Marketing & Sales Insight for the Lawn & Landscape Industry

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This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of Lawn & Landscape magazine.

I live on the top floor of a contemporary mid-rise apartment downtown Austin, Texas. While I take great pride in my horticultural skills on display on the balcony, a need for lawn care services for my 70 square foot concrete and steel space does not exist.

My living circumstances, however, do not seem to disqualify me from receiving dozens of email newsletters from well-intentioned lawn and landscape companies from around the country (oddly, none in Austin).

As summer is coming to a close and Labor Day approaches, I’m often reminded of a yearly memory over my past 20 years in the lawn care industry. It’s almost aeration and seeding time!

Pulling those little plugs and broadcasting seed means not only improved lawns for clients, but a spike in revenue each fall. It’s a race until cold temperatures arrive to get as much work done as you can.

But what if your company struggles with the question of how to sell lawn aeration and overseeding? You could send out a postcard. You could run a promotion in print or social media. But that all rests on the hope that your potential aeration and seeding prospects understand the value of the service and wants you to do it for them. It’s a lot of hope to hang on the small real estate of a postcard or advertisement.

This article was originally published in Turf Magazine where Chad writes a monthly feature on sales and marketing for landscaping, lawn care and other green industry companies.

It’s hard to believe, but email was invented 45 years ago, in 1972. Upon the world-wide adoption of the internet in the 1990’s, email’s popularity spread and is still widely in use today.

Contrary to some predictions, email is not dead, and has become a pillar of modern communication. While younger generations are becoming more active on other messaging platforms, email still remains a viable and regularly used means of communication for lawn care, landscaping and tree service companies to prospects and customers of all ages.

Email marketing is used by many green industry companies to communicate with both prospective and current customers. Frustration and poor results are common because many companies view email like traditional advertising methods.

This article was originally published in Turf Magazine, where Chad writes a monthly column providing sales and marketing tips for lawn care, landscaping and tree service companies.

In 2011, Google conducted research about how consumer habits have changed. The findings, coined a term “Zero Moment of Truth” (ZMOT), referring to the moment when a prospective customer finally reaches out to a company for an estimate, consultation, or to make a purchase.

The results of the ZMOT study yielded an important number: 70%. The percentage refers to the fact that, on average, buyers are 70% through their buyer’s journey before reaching out to a company for their Zero Moment of Truth.

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

As the keystone business principle states, “You gotta’ spend money to make money.” Savvy business owners of lawn care and landscaping companies plan ahead and make sure a portion of their annual revenue gets allocated to their marketing budget.

Aggressive budgeting along with smart initiatives that can be measured are common traits you’ll find when looking to our industry’s leaders.

But what happens when you “gotta spend money”, and don’t “gotta” lot to work with? Some marketing initiatives come at a premium price and you have to be careful not to waste those dollars you and your team works so hard to bring in.

It takes more time, energy, and marketing dollars to find a new customer than to sell more work to an existing customer who is already sold on how great your landscaping, lawn care, or tree care services are. But yet, winning new customers is what seems to get a ton of attention when green industry companies empty their marketing wallet.

While it is true that your business needs to keep aggressively pursuing new customers, it’s just as important to make sure you’re not missing easy cross-selling opportunities with your existing customers.

Good news, good ideas do grow on trees. If you want to watch your tiny, sprouting tree service grow into a majestic tower of marketing prowess, it can happen. If you want to watch your withered, shriveled up tree service marketing ideas bud forth into life, that may be possible.

Over the past couple decades I’ve been involved in the Green Industry. I’ve held roles in production, selling and marketing. I’ve seen lots of horrible, average, and downright awesome methods of marketing for tree services. Some I’ve stumbled upon on my own, some from tree service industry experts, and a few learned from painful, personal mistakes.

Most lawn care professionals get into the industry because they’re passionate about the work and helping customers.

But often, you aren’t as excited — or comfortable — with the business aspect of it.

“You have to be able to track production, revenue received for accounting, the ability to send statements to customers that owe money, have efficient routing in the jobs that are to be done on specific days and finally the ability to forecast the revenue your business will generate for the year for budgeting purposes,” explains Brian Leto, IT manager at Green Lawn Fertilizing.

That can be a lot to wrap your head around no matter your lawn care company’s size. So what should you do?

Whoa, hold it right there. Take your finger off the “send” button and read this post first, because we’re gonna set the record straight when it comes to email marketing and how to use it to reach your customers.

First, as a sign of togetherness in this important fight against crappy emails, let’s agree that: 1) We will never use the words “email blast” again and, 2) Promise each other that we will never send another email that we would not want to receive ourselves. “The Golden Rule of Email” we’ll call it.

Shake?

This article was written by our client services director, Paige Worthy, and originally appeared as the cover story in the November 2014 issue of Turf Design Build Magazine.

At Landscape Leadership, we live and breathe inbound marketing.

But what is it, really? Well, when HubSpot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah came up with the term “inbound marketing” eight years ago, they defined it as such: “a methodology that focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product.”