Author: Chad Diller
Your lawn care business or landscaping company has grown a lot over the years. And through this process, you or one of your team has worn many hats.
One of these hats happens to be doing the marketing for your lawn care landscaping business. But there's a big problem.
You either don't have enough time or you're realizing now that you haven't done it really well.
Is it time to hire an in-house marketing person for your lawn care business or landscaping company? Should you hire a marketing agency? How does all of this work?
Those are really great questions and I'm going to help you start to answer them today. Stay tuned.
(Check out the video with description, resources, comments, etc. on YouTube)
Video Transcription
Hey, what's up? It's Chad with Landscape Leadership. I've been in the lawn and landscape industry for over 20 years and have a really interesting perspective on this topic.
Working at a lawn care business or landscaping company doing the marketing. Yep. I did that.
Using marketing agencies while I was there? You betcha. Some were great and others, well let's not go there.
And in the most recent years I've come to work here at Landscape Leadership. We've worked with dozens of lawn care businesses and landscaping companies to help them generate leads that turn into paying customers.
I'm here to share whatever hard lessons I've learned over the last two decades with you. So if you're here for the first time, I invite you to subscribe to the YouTube channel as we frequently release different videos on topics like this.
And you can also subscribe to the Landscape Leadership blog because you'll also get some really great questions answered like the ones we're covering today.
In-House Help or Hiring a Landscaping or Lawn Care Marketing Agency?
Let me cut right to the chase and clear the air. I'm not going to make you wait for the answer to this question, but you're gonna want to stick around to find out the explanation for that answer.
Should you hire an in house marketing person or work with a marketing agency? The answer is you should hire an in-house marketing person AND also hire a really great marketing agency for your landscaping or lawn care business.
If you choose one or the other, you're gonna really limit your success. But I recognize that some of you are not ready for this. Either you can't afford it or you don't have the people on staff to do this, so that means in the meantime, you or another person on your team may assume some of those in-house marketing responsibilities and it also might mean that you can't fully engage with a marketing agency.
RELATED PODCAST: Hiring In-House Marketing Help
Considering Marketing in 3 Parts
This is a big topic that will inspire even more questions, way too much for one video. In order to set your company up for success, it's important for you to understand that marketing can be divided up into three different groups.
This is really important because as you start thinking about your marketing strategy and the different things that need to be done, it help you to assign who should and shouldn't be doing each of these parts.
The three areas are this:
- Strategy
- Creative
- Implementation.
Marketing Strategy
Let's talk about strategy first. You want both a in-house marketing person and a marketing agency to be involved in all of the things that you're doing to help grow your business. But depending upon which part of your overall marketing efforts you're looking at, the responsibility may fall on one party more than it does on the other, s
Within your landscaping or lawn care business, you will want your executive leadership, even your in-house marketing person to be involved on some level with strategy. After all, you know your company and services pretty well.
But a really great marketing agency will be able to ask you questions that you've never thought of and have ideas that your industry peers are too afraid to try.
Your marketing agency should spend a lot of time and energy in the beginning, figuring out what your specific goals are to grow your company and finding out what the problems are and how to fix them.
Marketing Creative Services
Next, let's talk about creative. You have to know your in-house marketing person's limitations. Over the years. I've done a lot of things...graphic design, writing articles, video production, you name it.
There was a lot of stuff going on and I consider myself a pretty creative dude. But as I've grown in my creative skills, I've realized that I sometimes did an okay job, but not really a great one. When I look back, I realize that there were some things that even though I could do them, I probably shouldn't have.
Some of these things take a ton of time, so you have to consider what your time is really worth to your company and are you doing the things that serves it the best, or can you hire somebody for pieces of this?
Some things are clearly out of your wheelhouse, while others you may be able to pull off. You can be involved in the creative process but not be tied down to all the time it takes to actually create things.
Marketing Implementation
Lastly, let's talk about implementation. There are a lot of things to be coordinated. Some of these things aren't really up for interpretation, so it's really great idea for someone in-house to be making sure that all these things get done on a timely basis.
There are things you can easily do instead of paying a marketing agency big bucks to do it for you. For example, do you need to post some pictures of a recent project you completed or send out a holiday message on social media? That's just one example. Why would you pay someone outside of your company to do that for you?
The list is really time-consuming but full of really important tasks that you should be doing in-house. Plus, some of these tasks are things that nobody can do better than you. I'll give you an example.
Say you get a bad review on Google. Well, someone in your company is going to be way better at responding to that, having the context of what's going on with this customer and maybe what you might do to remedy the problem and take ownership of it. You wouldn't want to give something like that to a marketing agency.
Then again, there's some things that are way out of your expertise and are better left to experts that know what they're doing. Just because you can build a website, write blog articles, or take pictures of your completed projects doesn't necessarily mean that you should be doing this. Remember what you often tell your customers...you get what you pay for.
A valuable in-house marketing person knows where their limits stop and is connected with the right experts at an agency to help them.
More Questions
This is probably provoking even more questions. You might have questions swirling around in your head such as:
- What other marketing should we be doing as a company?
- Which comes first? Hiring in-house help or hiring a marketing agency?
Again, great questions. In my next video, I'm also going to be covering points on this topic such as:
- How much salary should you pay an in-house marketing person?
- How to hire an in-house marketing person who's gone to kick butt for you.
Then we're going to finish off this video series by talking about marketing agencies, like filling you in on their dirty little secrets. And, we'll also talk about how much to pay them each year. Plus, I'm going to give you a list of questions that you should be asking a potential marketing agency to make sure that you're hiring a really great one for your company.
I hope this has given you some great answers and help you to start asking even more great questions on how to help your lawn care business or landscaping company succeed. Thanks a lot. Have a really great day.
Want regular, practical tips like these to take your lawn care or landscaping business to the next level? Then consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. Or if you'd rather read our in-depth articles on Landscape Leadership's website, you can also subscribe to our blog.
