Like other businesses, the landscaping business is also witnessing fierce competition and, therefore, it is necessary that you implement the right landscaping marketing strategy to get more customers. Since a big portion of your clients are going to search for landscaping services online, most marketing methods given here will be focusing on online marketing methods for landscaping businesses. Let us explore all these landscaping leads generation methods one by one.
1) Website
For capturing and converting landscaping leads online, the basic minimum requirement is having a well-designed and professional website. It must also be noted that all people who will be visiting your website are not going to call you or take your services. To increase the ratio of people who take your services after visiting your website, implement these things on your website
A) Test your site loading speed and ensure that it is fast loading because many people tend to switch to other websites if the website loads slow.
B) Make your website fully optimized for mobile devices because an increasing proportion of people nowadays use mobile devices to browse the web.
C) Put testimonials and reviews of your landscaping business on the front page.
D) Put a direct call number and a service booking form on the home page itself.
E) Make sure to highlight the best features and accreditation of your business.
F) Incentivize people to call you using a free quote or free inspection offer on your website.
2) Outrank Others Online
There are many landscaping businesses that have their websites indexed on Google. However, not all of them will get the benefits of an online presence as people usually find most of their required information and services on the first page of Google itself. So you must make sure that you take care of website optimization in order to rank on the first page of Google for various landscaping-related keywords. You can do this either by learning and implementing good SEO principles or by giving the task to an SEO agency that can take care of your website optimization. This will ensure that you start getting landscaping customers regularly.
3) Social Network
Social networks can help in growing your landscaping business in 3 different ways namely
A) Direct Lead Generation: Firstly by making an account on the most prominent social networks, you can connect directly with local groups and businesses and can thus get new landscaping leads.
B) Indirect Lead Generation (Method 1): By having a presence on such networks, your landscaping business profile URL will also start ranking in searching engines for various combinations of low competition keywords due to which more people will find your profile in Google search.
C) Indirect Lead Generation (Method 2): Many people who come to know about your business through various online and offline means will search the name of your business on Google and they will also find your social profiles while performing the search. This will give them a good signal and will help in conversions.
However, social media is a slow but rewarding marketing strategy for most local businesses and services. Once you have built the initial momentum by being active for a few months, the rest things become easy. The only thing that you must keep in mind initially is that you must not start promoting your landscaping services from day 1 of being active. Socialize first and then promote on these platforms.
4) Press Releases
If you want to spread your landscaping business name across various websites (most of them being news sites), then the best way to do this is through press releases. A press release will also provide instant attention to your announcement by getting traffic from hundreds of published sites. At an indirect level, they will help you increase the backlink factor of your website which is sure to help in the performance of your website in Google, thereby getting you much more traffic and landscaping customers. Depending on your budget, you can also ensure your press release to appear on some of the prominent news sites of the world. This process of issuing press releases is extensively applied by many agencies to increase the brand value of their client’s businesses and services.
5) The Magic of Ads
The fastest method to start getting landscaping leads is through paid ads online. You can grab active and fresh leads for landscaping services by using Google Ads which will display your ads every time someone from your pre-decided location searches for landscaping services. One other big paid ads traffic source is Facebook Ads, though its lead quality will not be as high as Google Ads. Both these mentioned ad platforms have their own set of rules and regulations for making ads and editing parameters relevant to ads. It is advised to learn some basic fundamentals before making the ads so that you do not end up having a negative return from untargeted ads. The other way around is to get an online advertising agency to handle all the steps and they will handle all the technicalities.
6) LinkedIn
To get more high spending clients and commercial opportunities for landscaping business, nothing can be better than the platform “LinkedIn”. You can easily find direct profiles of high-end employees (CEO, CMO, etc) of local businesses on LinkedIn and can then make contacts with them to get bigger opportunities. The LinkedIn platform also allows paid advertising option which can be used to grow your landscaping business if you want to see some results soon (though, it’s much more costly to run ads on LinkedIn). It is better to explore a little more about the platform to understand all the possibilities provided by it.
7) Email Marketing
By establishing contact with potential clients through email marketing, you open the doors to recurring business for your landscaping services. In order to do email marketing for landscaping services, you can either adopt any or both of the two ways given below:
A) Set up an email subscription option open on your website and provide something useful in exchange for the email addresses of your website visitors. This can be a free e-book related to landscaping or a coupon code for your services or a low-cost digital gift item etc.
B) Partner with local businesses or blogs that have a big list of email addresses of people within your city. You can pay these entities to promote your content, offers related to landscaping through email marketing.
8) Utilizing Existing Customer Base
For all customers that either take your services or are interested in your services, make sure to establish maximum touchpoints with them through their email, phone number and by asking them to leave their reviews online and on their social profiles. For this, you can go a step further and can choose to give them some incentivizes for doing these tasks. Once you have their details, you can promote new offers and services regularly and can get repeat business from these customers.
9) Networking
All people and businesses who can likely have more percentage of clients interested in landscaping services can be the ideal prospects to send you leads. Some of these include pool care services, flower shop owners, pest control services, realtors, etc. You can give them custom printed gifts, coupons, or other incentives to make them more inclined and interested in referring your landscaping services. This way you can market and grow your landscaping business using your own local network of entities.
