Most lawn and landscape business owners dream of servicing entire neighborhoods, hopping from one lawn to the next and racking up profits. Building a highly profitable and scaleable route-based business revolves around, you guessed it, ROUTE DENSITY.

If you’re a one man lawn business, you can make ends meet by driving around town servicing clients. As soon as you expand your team, those drive times will start eating into your pocket. Not only do you have the increased fuel costs that comes along with adding to your vehicle fleet, but you’re also paying your crew while they sit in traffic. If you’re the small guy starting out or the multi-million dollar lawn company, route density should be a priority.

Our good friend, Naylor Taliaferro of Lawn Care Rookie, breaks down how he’s absolutely dominated his service areas.

How did Naylor do it?

1. Organically sharing his work on Facebook and taking advantage of specific online groups (his most powerful tool)

2. Branded uniforms and vehicles

3. Flyers (he personally shared them where he wanted, not EDDM)

4. Asking for reviews and building his Google profile

5. Being the most professional service provider possible

“Get a Quote”… if you’re in our service area

Imagine that, only sending quotes to leads who are in your service area -without you or an office assistant even seeing it. That’s exactly what My Service Area can accomplish for your business. Every quote you send out is a profitable project, AND it lets you know where you are receiving quotes outside of your service area. If and when you decide to expand your service area, you’ll know exactly where you’ve received the most inquiries.

This does NOT work off of zip codes, because we all know how big some areas can be. It uses pins, similar to Google Maps, where you are able to create a very specific border. You can see it in action in the video below!

With My Service Area you are also able to implement custom pricing for specific neighborhoods. This comes in handy if you’re having to make up for fuel/labor costs due to longer drives, of if you just want to (higher income neighborhoods).

Hyper-targeting

EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) has a place, but it also has its’ pitfalls. Your flyers may end up at an apartment complex, and there goes 400+ missed points of contact. Not only that, but you’re spending a significant amount of ad spend to only be seen once.

With Facebook and Instagram targeting, you can deliver your ads to the specific neighborhoods you want - this can be VERY dialed in. Your potential leads will see your ad multiple times, for pennies on the dollar compare to EDDM. You can have a variation of ads to keep things fresh, and not have to gamble on a single piece of marketing content to work for you. This is not a “boosted” post - Facebook will happily take your money and send it into the ether for no one to see.

For a quick tutorial on how to target your ads check out our video, we included a clip showing you how it all works.

Saving Your Marketing Dollars Only Hurts You

Marketing isn’t a “do it during the spring rush” type of deal - massively successful lawn and landscape companies never go into hibernation. Nurturing leads on a high level isn’t accomplished in 3 weeks, it’s an ongoing process of getting those “touches” so that they eventually warm up and act on your CTA. Obviously, you’ll spend more during the Spring, but the fire needs to be kindled throughout the winter too. It’s about building trust behind your service and creating a brand.

So when they need a landscaper or weekly mowings, they know exactly who to call. They’ve seen your ads on their social media accounts, your branded (hopefully wrapped) truck in traffic, and your team on a project. You are the expert in your field, that’s who they want. This also gets you out of the game of having to compete with pricing. Sure, someone else can shoot their own foot by mowing the cheapest lawns, but is that what every homeowner is looking for? Absolutely not.

Simply put, if no one knows about you or your service, then how do you expect to stand out?

You’re competing with every lawn care company who decides to ramp up their market efforts during the spring. Whoever has the most brand recognition will collect the most leads. We’ve seen it done with our friends at Scooter’s - they are winning big.

Start now.