business decisions without wasting time or money.

This article originally appeared in Turf Magazine, where Chad writes a monthly column offering sales and marketing tips for lawn care and landsape companies.

Our society is bombarded with images. In the 1970’s, the average American saw 500 advertisements a day. In 2017, that number has increased tenfold. And that’s merely commercial advertisements, not to mention all the cat pics and selfies.

Our brains can only absorb so much. In order to prioritize limited memory space, information is subconsciously sorted and many of these images are discarded.

The old saying goes that “a picture’s worth a thousand words”. But when a prospective client sees your company’s images, will the first word in their brain be “Meh...”, triggering the mental garbage disposal?

This article was originally published in Turf magazine, where Chad writes a monthly column on sales and marketing tips for lawn and landscape companies.

One of my favorite movie franchises is the Terminator series. There’s just something about the impossible task of overthrowing the evil, cold technological forces which are attempting to extinguish the human race. The story takes fragile, uncertain characters and transforms them into powerful heroes that lead a movement for all mankind.

This article originally appeared in the November 2017 edition of Turf Magazine, where Chad writes a monthly column about sales and marketing insights for lawn care and landscape companies.

Blueprints, mechanical time clocks, 2-way radios, and messy stacks of paper reports—these are just some of the exhibits one may find if the Green Industry History Museum if we constructed one. While it’s fun to reflect in jest, those items aren’t in a very distant past. The technological landscape has changed rapidly over the past couple decades. And the alarming rate of technologies being swapped for newer counterparts seems to increase as time presses on.

To run a successful company in the lawn and landscape industry requires being able to change over and over again. Legislation, technological advances, consumer behaviors, and culture itself is shifting, progressing, and refining every day. We must not only be okay with change, we must be excited about it. Our businesses depend on it.