To grow your lawn care or landscaping business, you must market your services. But marketing costs time, money, and it requires energy to learn all the strategies and tactics.

Which strategies are worth your time? Where should you start?

In this complete guide to marketing for lawn and landscaping, we’ll show you which marketing tactics work best and why, and we’ll walk you through the best practices for each strategy. You’ll discover how to get new, profitable clients on a consistent basis so your revenue increases and your landscaping business grows.

By the end of this guide, you’ll know exactly which marketing tactics to pursue and what steps you need to take to outpace your competitors, and build the landscaping business of your dreams.

#1 - Create an “Outstanding” Web Presence

Imagine if you had a sales guy who never made a mistake, always did his best, and he’s ridiculously good at selling your lawn services. 

Now, imagine if he worked 24/7 … and you barely paid him anything at all. 

That’s what your website could be, which is why it’s the most important marketing aspect to get right first

The good news? 

With so many website builders out there these days, it has never been easier to build a high quality website. Try Wix.com, Squarespace.com, or a similar tool and build your own website today. It will help your business look legitimate and professional, and it will allow you to instantly scale all of your other marketing efforts.

This is what your website should tell people:

• Who you are

• What services you offer

• And what cities you work in

Don’t overcomplicate it. You can always add more later.

#2 - Generate More Leads with a Landing Page

Once you get your website up and running, you need to build a strong landing page. This is the page where most of your marketing will point people. If you’re just starting out, this will probably be your home page.

The landing page has two main objectives:

1. Sell your services to all relevant visitors

2. Gather your leads’ information so you can follow up

hat second one is crucial. If you don’t ask for their information, you’re wasting their time and yours. We see so many owners, new and experienced, make a few big mistakes on their landing pages. The most common mistake? They bury the form on the page, or they forget to put it there at all.

The best practice is to put a form at the top of the page where your future clients can instantly see it. Usually, we like this form to be visible alongside a phone number. The form might say something like: “Enter your information and get a free quote!” 

Get your landing page right, and you’ll have an automatic sales machine that can run day and night. The next step … is to turn the machine on.

#3 - Find More Ideal Clients with Digital Ads

Hands down, the most powerful marketing tool in your kit will be digital ads—ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google can advertise your lawn care or landscaping services to thousands of local clients who can’t wait to hire you. You can even run hiring ads on Indeed to find new, great  employees.

At Lightspeed Social Agency, we specialize in Facebook and Instagram ads, because we’ve found these two sources to yield the best bang for your buck. We’ve built an extremely powerful strategy that allows lawn and landscape owners to target “hyper local” clients to help you clone your best customers. ‘

We’ve written a starter’s guide to this Facebook strategy here. The concept is simple:

1. Upload a list of your best clients into Facebook

2. Create a set of dynamic, benefit-rich ads to sell your landscaping services

3. Use Facebook’s powerful local-targeting tools to advertise only to specific neighborhoods

Forget billboards. Forget cold calling. This is the highest-value marketing tactic available—we’ve seen companies get new clients for as little as $7 per client!

Think of it like a faucet: you can spend a little, and get a trickle of clients … or you can open the floodgates and sell a ton of jobs fast.

We’ve built our Agency upon helping green industry owners like you get massive results from digital ads. If you’re interested in talking to us, contact us here, and we’d be happy to show you what Lightspeed Social can do for your business.

#4 - Increase Density with Door Hangers, Flyers, and 9-Arounds

A few of the old methods of advertising still work. 

Door hangers and flyers can still yield a healthy return on your marketing budget, if you do them right. Don’t spray and pray—don’t send out a thousand fliers to a few random neighborhoods. The best practice with paper advertising is to execute 9-arounds. 

Each time your crew stops at a house, have one person walk to the nearest 9 houses around, and put a door hanger on each door. 

The flyers/door hangers should include:

• Your logo and name

• Your services (with benefit-rich text)

• Your website

• Your phone number

…and that’s it!

This strategy allows you to build incredibly dense and efficient routes in a compact area, so you spend less time driving, and more time getting jobs done. All it costs you is a bit of design, printing, and some footwork.

#5 - Boost Client Value with Email Marketing

One of the best ways to make more money in landscaping is to upsell, upsell, upsell. 

Say you have a client who only pays for weekly mowing and maintenance. What if you could sell them on fertilization and mulch? Would that double the value of this client? 

The easiest, most cost-effective way to upsell your clients? 

Email.

You already have their email addresses. Use them!

Write 3–5 emails and send them a few days apart to announce a big service you want to upsell, like fertilization or mulch. 

We’ve got a full guide on upselling your landscaping services here.

This is also a crucial strategy for selling to your leads. Most leads will NOT buy the first time they visit your website … however, they might give you their email address. Don’t let that go to waste. Create a short email campaign that talks about the benefits of your services, and automate it so that every lead who hasn’t signed up gets this campaign. You’ll sell more work in no time.

Good email campaigns are one of the most powerful tools for growing your business, because it costs nothing but the time to write those emails. Most of your leads (and many of your clients) will forget about you, unless you do something to make yourself top of their mind. So, email away.

#6 - Get More 5-Star Reviews

You can also use email to gather more online 5-star reviews for your business.

Online reviews are great because they tell search engines like Google that your business matters, and they tell future clients that you are trustworthy and worth the price. 

We recommend you ask every new client, at least once, to leave you a 5-star review. Usually, this means you should email them after your first service, because you’ll probably give 110% effort and make their property look amazing. They’ll be thrilled with you, and they’ll happily leave a glowing review.

#7 - Start a Client Referral Program

Want high quality clients to come to you? 

Want to duplicate your best clients, and build a steady flow of new, incoming work? 

Build a client referral program, and tell all of your clients about it! A good referral program should turn your clients into salespeople through incentives. Chances are, your best clients know lots of other people just like them—meaning, they know lots of other potential clients.

Here’s an example of how your referral program might work:

“For every client you bring us, we’ll give you a $25 credit on your account! New clients must stay with us for at least one month of weekly mowing.” 

If you’re new to this concept, we recommend you try it with a handful of your best, most outspoken clients. Send them an invitation to your referral program, and keep close track of how many new leads they bring in.

Note: this is NOT a “get tons of new jobs fast” strategy. Referral programs are a slow-burning tool, but once you get started, the benefits will add up.

The #1 Secret Weapon to Great Marketing 

Marketing can be a lot of work. There are lots of tactics to learn, tools to buy, and so much to keep track of. 

You might not have time for all this. But you don’t need to feel overwhelmed. There are resources and agencies that can help you.

If you read this far, you’re probably ready to hire a great landscaping agency. At Lightspeed Social Agency, we know you have a ton of work on your plate. That’s why we’ve built an expert team of landscaping marketers to do the marketing for you. We work hard with small companies and multi-million-dollar franchises to get real, profitable results. 

Our specialty lies in helping landscape owners like you get tons of new, high-quality clients through our “Hyper Local” Advertising strategies. 

If you want to save yourself a ton of time, and work with professionals you can trust, try Lightspeed Social.

Contact us here, and we’ll show you what we can do for your business.