The 5 Worst Marketing Mistakes for Lawn Care & Landscaping Owners
Today, it’s crucial for lawn care companies to use marketing strategies that make you stand out from the competition. If you want to reach a wider audience—and get more clients—you must invest in marketing.
However, even with the best intentions, many lawn care business owners fall prey to a few critical marketing mistakes. These mistakes will slow your growth and waste your money. Worse, they’ll make you think marketing is too hard, too expensive, or both.
In this blog post, we'll discuss show you how to avoid these costly mistakes, so you can grow your business with total confidence.
Mistake #1: Targeting the Wrong People
Who is your best customer? If you could clone them 100 times, and sell 100 jobs to new clients just like them, wouldn’t you?
That’s the goal of targeted marketing: to find your best clients, and clone them. It’s especially critical in the Green Industry because good clients will pay you better and cause less stress than bad clients. Good clients make your whole operation run that much smoother.
New lawn care owners may try to market their services to everyone, which means they end up selling to cost cutters, cheapskates, difficult clients, and clients outside of their service area. Not only does this cost you time, but it costs you money. The wrong clients will drain you, and make it impossible to hit that $100,000 mark … and beyond.
What to do instead: find out who your best clients are. Find out where they live, what kind of property they own, and what kinds of marketing appeals to them. Then, double your efforts on their neighbors and other leads who live in similar areas.
Mistake #2: Weak Branding
Who are you? What do you stand for? And, most importantly, what sets you apart from the competition? Branding is a powerful tool for making your landscaping company known—and trusted—in your area. It's important for lawn care businesses to stand out by offering unique services or quality of work. Not doing so can make it difficult to attract customers, as you’ll get lost in the sea of competition.
What to do instead: Your brand should be simple, colorful, and eye-catching. Most of all, it should differentiate you from your competitors. When you put out an ad, a flyer, or any kind of marketing, make sure you have a consistent and clear brand that shows your leads: “Here’s why we’re your best choice.”
Mistake #3: Not Following Up
They say it takes 7 to 14 touches to turn a lead into a paying client. Follow up is critical for the success of any lawn care business. It's not enough to put out a single lawn care flyer or Facebook ad, and hope for the best.
Even if people need your lawn care services, life happens. People forget, or they get lazy, or they lose your contact info.
What to do instead: You must follow up. Again. And. Again. And...
Without proper follow-up, leads generated from marketing efforts can easily slip through the cracks. When you plan your next marketing campaign—be it emails or digital ads or anything—make sure you plan to send each lead more than one message.
This is one of the reasons we love our hyper-local strategy; it allows our lawn care owners to advertise to the same people multiple times a day, leading to ridiculously high sales when compared to other advertising methods.
Mistake #4: Relying Too Much on “Free” Social Media
While social media can be a useful tool for marketing, it's usually the last place you want to spend your marketing investment.
Other marketing channels, such as email marketing and Facebook Ads, are more effective for getting direct action from your leads. Social media is powerful when it’s used in combination with other marketing efforts, but it’s more useful for building your brand and authority.
What to do instead: don’t wait around and hope your social media “goes viral.” Keep posting regularly while also investing in other, more direct forms of marketing.
Mistake #5: Ignoring the Power of Digital Marketing
Paid ads, especially on Facebook, are the most powerful tool for lawn care companies looking to attract new customers and grow their business. Facebook has over 2 billion monthly active users, which means there's a good chance that your target audience is already on the platform—for hours a day (and that’s not including Instagram users).
Think about it: those people could be looking at your ads.
Even better, Facebook's targeting tools allow you to show your ads only to people who are most likely to be interested in your services. That means you spend far less per lead than any other advertising method. You can target users based on a variety of factors, such as location, age, interests, and behaviors.
Facebook allows you to set a budget for your ads, so you can control how much you spend and ensure you make more than you spend. If you ignore the power of paid ads on Facebook, you are leaving money on the table.
What to do instead: dip your toes into Facebook’s advertising tools today. Or, if you’re not sure about running your ads yourself, you can hire a landscape marketing agency to build out and optimize your ads for you.
Get Real Results from Your Marketing Dollars
One of the best ways to avoid making costly marketing mistakes is to hire a team of expert marketers.
Find the right lawn care marketing agency, and you will instantly gain all their knowledge, expertise, and experience—shortcutting you past hours of stress and failure.
Lightspeed Social Agency specializes in “hyper-local targeting” for landscaping and lawn care companies. Our team of expert marketers works exclusively with the Green Industry, helping owners like you develop a complete marketing pipeline, so you can increase your online visibility, generate more leads, and ultimately grow your customer base.
Contact us here to see how we can help you grow.
