How Much Should Your Lawn or Landscape Business Spend on Marketing?

How much should your lawn care or landscaping business spend on marketing? You will probably spend around 10`% of your annual revenue. For a company making $100,000 a year in revenue, about $15,000 should go to marketing spend, so you can keep selling to new clients and finding new employees.

But if you stop right there—if you take that 10% as a law—you will leave money on the table. Your business may have a drastically different number, especially if you want to grow by 40 or 50%, or more in a year. You may need to spend more to reach your goals. 

The truth is, you need to calculate your marketing spend for your specific business. Good news? It’s pretty easy to get it right. Let me show you how to find your optimal marketing spend in 3 easy steps:

Step 1: Look at Your Company’s Numbers

Before you know where you’re going, you need to know where you stand. Pull your numbers from the last few years of business. If you started a new lawn business this year, create a conservative estimate for the revenue you think you’ll make in your first year.

We want to answer these three questions:

• How much did your revenue grow from last year?

• How much did you spend on marketing last year? 

• And how many new leads and clients did you add to your business last year?

Marketing is not magic. It’s a relatively predictable system, and when you start to think more strategically, you start to see a better return on your ad spend, allowing you to grow so much faster. We need to find our benchmarks, so we can see what realistic growth looks like for your lawn business.

Step 2: Set a Realistic Growth Goal

Now that you know how much you have grown in the past, it’s time to get ambitious. 

But not too ambitious. 

Look at last year’s growth numbers. It’s probably not realistic to double your growth in a single year, unless you’re making massive changes and investments across your business (like raising your prices and hiring a great landscape marketing agency at the same time). 

Ask yourself: what would a realistic improvement look like?

Set a revenue growth goal now, and we’ll move on to the final step.

Step 3: Find Your Optimal Marketing Spend

Again, marketing is a science. It’s one big calculation, with a bunch of moving parts. But that means you can plug in numbers, and get a good idea of what will happen in the future.

Client Value x New Clients = Your Revenue Goal

You already know your revenue goal. Now, you must know how much each client is worth to you on average. 

How much does each client pay you per year? 

If your clients are worth, on average, $1500 a year … and you want to grow your revenue by $150,000, then you need to find 100 more clients. That’s pretty simple. Then, you only need to answer one last question: 

How much do I spend, on average, to find a new client?

Example: 

If you spend $200 to find one new client, you’ll have to spend $20,000 total on marketing to reach your revenue goal:

$200 per Client x 100 Clients = $20,000 Marketing Spend

Remember, this is just an example. You must know your own numbers, and determine the optimal marketing spend for your lawn and landscape business. The more times you do this exercise, the better you will get at setting an extremely accurate marketing budget.

How Do You Market to Find New Clients?

One of the best places to spend your marketing budget is with an agency that knows the landscaping industry inside and out. 

Lightspeed Social works with Lawn and Landscape owners to build out your marketing presence, and help you find new clients (and upsell existing ones) for pennies on the dollar. We execute highly-specialized Facebook, Instagram, and Indeed digital ad strategies that yield a strong ROI and a healthy profit for all our clients. 

If you want to work with a team you can trust to grow your business faster than ever, talk to our expert team of landscape marketers.

Contact Lightspeed Social for your free quote. Let us show you how we can help your business grow.