If you have a lawn care service or landscaping company, you work hard daily to hire the best people, manage scheduling, pay bills, maintain equipment, and get the work done. You don’t have time to worry about marketing. Often business owners neglect marketing because it seems impossibly complex and overwhelming. However, companies can’t grow without marketing and companies that don’t grow can stagnate, so it’s important to find new business by marketing.
Lawn care and landscape companies, like all service businesses, want people to be able to find them online but don’t know how to build, maintain, and leverage an effective website. They think great logos, signs, nice uniforms, and handouts can help, but they must learn how to design and write them for the best results. Everyone knows social media marketing is important, but most people either don’t understand how to use it or don’t have time to post and track.
Fortunately, some marketing companies specialize in service businesses like lawn care and landscaping. They can help design, publish, and manage websites, create social media platforms, track results, build your brand including logo design, create advertising and marketing collaterals, and even help with recruiting and retention. They will build marketing strategies that:
- Establish and build your brand
- Improve your online presence with a website and social media platforms
- Leverage the best digital marketing tools.
- Improve your selling techniques and follow-up routines
Your best choice for a marketing company will depend on your company size, your plans for future growth, and your individual needs. Here are a few marketing companies offering services designed specifically for lawn care companies:
Lawn Care Marketing Mechanic
The Lawn Care Marketing Mechanic company is a smaller organization able to give personal service to any sized lawn services company. When you call, they will guide you through a ten-step process that gets your marketing program up and running. The ten steps are as follows:
- Discovery and Consultation by Phone – an introductory phone call to introduce the program and answer any questions you might have about the services.
- Company Audit and Competition Analysis– You get a study of your company’s present marketing and sales and a comparison to the competing companies in your market.
- Proposal Approval– You receive and sign an official agreement for Lawn Care Marketing Mechanic staff to start working with you.
- Questionnaire– This is where they gather all the information needed about your company and services to design a program.
- Website and Program Design – Lawn Care Marketing Mechanic creates a website and marketing plan designed to increase leads and conversions.
- Website Build – Lawn service companies usually start with 5 to 10 pages, including the home page, about us, our services, contact us, special services offered, and a blog page.
- Content Creation –They write and publish industry-based blog articles, new company information and services, and portfolio pages.
- Reputation Monitoring & Review System -They set up systems for tracking and measuring marketing results.
- Contact Form or CRM Integration-They work with companies specializing in tracking and capturing all lead information.
- Website Launch– This includes linking a Google Analytics account to the new website.
In addition to the initial ten steps, Lawn Care Marketing Mechanics offers ongoing services like citation development. Your company gets listed with both information and graphics on all appropriate directories from Yelp to Angie’s list. They submit accurate business information for the client to the four main business aggregators, Factual, Neustar, Infogroup, and Acxiom, because incorrect business information on the internet can be destructive. They also continue to write, design and publish content like blog articles, project descriptions, photos, new services offered, etc. LCMM also adds backlinks to other industry-related content, which helps establish its clients as experts.
Lawn Care Marketing Mechanics also handles all social media marketing and pay-per-click advertising, and retargeting services every month. Retargeting uses captured website traffic information to identify and approach potential customers. In addition, they build a review request system designed to increase the number of service reviews.
Whether you are a sole operator running a lawn care company or a larger multi-crewed landscaping company, Lawn Care Marketing Mechanics can help with your marketing.
Evergrow Marketing
Evergrow Marketing concentrates on establishing or improving your digital marketing solutions, from websites to social media. They understand the importance of having an attractive and optimized website and want to increase traffic to your site with the latest and most effective SEO (search engine optimization) strategies.
They will build you a website that search engines will like searching. Your site will automatically include five pages:
- Home Page
- Services Page
- Where We Work Page
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
As their client, you can add additional pages to show your work with a portfolio page, build your brand with a blog, offer other niche services, or answer “often-asked questions.”
In addition to building a great website, Evergrow Marketing offers various marketing “modules” tailored to fit any marketing goals or budget. The basic package, which they call “The Foundation,” includes monthly SEO, Google Business Profile Management, Google Ads Management, $250 worth of ads every month, and useful monthly performance reports. Clients can add Facebook, Local Service, Discovery, or Spotify ads. They can also get regular blog articles written and posted.
Lawnline Marketing
Lawnline Marketing handles digital marketing for multimillion-dollar lawn and landscape companies in the U.S. and Canada. They believe in and deliver an all-inclusive, complete marketing solution for companies, leaving lawn and landscaping businesses to close their sales and handle day-to-day operations.
Lawnline handles everything from website design and search engine optimization to social media marketing. They customize a program for a company based on the services it offers. For example, companies providing maintenance services need different marketing from landscape designers.
