Marketing & Sales Insight for the Lawn & Landscape Industry

Roll back the calendar...it’s 2016. I’ve had my own frustrating experiences marketing at a $13 million lawn and landscape company and now, after coming to work at Landscape Leadership, I have realized my misfortune was a common green industry marketing epidemic.

Ask me the question, “Is Pay-Per-Click (PPC), specifically with Google Adwords, a good idea for a lawn care company?”

The answer then was, “No. Stop wasting your money.”

But...now I would say, “Maybe…” Let me explain why.

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.

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.

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.

Purchase our entire collection of Green Ways comics on Amazon

In this Green Ways comic Archie is making the same mistake we see others in the lawn and landscape industry continue to make over and over again: registering numerous “exact match domains” (EMDs).

Ranking the top revenue-generating companies in the lawn and landscape industry has become an annual tradition amongst publishers in our industry. Lawn & Landscape was one of the first, releasing their inaugural “Top 100” list back in 1998.

Nearly 20 years later, Lawn & Landscape has again published their Top 100 list as part of their May 2017 issue.

We’ve had clients of ours appear on these industry lists off and on over the years so we like to pay attention to who’s moving up and down, or on and off.

After reviewing this year’s list, Chad Diller (Director of Client Success at Landscape Leadership) and I had the idea to grade and rank the websites of these top 100 lawn care and landscaping companies.

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

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

My step-son recently bought a hammock to hang under his bunk bed. Upon bringing it home, we realized that it would not be so easily hung. I assumed its attachment would entail me tying the support ropes around the upper frame of his bed, but instead, there were specialized hooks attached to short ropes that would not even reach around the upper frame of the bed.

Step-dad fail...If only I had opened the box then I could have stopped at the hardware store on our way home...stupid hammock.

The hammock reminds me of blogging for a business. More times than not, green industry companies make assumptions and inevitably end up saying, “Stupid blog.” Turns out this whole content marketing thing doesn’t work as they assumed.

Have you gone online recently to research the cost of something?

What happens when you search a company’s website for pricing information but you come up empty handed?

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.