Looking for ways to grow your lawn care company or landscaping business? Word-of-mouth marketing is a great place to start, but if you want to continue growing, you’re going to need more marketing approaches and advertising ideas.
Below, we’ll help you refine your lawn care marketing plan so you can better define your marketing goals. Then we’ll walk you through eight powerful, time-tested marketing tips you can implement to reach and convert more potential clients.
What to include in your lawn care marketing plan
Before we jump into our eight actionable lawn care marketing strategies, let’s make sure your lawn care marketing plan is where it needs to be. A strong marketing plan will give you a framework that you can use to organize the various strategies and ideas as you implement them.
Make sure you’ve defined or included the following elements in your marketing plan.
Target audience
Your target audience is the market you want to work with. Defining your target audience gives you a clearer understanding of where to focus your energy—and your marketing dollars.
To be clear, we’re not saying that you should never take a client that isn’t in your target audience. In fact, there are plenty of times when it might make sense to do so.
But you can’t care for every lawn in town, and you can’t effectively market that widely, either. Narrowing down to a target audience (such as a geographical area, a minimum property size, or residential vs. commercial) helps you cut through the noise and market precisely to the right people.
Marketing objectives
Your marketing objectives are your goals. They answer this question: What do your marketing efforts need to accomplish to be considered a success?
You might set an objective of increasing clients in your target audience by 25%. Maybe you’ll aim for a specific conversion rate from a pay-per-click (PPC) Google Ads campaign. Maybe it’s as simple as a number of new clients or increasing your average job value by 15%.
We can’t tell you what your marketing objectives should be, but the important thing is to have marketing objectives. Otherwise, you won’t have a way to know whether your efforts are delivering the results you need.
Brand identity
Your brand identity is your visual look: logo, website visuals, social media cover images, etc.
A good brand identity uses consistent colors, fonts, logos, wordmarks, and even tone and style. If you’ve worked with a marketing agency, chances are you already have a brand identity established. If so, stick with it and be consistent. Every flier, email, business card, and social post needs to look and sound like you.
If you don’t have a brand identity built yet, you can start by choosing colors and fonts you stick to whenever you create assets in Canva (or having someone create them for you). You can also use Bitly to create branded links to extend your brand identity to your URLs.
Building a full-scale brand identity isn’t the easiest thing to DIY, but if you’re considering going all out (without hiring outside help), HubSpot’s guide to developing a unique and memorable brand is a good starting point.
Unique selling proposition
Your unique selling proposition, or USP, tells people what makes your lawn care business different from the others in your service area.
It’s more than just a mission statement—several of your competitors likely have some variation of “to be the best lawn care provider…” in their mission statement. Being the best is a good goal, but it’s not unique in the slightest.
Once you determine what makes customers choose you over a sea of competitors, you’re close to discovering your USP.
Your USP becomes a sort of guide, almost like true north on a compass. You can vet every opportunity or marketing angle that comes your way using your USP. Some marketing approaches will highlight what makes you unique. Others will obscure or even damage it.
When you think through opportunities with your USP as a guide, the right answers start to become clear.
Market and competitive research
Two distinct forms of marketing research are crucial: market research and competitor research.
First, the market. You’ve already defined an ideal customer and your USP. But do you know all these data points?
- Where the ideal customers that want your USP live
- Approximately how many of them exist in your service area
- What they’re doing for lawn care right now (paying a rival, doing it themselves)
Market research helps you understand how your target customers live, think, and operate so that you can adjust your marketing to better meet their wants and needs.
Competitive research is essentially the same thing but aimed at your competition. You want to answer questions, including these:
- Who are your competitors?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- Why are some of your target customers choosing them?
- How can you differentiate your business from theirs?
Promotional strategy
As a small business owner, you may not have the resources to advertise in every conceivable channel and location (nor would it be a good use of your time to do so—it would be both overwhelming and overkill).
Your promotional strategy decides how you’ll allocate your marketing spend, such as which platforms and which target areas. Whether you’re all in on email marketing and social media marketing, exploring direct mail, or getting ready to record a radio ad, all the details will go into your promotional strategy.
As you develop your promotional strategy, you’ll need to leverage several categories of marketing tools. We’ve rounded up eight of the best marketing tools covering a variety of marketing functions to help you hone your promotional strategy.
Reporting metrics
Reporting metrics are how you measure the success of a marketing campaign. They’re the numerical data behind your marketing objectives, telling you how well you’re doing.
