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.

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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.

This article originally appeared in Turf Magazine, where Chad writes a monthly column offering sales and marketing tips for lawn care and landsape companies.

Our society is bombarded with images. In the 1970’s, the average American saw 500 advertisements a day. In 2017, that number has increased tenfold. And that’s merely commercial advertisements, not to mention all the cat pics and selfies.

Our brains can only absorb so much. In order to prioritize limited memory space, information is subconsciously sorted and many of these images are discarded.

The old saying goes that “a picture’s worth a thousand words”. But when a prospective client sees your company’s images, will the first word in their brain be “Meh...”, triggering the mental garbage disposal?

In every blockbuster, the hero faces serious problems; some less obvious than others.

The obvious problem Luke Skywalker faces in Star Wars is the Evil Empire. In the Karate Kid, our hero, Daniel LaRusso, must defend himself against the Cobra Kai's bullying.

As the hero in your company's story, luckily your customers don't have to face off against Darth Vader or Johnny Lawrence. Though not as menacing and galaxy-threatening, brown patch, crabgrass, and fire ants present a real problem to your customers.

This article originally appeared in Turf Magazine, where Chad writes a monthly column offering sales and marketing tips for landscaping and lawn care companies.

As a Generation X kid, I remember my first pair of Bugle Boy jeans. The zipper pockets and elastic around the ankles made me pretty fly for a 1988 guy. Fast forward just a couple years, and I wouldn’t have been caught dead in those pants.

Imagine my surprise as I see some of my daughter’s male friends now walking around with similar new adaptations of this 80s fashion. What are next? Zoot suits? Jelly Shoes?

I’m sure you have a similar story in mind. Trends come and go and resurface again, particularly when it comes to clothing. But when it comes to marketing a business in the lawn and landscape industry, that resurfacing rarely occurs. Trends die and become obsolete. This particularly holds true when it comes to websites.

No one connects with their audience better than Hollywood. They do it with a formulaic storytelling framework that keeps our squirrel brains (and butts) in our seats for 90+ minutes.

You can use this same proven framework to develop effective messaging for your lawn and landscaping company. Your "script" will influence the following: