Building your lawn care or gardening business is the first step to establishing yourself as a successful business owner. The most crucial step, however, is marketing. You need to be mindful of getting the word out about your business. After all, you could have the best gardening skills in the world, but if no one knows about them, you’re not going to make any progress.
Marketing your lawn care business has a ton of advantages. It will:
- Help you raise awareness for your brand
- Establish you as a lawn care expert in your locale and gain the trust of local consumers
- Grow your business online, so that you can reach people across other areas, providing an opportunity for expansion.
As a business owner, you need to utilize all avenues available to you to conduct your promotional campaigns. In this guide, we’ll show you how to take advantage of offline, social media, email, and location based marketing and some SEO practices.
Offline marketing
Distribute flyers
Flyers are one of the most effective, tried and tested techniques for getting the word out about your business.
Put up lawn care flyers in:
- Places where they will be easily visible
- Places where there are people at most hours during the day, for instance, outlet malls, public parks, or sidewalks
Remember to check local laws about flyer distribution and placement before you do this though, so you don’t run into any trouble.
As a small business, you may not have the funds to get expensive flyer designs made by someone else. If that’s the case, you’re in luck. PosterMyWall offers an online flyer maker that allows you to make beautiful, professional-looking flyers in a matter of minutes. Simply choose a lawn care flyer template that you like and customize it according to your preferences.
In addition to general gardening flyers, PosterMyWall has free flyer templates centered around specific services, for instance lawn maintenance flyers. You’ll also find lawn mowing flyer templates in our collection. We want to give you as many options as possible as you work on your lawn care business marketing plan.
You can also create a large poster to advertise your lawn care business at key locations. Simply use our free online poster maker to get a high quality poster ready in no time.
Use word of mouth and referrals
People are far more likely to trust the quality of your services if someone else sings your praises to them. This is because while you may be biased, a customer is likely to share their experience of your business with others.
Ask the customers who use your services to recommend you to their friends and neighbors so that word gets around, until you see a domino effect which ends with you taking care of everyone’s front and back lawns in the neighborhood.
Introduce a scheme where existing customers can get a small discount if someone they refer you to ends up using your services. Print out tiny referral cards and hand them out to customers, and everytime they bring in a new customer, they get to check off a point on the card. If they bring in a bunch of customers, they should be entitled to a bigger discount.
Word of mouth is an important strategy simply because it builds a network of trust and familiarity with your consumers. If your company becomes a well-known name around the neighborhood, you’ll bring in more business naturally.
Target local businesses
Local businesses don’t often go out actively looking for someone to tend to their grounds for them. It’s an afterthought in many instances, and this is something you can use to your advantage.
Do your research beforehand and figure out which businesses in your area have grounds that need to be catered to. Approach those businesses directly. Go to them and make a pitch. Tell them what they would have to gain by hiring you. Give them a reason to give lawn care services a second thought.
Bagging a local business is more than just an opportunity to establish yourself as a noteworthy industry leader. It also ensures that you have a long term client that you can rely on. Months long or even a year long contract allows you to keep a steady flow of revenue coming in.
It is important that you pitch to local businesses face to face, rather than online. This adds a personal touch to your business and boosts your credibility as a company that cares. According to one study, 85% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company after an in-person interaction.
Social media marketing
Post pictures and testimonials
The goal with social media marketing is to familiarize your target audience with your services, and to establish a relationship of trust and accessibility with them. And the best way to do this is by sharing – a lot.
Make a Facebook and Instagram page and update it regularly with pictures of your staff at work. Show people what you do and how you do it. Also show before and after pictures of lawns that your team has revived. Paint a picture of wholesomeness and good, hard work, and it will click immediately both with other small businesses and suburban homeowners looking for friendly faces to work around the house.
Use social media to advertise your services whether it’s cutting, mowing, clearing leaves, pest control, planting flowers, or irrigation.
Finally, post customer testimonials. This should include pictures of happy customers and a paragraph or two of their experience with you. The more you have of these, the better, because remember, customers trust other customers. PosterMyWall has tons of gorgeous testimonial templates that you can choose from.
Lawn care company, Alalawn, recently posted customer testimonials on Facebook to validate the work that they do. Similarly, The Master’s Lawn Care also regularly updates its pages to include testimonials from happy customers.
Plan giveaways
Stay one step ahead of your competitors by taking your social media marketing to new heights. You should do this by increasing your reach. And the best way to increase your reach is by hosting a social media giveaway.
People love free stuff with more and more people taking an interest in plant keeping and gardening, there has never been a better time to market lawn care.
A simple and effective social media giveaway will ask people to share a certain post or tag a number of friends in order to be eligible for, let’s say, two bags of rare flowering seeds. Tempt people by showing what the seeds will look like once the flowers have bloomed.
Armour’s Lawn Care recently did a giveaway on their Facebook page. They offered customers a chance to win company merchandise and a gift card if they liked, shared, commented, and tagged two friends on the post. The giveaway was wildly successful and garnered twenty times the engagement they otherwise got. This meant free publicity and tons of new customers.
This giveaway was a roaring success mainly because it specifically asked customers to reach more people to win. People love free stuff and given the opportunity for it, they are always willing to promote your brand to their friends. So remember, whenever you host a giveaway, it must ask people to share your content so that it reaches a bigger audience than it normally would.
You should also host a service-oriented giveaway. Let everyone know that the first twenty people to share your post will receive a special discount on lawn mowing services.
When people share your content, your customer base is bound to increase because you will be reaching people you weren’t able to before. These people may not enter the giveaway but they will remember you for when they need their front lawns maintained.
Start a blog
A blog is a great way to get people to visit your website and social media pages. Blog posts should be centered around providing gardening tips and answering any questions people might have about maintaining their lawn.
You should use your expertise to write detailed blog posts about lawn care. Make sure your blog posts are concise and to the point so they can find what they want quickly.
A well visited blog will bump up your website on search queries relevant to your niche. For instance, if you have a blog post on flowering plants that grow the quickest, and someone searches for this information, Google will show your site as a solution to their query.
Once the person clicks on the blog post, you get an interested reader and a potential customer. Through your blog post, you should aim to do two things for this individual:
- Answer their query to the best of your ability
- Subtly advertise your own services e.g. the fact that you can plant flowers in people’s gardens at affordable rates
The second aim is important to fulfil because you already know that you’ve reached someone who wants to plant flowers. Now it’s your job to get them to do it with your help.
GreenPal is a lawn care company that posts regular blogs about everything gardening related – seeding, aeration, landscape design, fertilizing – you name it and they have a blog on it.
Set goals for your social media reach
Track your engagement rate on social media and set goals for yourself regarding the number of people you want following and interacting with you. After all, social media marketing is ineffective if you’re not keeping a record of the progress you’re making with it. You could unknowingly be putting customers off with your content, and if that is the case, you should know about it.
Set weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual social media goals. If you’re meeting your goals in one quarter and not in another, find out why.
Your goals should look something like this:
Followers –
- +10 weekly
- +30 monthly
- +110 quarterly
- +500 annually
Similarly, keep a track of clicks and interactions. You should also take advantage of scheduling tools like Hootsuite so you can view all your data on one platform.
Email marketing
Make and segment email lists
Collecting a good number of emails is the first step to email marketing. This may seem like a daunting and tedious task but if you’re smart about it, it shouldn’t be too difficult.
Use your website, social media, and offline marketing to collect emails. On your website, add a page that people can upload their information to to stay updated on everything new with the business. Even better, create a pop up that emerges as soon as someone logs into your website. Let people know that they will be entitled to exclusive news and offers if they sign up.
On Instagram, add a sign up link in your bio that allows people to add their information. Remind people of the link every so often via posts and stories, and highlight the perks that come with being a subscriber. On Facebook, the best thing to do is to add a call to action button on the front of your page. People can browse through your services and then sign up for your email list in just one click.
Ask people to fill a sign up sheet when you work on their lawns. Also, go around the neighborhood collecting email addresses from people in your locale, after telling them about your business.
Once you have your email lists, it’s time to categorize them into segments. You need to make sure that the emails you send out go to the people they’re intended for, otherwise your marketing is pointless.
For instance, if you’re giving a special offer on full lawn care services on giant grounds, you wouldn’t want to send that email to small homeowners who are usually just looking for someone to tend to their plants and mow their lawn once a week. Now even though direct marketing through email saves a lot of time, it undoubtedly does more harm than good if it goes to the wrong person. This person may get annoyed by constant irrelevant emails and choose to unsubscribe.
Instead, this email should be going out to country clubs and university campuses instead i.e. places that actually have grounds big enough to avail your service. Similarly, homeowners should get separate emails that advertise specifically to them.
Everyone has different needs and the best thing about email marketing is that you can take care of all of them. So remember to always segment your lists before you advertise via email.
Create colorful campaigns
Emails that are plain and boring are not going to get any traction. In fact, people might not even be bothered to read through them in their entirety. People like color and pizzazz, and your promotional emails should give them exactly that.
A fun idea would be to create a plant mascot that introduces all your emails. Not only is that a cute way to grab your customers’ attention, but a mascot will also be able to deliver important information in short and snappy ways.
Remember to always keep the text limited in emails. People don’t want to read, they want to watch. Present your information using exciting graphics to reel them in.
You can use PosterMyWall’s email campaign builder to create the most exciting and impactful campaigns, to really build your customer base.
TruGreen is a lawn care company that has run successful email campaigns in the past. They collect emails using social media (e.g. giveaways), segment those emails into niche-specific lists, and then market their services based on each list’s preferences. They have seen tremendous success with this, and have used the email marketing approach repeatedly to gain more customers.
Location based marketing
Engage with local reviews
With more and more people using social media to share their opinions, you must keep a track of what is being said about your company on online forums.
Look specifically at reviews from people within your community. Find out what they have to say and adapt according to their needs. Being able to respond to customer queries quickly shows that you care for them.
