Marketing & Sales Insight for the Lawn & Landscape Industry

I've gotta say...I really love working with lawn care companies.

Maybe it's due to the fact that for eight years, I treated thousands of lawns.

Maybe it was due to the fact that this type of work seemed to be the easiest service for me to sell at my 7-year stint as a salesperson at a full-service lawn and landscape company. 

Or possibly it was the thrill I felt figuring out new ways to market lawn care services to add thousands of new lawn care customers each year. 

Whatever the case, it's a rush. But, I get as equally frustrated when I see lawn care companies trying to do their best but failing or getting lackluster results.

Over the years, lawn care and landscaping companies have asked us a LOT of questions about various advertising mediums.

But the one that seems to come up the most often (with skepticism and criticism) is Google Ads (also referred to as PPC, Pay Per Click, or Google Adwords.

Do you find yourself at one of these places?

• You're contemplating using Google Ads for lawn care or landscaping leads

• You did your own Pay Per Click in the past but weren't that impressed

• You hired a marketing agency to place PPC ads for lawn care or landscaping lead generation

• You've grown your business without this advertising medium but are always looking for ways to land new customers

Well, I am assuming most (if not all) of you fit into one of those categories. If so, I've got something special for you. Over the past month, I've taken this complicated (and most often very boring) topic and created a series of videos for you. 

This series of videos highlights both good and bad decisions when it comes to the words you choose for the homepage of your lawn care and landscaping website. 

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?

Purchase our entire collection of Green Ways comics on Amazon

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.