3 Ways to Grow Your Landscaping Business Faster
Ready to grow your landscaping business faster and get more clients right now?
Sure, you could build content and start sharing pictures on social media … but those strategies take time to move the needle. If you’re reading this, you need clients ASAP. This is a starter guide to marketing for fast results, specifically for the landscaping and lawn care industry.
We’ll show you three of the most powerful advertising tactics to rapidly increase your client base, so you can keep your cash flow healthy and your routes running at maximum capacity.
1.Run an Irresistible Offer Campaign
Some people think the fastest way to get new clients is to undercut the competition. This is a terrible idea. You should never underprice your work just to get more clients—that’s a race to the bottom. Instead, you need to think about getting the highest value clients … or increasing the value of your existing clients.
The fastest way to do this? Run a marketing campaign with an irresistible offer. Once you’ve chosen your offer (we’ll cover offers in a moment), build out a quick set of emails and schedule them to go out to all your leads and clients. This tactic works best when you push the offer on multiple marketing channels—email, digital ads, flyers or door hangers—all at once.
Here are three powerful campaigns any landscaping company can run:
1.Upsell to existing clients
Upselling is the act of selling a more advanced package, or more services, to existing clients. Your clients already know and trust you, and they love your work.
Choose a profitable service that you can easily upsell based on the season, like a fertilization package or mulch and garden bed renewal. Create a sense of urgency around this service (e.g., “We’re running a special on mulch and garden clean up until March 30th!”) and run your campaign. For very little effort, you’ll be amazed at how many clients raise their hands and say yes.
2.Referral campaign push for new clients
Already tapped out your existing clients?
Still need new leads and clients to fill out your business?
Let your existing clients sell the work for you. Put together a referral campaign that incentivizes your existing clients:
Offer a reward to any client who refers new leads to you. Or, even better, offer a reward if they send you a lead that becomes a long-term client (one that sticks around for at least a month). The reward could be a gift card, or a discount on services, or anything you can think of.
3.New leads and clients discount campaign
We tend to think of this as a last-resort campaign, because discounting services for new clients is a dangerous game—it trains your leads to expect discounts from you.
However, if you need to get clients fast, you might find success by offering a one-time discount on services. For weekly mowing, the best way to do this is to offer a discount on the 3rd or 4th service, so new clients can’t just cut and run.
Again, run this as a limited-time campaign. That sense of urgency will give your marketing efforts a huge boost, without any extra effort.
2. Tap Your Networks for Fresh Clients
If you’re hungry for new leads and landscaping clients, there are better ways. Let’s check out another strategy that will allow you to rapidly pick up new clients: tap your networks.
As a business owner, you have several networks at your disposal:
Your community
Other landscaping owners
Local businesses and trades
Because you provide a service, many of these people will be happy to help you—yes, even your competitors. Here’s how:
Work with Other Trades and Local Businesses
Talk to your favorite local plumbers, electricians, construction companies, etc., and see what they need help with. Do they need your landscaping services? Do they need client referrals? If you can help them, they might be willing to help you by referring clients your way, too.
Don’t miss out on the shared relationship between all small businesses. You can work together, and help each other grow. This method isn’t always fast, but if you can build a few healthy mutual relationships in your area, it’s one of the most effective (and lowest cost) forms of marketing.
Sell Commercial Contracts
Commercial landscaping contracts are one of the most impactful tools for growing your business. Even a single client can be extremely profitable, and often commercial clients mean stable, recurring work.
Drive around your service area and look for small, commercial properties that could use landscaping services. Prepare a solid pitch, and spend some time submitting commercial bids to your local restaurants, banks, churches, and other similar properties. One commercial client can make a huge difference.
Ask Your Competitors
This one works best for new companies during the busiest seasons of the year.
Call up your competitors, and ask them if they have any clients they need to offload. Many landscaping companies sell too much work, or they sell work outside their optimal service area. You can help them out—and help out your own landscaping business—by offering to take over some of their clients. It’s a win/win: they get to preserve their reputation, and you get the clients you need.
3. Run “Hyper-Local” Facebook Ads
This might be landscaping’s best-kept secret: hyper-local ads on Facebook are one of the most powerful and easiest ways to get new clients.
The big watch-out: if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can take some time, effort, and money to get your first ads up and running. Facebook ads also require careful updating and optimization to keep them working at prime capacity, but even sub-standard Facebook ads will outperform most other marketing tactics out there.
For new clients, better route density, and more profitable routes, you need to start using Facebook Ads. We’ve put together several guides for Facebook Ads for Landscapers, including these two:
The key is to be brave when you start. Set up a Facebook Business account, build out one or two creative ads that showcase your work, and start targeting leads in your area. If you set them up right (that is, if you’ve dialed in your targeting the right way), you will see a sharp uptick in new clients, and a very healthy ROI on your marketing spend.
If you want to get this done even faster—and want expert help optimizing your digital ad performance—we strongly recommend you look for a Landscape Marketing Agency.
Should You Hire a Marketing Agency?
Hiring a marketing agency comes with a ton of instant benefits. Instead of having to learn how to use each and every marketing tool (and all the best practices that come with that), you get to “borrow” your agency’s years of experience and all their best marketing strategies.
You don’t need to spend season after season, wondering if you’re doing things right. Start with the right marketing agency, and you’ll know in a few months that your ads are working, because you’ll see the results in your bottom line.
Lightspeed Social Agency is an expert group of marketers solely dedicated to the Green Industry. We work with landscaping and lawn care owners to increase route density, boost profitability, and ramp up marketing performance.
Talk to us today to see how Lightspeed can help your landscaping business grow faster.