Ultimately, you need to monitor the feedback you get and use it to improve your services. Publicize the fact that you listened by thanking community members on your website and social media, and welcoming more reviews.
This is an important way to build trust with your community, and make a statement about the kind of brand you are.
Try geo-fencing
Currently, 84% of marketers use location data for their marketing campaigns, and there’s a good reason for this. It works, even in small doses. Geo-fencing is a location based technique that is quickly taking the marketing world by storm.
Geo-fencing involves demarcating a virtual radius, within which you advertise to consumers. When people are within the radius, they get timed notifications on their smartphones about your services. For instance, you’ll have more luck with customers if you offer a 20% discount to people within a particular radius (because they’ll be more likely to avail it), as opposed to a general advertisement.
This strategy is good for lawn care businesses because your work is inherently location based. This type of marketing allows you to set priorities on where and when you want certain promotions to be advertised.
Interact with the local community
If you want to be big as a business in a particular locale, you have to learn to integrate with the local community. As a lawn care business, the best way to do this is by participating in local contests and shows.
For instance, your community may be hosting a flower show. This would be the perfect opportunity for you to advertise your gardening services and your flowers. Simply set up shop at the show, and show people exactly what kind of work you do. This would also be a good opportunity for you to collect people’s information so you can advertise to them later, strategy outlined in more detail in an earlier section of this guide.
Apart from this, try setting up stalls in malls, parks and community centers. Let people come up to you and talk to you one on one, to find out more about your products and services.
The ultimate goal is to get the local community to recognize you as a company they can trust with their gardening needs. And active efforts at integration is the only way to go about it.
SEO tips and tricks
SEO is one of the most important online tools for small businesses. It can be a make or break in raising your brand awareness. Some people find the whole concept too daunting to even explore. However, with just a few small suggestions on how to incorporate SEO into your marketing, you can take your small business to incredible heights.
Focus on unique offerings
Find out what the unique selling point for your business is. Is it the lawn mowing services you offer? Is it weeding and planting? Is it great customer service? Pick whatever describes your brand the best and advertise it as often as you can on all your online platforms.
Your unique offering should be something that you can offer but your competitor cannot. So it’s important to do your research first in order to determine this. Once you do, you should make it an integral part of your brand so that people know to come to you alone when they have a problem of that nature.
For instance, Lawn Care company Weed Man prides itself on offering golf-course level precision with their grass cutting services. Anyone who wants their lawn to be minimalists and not overbearing will then contact Weed Man specifically to get their needs met. While other lawn care companies may also provide quality services, Weed Man has established itself as a leader in the business through its unique offering.
Use the right keywords
SEO works best when you have an idea of the keywords that people search the most often. For instance, if people are searching for “flowering plant seeds”, you need to make sure that your website content contains that keyword as much as possible. The more keywords you have, the greater the chances of your content showing up at the very top in Google’s search results.
The best way to incorporate keywords into your content is through blog posts. Your blog posts should be about anything and everything related to lawn care. Each blog post should include a number of keywords that are most often searched, and you should use them to subtly advertise your products.
Research is central for finding out the right keywords. So before you start working on a blog post, do your research. Find out what people are most interested in in that department, and then start writing.
Apart from adding keywords, you should optimize your blogpost for SEO in the following ways:
- Add a meta description – this gets shown in Google search results
- Add links to relevant articles
- Use short paragraphs and lots of headings
- Use transition words
- Add links to other blogs on your site
- Structure your blog post so you don’t add fluff content that would reduce readability
Have a user friendly website
We already talked about the importance of creating a website for your business. However, if this website is cluttered or difficult to navigate, users will get frustrated and leave without engaging with it.
Google shares some tips on how to make a user friendly website. Also remember to always make your website look visually appealing. The web pages should be neatly organized and the home page should be welcoming and informative at the same time. Remember, the goal is to get people to stay and buy from you.
Most importantly, make sure that other sites link to your own website, whether that’s through blog posts on other websites or an organic mention in passing. The more links through other websites you have, the greater the chances of your website showing up at the top of the search results.
Final thoughts
Remember that offline marketing is crucial for building a local clientele and for establishing trust within a community. Thus, all your offline marketing strategies should be geared towards fulfilling this goal.
For social media marketing, your goals are to build a stronger relationship with existing customers and reach new customers at the same time through new offers. You also need to be the ultimate source for information on anything lawn care related.
Email marketing is essential to reach customers who you might have missed on social media and offline. Reach their inboxes and market to them directly with engaging and visually appealing content.
Finally, location based marketing is a new-age marketing technique that you should use to maximise the efficiency of your marketing. The goal is to attract people within your neighborhood. Merge this with your offline marketing to truly integrate with your community.
And that’s everything you need to know about promoting your lawn care business on different platforms.
New to PosterMyWall? Take your lawn care marketing to the next level by creating professional posters and flyers with our easy-to-use design tools.
Senior editor at PosterMyWall.