10) Promoting on Customer Premises
When you are rendering landscaping services at your customers’ premises, you can utilize that premises to advertise your landscaping business brand name to all people who are in the neighborhood. You can do so by putting your business banners and flags (with prior permission).
11) Small Utilities
You can create small utilities (with your landscaping business name printed on them) and can distribute them for free in various neighborhoods. Some of these utilities can include door hangers, no parking signs, beware of dogs sign, etc. To ensure better outcomes, you can first send a few people to survey and ask which type of banner, signs people would like to put on their front yard followed by printing and distributing it for free. This way many households will become your landscaping business advertisers.
12) Showcase USP
With more and more people using the Internet, most people will likely go through websites of many landscaping businesses and if you don’t have any competitive advantage to showcase to people, then most people will choose other landscaping services instead of yours. So take note of all the “Unique Selling Propositions” (USP) that your business has to offer and showcase it across all the mediums that you choose for marketing. This can be things like awards, accreditation, big clients, number of years in business, total clients served, 24/7 services, cost benefits, free inspection, etc. Make a list of all the best things that you can showcase to your customers so that you don’t miss out on opportunities.
13) Utilizing Name of Competing Landscaping Services
Let us say that the top landscaping services in your area are A, B and C. Then you can bid on the brand name of the companies A, B and C in Google (by using them as keywords) so that ad of your landscaping business will show even when people type your competing business name in Google. This can put some additional clients for you who might have otherwise used a different service. The same process can also be repeated with content marketing, the only difference being you will have to create separate posts for each competing business name followed by ranking it using SEO principles.
14) Utilizing Ranking Sites
Some directories and websites that often pop up high for local businesses are one of the best resources for marketing a landscaping business. Some of the names that you may be familiar with are Homeadvisor, Yelp, Crunchbase, etc. For a one-time exercise of adding your business details on such platforms, you not only gain additional traffic sources but also valuable links for your official landscaping website.
15) Free Services
You can offer free (or highly discounted) landscaping services to some of the most promising clients that are sure to send you many referrals. These can include some big commercial clients that look after property renovation and design, big real estate dealers or powerful people with big corporate connections.
16) Influencers
You can get your business advertising content spread across many people by using big influencers from your city/town. Those people owning big local groups or having a big following on social networks are one of the best contenders for getting your marketing message spread to thousands of people. There are many big sites online that list influencers by various parameters like follower count, locality, niche, etc.
17) Subscriptions
Landscaping services require maintenance and you can, therefore, come up with good packages to convert your one-time visitor into a recurring client so that you get much more revenue per client. This will also increase the cash flow to your business per service which means you will have more money to spend on other marketing channels which is sure to generate a big momentum for your business. Subscriptions can add a long term potential for marketing a landscaping business.
18) Custom Printed Gifts
No matter how much money a person has, people like receiving gifts because it builds an experience of being special rather than just a monetary value. So get some custom printed gifts ready that you can hand over to each client after rendering your service. In order to get the best possible results, get your business name and details printed on items that might last long so that people will remember your business name and will become more inclined to refer others to you. You can come across many sites online that do custom printing on various products like mugs, calendars, T-Shirts, Pen, paperweight, etc.
19) Videos
When it comes to convincing people, videos convert at a much higher rate than simple text content because more senses are engaged with videos than text. Create a few videos related to your landscaping business so that every time people would type your business name to find more information about your company, they will see videos that will describe your business much better and will, therefore, give better results. You can also add videos to your website and social media so that people who visit your website or social network will have more chances of selecting your service.
20) Offline Marketing
The traditional offline marketing methods like banners, flyers and newspaper advertising are still relevant though the results are hard to analyze. Distributing flyers and banners in crowded places still work well for generating leads for local business and services. So don’t forget to add offline marketing methods to market your landscaping business.
21) Being Active Locally
Being active locally through events, shows, sponsorships, community gatherings, etc helps to build a brand reputation which in turn converts into more sales and customers. Though it is not a cheap and convenient method as compared to many other online landscaping marketing methods, it is definitely one of the brand shaping methods.
22) Editorials
By contacting journalists and publishing posts related to lawn care and landscaping in local newspapers and magazines, you stand much better chances of getting big commercial clients as getting articles published in newspapers and magazines creates a good impression about the image of the company. Once your columns appear in newspapers, you can cross-promote this achievement on your website and other marketing sources too.
23) Taking Care of Reviews
One of the most influencing factors for most businesses nowadays is reviews because it is easy for people to just type the name of your landscaping business and find out what people say about your services. If they find bad or average reviews, then many of the potential prospects will definitely choose another provider. So maintain a healthy positive review of your landscaping business online. You must make it a habit of asking your customers to leave reviews for your service.
By implementing the landscaping business marketing methods given here, you are destined to witness a fast growth of your landscaping business. If you have something to say be it doubts or more landscaping marketing tips, you can do so in the comments section below.
