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.

Your prospective client needs help visualizing their own success. Don’t just show the product or service you sell. Show how your clients use the product or service. The most successful brands do this and people are conditioned to respond positively to it.

Models or actors are wearing the clothing. They eat the food. They drive the vehicles. They use the devices. They enjoy lives that are a direct result of the product or service. 

One of the most powerful ways to have maximum marketing impact is to have your landscaping or lawn care customers appear in your marketing images and videos.

There’s just one big problem. That’s often easier said than done. How do you get customers to help? What do you do when they’re camera shy? Are there other alternatives?

Your lawn or landscape company’s website is arguably the most important tool that you have to promote and support your business. A great website can do a tremendous amount of legwork in leading prospective clients to choose your business. And, let’s not underestimate your website as an effective recruiting platform.

Are you frustrated that your website doesn’t look as appealing as your competitors’ websites? Are you worried its poor performance warrants a redesign?

Of course, if you’ve started looking into website design costs, you might be a bit overwhelmed by what you see. The cost range appears to run the gamut. There are companies out there promising to build a website for just a couple of thousand dollars—and some that want you to set up a monthly subscription service with them.

Developing an effective marketing strategy that helps your company to connect with prospects in a meaningful way can be challenging enough on its own. But when you start adding in the fact that your landscaping or lawn care business is growing into multiple locations, it can become downright daunting.

For many, the fear is that your messaging will become diluted as it spreads. How can you ensure that you’re able to achieve optimal coverage with consistency—plus effectively use your budget to market all locations?

We understand how challenging it can become to feel that you’re maintaining consistency and implementing highly effective marketing strategies as your business grows. Everything from budgets to brand guidelines to the need for additional technology and people can seem to muddy the waters.

However, it really doesn’t have to be as overwhelming or stressful as it feels. With the right multi-location marketing strategy for your landscaping or lawn care business, you can approach your growth with confidence that everything is under control.

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.)

If you invest in professional photography for your landscaping company then you want to make sure you get the most possible value out of the photos that you have taken. After all, the images won’t mean much to your prospective clients if they never get viewed.

That’s why an image gallery on your website is so important. But in order to maximize the value of that image gallery, there are some important factors you should be paying attention to.

In this article, we’ll talk about the different ways to organize a landscaping photo gallery and some of the best practices that you should be implementing to truly get the most traction out of what you share on your website.

While you probably want the process to be as simple as just uploading all your beautiful photos, the truth is, there needs to be some forethought and planning as to how this is done.