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.

In a previous article, we talked about call tracking and how it can play an important role in keeping tabs on your marketing campaigns. In this follow-up article, we’ll talk about QR codes, which can be an additional useful tool in your marketing toolbox.

If you were to take a guess when QR codes first came out, what would you say? Five years ago? Maybe ten? 

If you guessed anywhere in that vicinity of time, you might be shocked QR codes were actually invented in 1994. They’ve been around much longer than most people realize. But it’s true that they didn’t become much more widespread in use until the last decade or so. 

In fact, since the pandemic has driven us into a more “contact-less” environment, you might be seeing QR codes more than ever. Restaurants started using them for menus and many retailers for checking out at the register. You might even remember an ad from Super Bowl LVI that featured a bouncing QR code for Coinbase, a cryptocurrency company. That ad was so popular it actually crashed the app.

This article is the first in a two-part series diving deep into how to better track your offline marketing efforts. Next week's article will focus on the use of QR codes.

While your website can be a top generator of online leads, most lawn and landscape companies also get plenty of business over the phone. Accurately tracking what led that prospect to call you (whether it was a postcard mailer, a newspaper ad, or somewhere else) can be really challenging.

You have to remember to ask how they heard about you—and frankly, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, prospects have seen your company name in more than one location before they actually pick up the phone and call and you’re left to rely on what they recall in the moment, versus what actually prompted their call.

Asking, “How did you hear about us?”, is not a reliable tracking method.

The answer to this challenge is call tracking. Call tracking is exactly what it sounds like—it’s the process of using software to track which marketing campaign led to the phone call. If you’re not using call tracking, you’re probably having a really difficult time making marketing decisions—such as whether that $10,000 postcard mailer last season was really worth it or not.

In this article, we’ll discuss call tracking in more depth including why it’s important for lawn and landscape companies and how you can get the most out of it.

(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.