Lawnline Marketing’s complete solution approach includes the following:
- A Great Website that’s designed, maintained, and optimized to attract and convert visitors
- Branding Services if a company needs help with logo, color scheme, and graphics help
- Competitor Analysis to help a company stay ahead.
- Content Marketing, including regular blogs, case studies, and new service announcements to continually attract search engine attention
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others
- Remarketing to approach people who have previously visited the website
- Social Media Platform Advertising geared to grow the most appropriate audiences
- Review Building to gain more positive reviews
- Citation, which means getting a company listed in all the right directories so they can be found
- Reports to measure and assess the success of marketing efforts.
The reports are based on sophisticated tracking and analytical data collected. Lawnline uses heatmaps and video recordings to track visitors’ engagement with a company website. They also have software to follow and analyze the organic search engine rankings for their client and the competition, so they can work to improve a lawn care or landscaping company’s search ranking. They also offer call and form submission conversion tracking from paid advertisements.
Lawnline’s all-inclusive marketing services may not be the best choice for smaller companies. Instead, they work best with larger, multi-crewed operations that can handle the sales volume the marketing will produce.
Green Marketing
Green Marketing specializes in marketing for landscapers, lawncare or maintenance companies, hardscape companies, tree service companies, and power washers. They understand how companies in the green services industry can use smart digital marketing to succeed. Their marketing services are comprehensive, building your brand and reputation, improving search engine rankings, and using the right software to track, measure, and analyze all marketing efforts.
Green Marketing takes a personal approach, with human contact as the key to a successful relationship. They regularly consult with business owners and managers. The company offers comprehensive marketing packages rather than individual services. They believe in mixing digital tools and adjusting them as the dynamics of online marketing change.
They start by building you a website and creating a strong, distinctive brand, including logos, taglines, colors, and advertising copy. Green Marketing drives traffic to the website with search engine optimization strategies from keywords to content creation. A client gets social media platforms and content, too.
Recognizing that website traffic usually takes time to build. The company also creates advertising strategies designed to ramp up incoming leads fast. The advertising can include email marketing, digital ads, and collateral materials like signage and brochures. Green Marketing might be a good choice for a smaller business owner just getting started or someone with no marketing knowledge or experience. The personal approach would be helpful to new entrepreneurs.
CoalMarch
CoalMarch started in the pest control marketing field but added lawn care marketing to its services about ten years ago. The company used what it knew about marketing pest control as a service industry to serve a new, similar sector. They understand lawn care business and know how important analyzing a market and the local competition can be to succeeding. They also know recruiting the right people and keeping them can make or break a lawn care company.
They quickly establish growth goals for their clients, whether they are sole proprietors with small staffs or larger multi-crewed companies. They then design marketing programs to reach those goals. Their one-on-one approach ensures consistent and manageable growth for any sized company.
The programs include a mobile-optimized website and conversion-focused to bring in leads that result in new business. CoalMarch continually updates content and improves a client’s organic search results. They add press releases, industry content, and backlinks to reputable sources to position a client as a lawn care expert. This marketing company includes a team management and recruiting platform to help companies attract and keep top employees. A service company can only succeed if, when they get new customers, they can complete the work because they have the necessary staff.
The marketing efforts also work to ensure your company appears in local internet searches for lawn care. Using social media and positive reviews from customers, the company establishes and protects a lawn care company’s reputation in the marketplace.
They add seasonal pay-per-click advertising to track and evaluate the leads they generate. CoalMarch measures results honestly, using agency-level analytics and tracking systems. They look for ways to improve performance if the growth goals still need to be reached. Digital advertising trends change fast, so the marketing experts work on updating strategies to match and keep leads coming in.
Lawn Care Marketing Past and Present
There was a time when lawn care company marketing was fairly simple. A business owner could place a yellow page ad, buy some yard and truck signage, business cards, and door hangers, and join the local chamber of commerce and that would be enough marketing to build a company. Today’s reliance on digital marketing makes lawn care marketing much more complex and time-consuming. Business owners need the help of a marketing company to get and stay competitive in any marketplace.
Depending on the community size and growth goals, a lawn care or landscaping company could still benefit from some more traditional advertising. Sponsoring local sports teams and being involved in other community projects helps a company build a reputation for civic-mindedness. Customer loyalty and referral reward programs are great for lawn care companies, and adding radio spots or local newspaper ads to their digital marketing can build the company brand. However, in today’s digital environment, the traditional advertising and public relations tools should work to support and feed a company’s digital marketing efforts. A marketing company specializing in lawn care companies can design a plan that successfully combines digital and traditional advertising.
Lawn care company owners should choose a marketing company specializing in service industry marketing with an understanding of lawn care and landscaping businesses. Finding the right company can help ensure a successful relationship between the marketing company and the client. The best choice might depend on budget, growth goals, company size, and the business owner’s marketing knowledge and experience. Consider one of the five companies recommended above.