Marketing & Sales Insight for the Lawn & Landscape Industry

(Here's a teaser video with 1 example of each of the 10 tips mentioned below. Read on for 30 more tips.)

Over the past two years I’ve spent a lot of time scouring YouTube and the Internet. I’ve wanted to get a really good sense of what kind of marketing tips are out there for lawn and landscape companies.

I’ve made a few general observations…

• The large majority of content addressing marketing for landscapers is geared towards entrepreneurs and businesses under $2 million in annual revenue. 
• Most of the people offering these tips are either A) well-intentioned small business owners sharing their personal advice or, B) landscaping marketing agencies that specialize in small businesses.
• And lastly, most of the popular "influencers" make money by producing videos (ads on YouTube, product endorsements, selling software, franchises, or courses for startup businesses).

None of these things are bad. However, these landscaping marketing strategies may not apply for companies with an annual revenue of over $2M or for companies pursuing aggressive growth goals. These tips are aimed at the bulk of the landscape industry, small startup businesses.

Just like you don’t want to be Just Another Landscaper, I don’t want this to be just another article about marketing for landscapers. These are not basic tips. They are specifically for companies that plan on surpassing $2M in annual revenue (or are well past it already).

If you are a local business with a goal of generating more leads and sales from your website, then this begins with understanding, first, how much traffic you get to your website each month and, second, where these visitors are coming from.

We'll focus on the latter in this post.

This article was co-written by Emmett Hughes, our Senior Project Manager, and Carolyn Bowers, our Digital Marketing Specialist.

As time goes by, the importance of mobile website design continues to increase. People visit websites more frequently on mobile devices than on desktops, and that won’t be changing anytime soon.

• In July of 2014, we published an article that showed 33% of our client’s traffic was coming from a mobile device.

• In 2018 we published a similar article where that same number jumped to 53%.

Not surprisingly, the upward trend of mobile traffic continued into 2019.

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.

I have always loved cars. First, there was the surprise ride in a Porsche 911 Turbo on my 13th birthday, driven by the local dealer at about 160 mph on a local highway. Then there was my mom’s 1981 Corvette with the Pete Jackson gear drive, humming and thumping when it picked me up from school.

At 16, I got my own first car, a 1965 Mustang Fastback. And last summer, another dream came true when I got behind the wheel at the NASCAR Experience in Dover, DE.

The sleek clean lines of a flashy car, the screech of tires and rumbling engines, the pump of adrenaline. It’s no wonder I ended up as an inbound marketing professional…

Wait… What??

What do these sweet rides have to do with inbound marketing? More than you think.

I promise to keep this blog post short. In return I want you to spend a few minutes reviewing the graphic below.

These charts are showing the website traffic growth (measured by "visits") for five companies we've been working with over the past three years. Traffic growth is tracked from January of 2014 through what we project for January of 2017. So three full years of data.

Most of you have (hopefully) created a sales goal for your company and expect your team to meet or exceed those expectations.

But reaching your goal isn’t something that happens all at once: You and your salespeople have to work toward it one day at a time.

To know if you’re staying on track, you need to keep up with your leads and prospects throughout the sales cycle, making it vital to have a reliable process in place.

Here’s why and how to set up a sales tracking process for your lawn care or landscape company.