Marketing & Sales Insight for the Lawn & Landscape Industry

There are a lot of lawn care and landscaping business owners who are fed up with marketing agencies. I know I was.

After a couple of decades in the field and sales, I served for another 5 years as a marketing manager at a $13M full-service landscaping company. I had my share of disappointing experiences with marketing service providers.

Ironically, I later joined the marketing agency life in 2016. Over the past six years I’ve spoken with a lot of industry professionals that have validated that, indeed, it is very challenging to find a great marketing partner.

There's one common, fundamental failure when marketing in the lawn and landscape industry. Brands don't know their role in the customer story. 

Your company is not at the center of your customer's universe. The customer is.

When Jesse Wisely from Mid South Night Lights came to us, he wanted to take his landscape lighting marketing game to the next level. And we were very excited to take on a client with a brand that specializes in outdoor lighting.

Since 2017, we’ve worked with Joshua Tree Experts to create hundreds of useful blog articles to answer common questions their prospects and customers have.

It’s paid off for them. We’ve seen huge gains.

• They now get 27x the website traffic.
• There has been a 311% increase in tree service, lawn care, and pest control leads
• This translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

Great blog articles are a foundational must as you can see from the results above. Recently, we decided to take their content marketing strategy to the next level to gain even more traffic and leads. To do this we created educational videos that are also entertaining (edutainment).

Prospective customers have a lot of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). Are you the expert they can conveniently turn to?

Your prospective landscaping and lawn care customers want easy-to-find, meaningful answers. However, back-and-forth, repetitive conversations aren’t always easy or convenient (for all parties).

There should be a way to remove friction from the FAQ process.

Good news…there is. Properly leveraging written content and video can answer FAQs which can mean growing your landscaping or lawn care business with happier, ideal-fit customers.

If you’d like your landscape company to not be seen as Just Another Landscaper, using video during your sales process is a great way to stand out.

Not only can video improve the experience for everyone involved, but it can also help you sell more landscape design-build projects.

You’re probably sick of dealing with prospects who get multiple bids and lose interest along the way. And, I think you’re likely fed up with wasting time and missing out on better opportunities.

Does this sound familiar?

Selling landscaping is time-consuming. As I think back to my 10+ years in sales, this is what I remember most:

• Long hours preparing paperwork and estimates 
• Tens of thousands of calls and emails
• Too many meetings to count

It’s been said that “the sky is the limit” when it comes to sales. However, success is limited by time. There’s only so much of it. It’s the one thing that salespeople are the most protective of.

Part of being a great salesperson is about becoming more efficient with your time. It’s learning how to close deals more quickly and with greater ease. It’s about doing the right things for the right people at the right times. 

As I recall hundreds of conversations I have had with sales professionals, one thing is very apparent...Selling landscaping services is still pretty “Old School”. Many leading green industry companies still have outdated methods.

Ted has been selling landscaping for your company for a long time. He’s a top performer. 

He’s also well connected, frequently name-dropping as he shares networking stories. 

At times, Ted can be found at his desk, working diligently on estimates and making calls. At others, he’s in the field. You don’t micromanage because, after all, he hits his numbers, right?

There is one question I frequently get from company owners struggling to grow a lawn care business.

“How long will it take to triple our website leads?” 

If you are investing tens of thousands of dollars to get more lawn care customers, you don’t want to flush marketing dollars down the toilet (while wasting time and energy). 

You want a lot of leads. You want results.

Today, I am going to share what has been proven to work time and time again. These strategies worked when I directed marketing at a $13 million company and they have worked for our lawn care clients over the past 10 years.

(And I say that you should dream BIGGER than 3x your current results.)