Reporting metrics could cover a wide range of data points, including:
- The effects your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts have had on your search rankings
- The rate at which you’re creating happy customers
- The click-through rate (CTR) of your Facebook Ads campaign
- The number of new customer bookings over time
8 marketing tactics to boost your lawn care business
Now that you have an effective lawn care marketing plan in place, it’s time to get tactical. Here are eight marketing tactics lawn care and landscaping companies can use right now to grow their business and reach more potential customers.
1. Set up and optimize your Google Business profile
Your Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business) is the information that comes up when users search for your business. Creating one is free, and your business might even already have one. To check, just go to Google Maps or Google Search and type in your business name, city, and state.
If nothing shows up, start by adding your business through Google Maps. If your business shows up but doesn’t seem like you can do anything to it, select Claim this business. You might also need to verify your business on Google once it’s added or claimed.
It might sound complicated, but the process is usually very straightforward. And it’s worth the effort: Imagine how many people in your city are Googling “lawn care near me.” Setting up a Google Business Profile is how you control what they see when your business lands in the results.
2. Establish a strong social media presence
Next, set up a strong social media presence focused on the platforms where your ideal customers tend to spend their time. Since lawn care customers generally skew a bit older, Facebook is the undisputed leader in this industry.
It’s important to set up a profile on each social media platform you choose and then post regularly on those platforms. You can use these posts to drum up business, announce deals and discounts, or even update customers on weather-related schedule changes.
Bitly’s branded links can supercharge your social media strategy, giving you short, memorable links that fit your brand identity.
Learn more about how you can use the power of branded links to support your social strategy.
3. Launch a website for your business
If you don’t have a website yet, launch one ASAP.
At a minimum, a website tells prospective customers that you’re serious about your business. In an industry full of teenagers driving beat-up pickup trucks, a simple but professional website can be a big differentiator.
As your business grows, your website can evolve from mere proof of professionalism or a “digital business card” into a lead-generation tool—but that’s a topic for another day.
4. Implement a referral program
Never underestimate the power of a satisfied customer. This is especially relevant in lawn care and landscaping, where your product is something so visible and enviable that it’s bound to be the topic of conversation. People’s desire to keep their lawns looking as nice as their neighbors’ can lead to multiple customers on a single street, saving you time and gas.
When people comment on a homeowner’s nice lawn, organic referrals are natural. By starting a referral program (say, a 5% discount for every referral that becomes a paying customer), you can turn those satisfied customers into new client referral pipelines.
5. Manage your online reviews
Nearly everywhere that your business shows up online, customers can leave reviews. These reviews can be your best friend or your worst enemy, so it’s important to stay tuned in.
Many sites allow you to respond or reply to reviews. Take advantage of this. Thank the positive reviewers to generate more engagement, and respond graciously to any negative reviews, giving your side of the story when helpful.
6. Include QR Codes in your physical advertisements
In today’s connected world, even your physical advertisements need a digital component. Including a QR Code on your physical advertisements lets customers find you digitally with just a tap or two on their phone.
Even better, with Bitly you can fully customize and redirect your QR Codes. For example, if you start a new promotion and build a landing page for it, you can redirect existing QR Codes to that new page.
Learn how easy it is to generate QR Codes with Bitly.
7. Invest in local sponsorships and partnerships
The lawn care business is as local as it gets, so it pays to invest locally. Sponsoring local events is a great way to build positive brand awareness, and you might be surprised at how affordable some smaller events can be.
Local partnerships can go a long way, too. For example, you could network with realtors to become their top recommendation for lawn care. Or, if you’re a residential lawn care business, you could partner with a commercial lawn care business to trade referrals.
8. Create informative video content
Creating and distributing informative video content on social media can deliver impressive results. Yes, video can be a bit intimidating—especially if you’ve never made one. But in the age of TikTok, it’s easier than ever to create and distribute short videos without fancy equipment.
Videos are more engaging than text or photo-based posts, and they can also build greater brand awareness and trust.
Looking for even more marketing inspiration? Here are another 12 free marketing ideas to keep your marketing machine rolling!
Increase the reach of your business with Bitly
Across many elements of your lawn care marketing efforts, Bitly delivers increased reach, better control, and deeper analytics.
With our custom short links, you can create branded links that are memorable and easy to type. And with Bitly, you can instantly generate QR Codes that help your physical advertising draw customers into your digital marketing efforts. Let Bitly help you take your lawn care business to the next level with better-branded marketing.