Lawn Care Business Marketing Tips
Identify your target audience
Who are the people most likely to need your lawn care services? This could include homeowners, property managers, and commercial businesses. The team here at LPM would like to share some valuable lawn care marketing tips for your business.
There are many different people and organizations that may need lawn care services. Some examples include:
- Homeowners: Homeowners are the most common customers for lawn care services. They may need regular lawn maintenance, such as mowing, trimming, and fertilizing, to keep their lawns looking healthy and beautiful.
- Property managers: Property managers, such as those who manage apartment buildings or office complexes, may need lawn care services to maintain the grounds of their properties. This could include services like mowing, edging, and landscaping.
- Commercial businesses: Commercial businesses, such as hotels, restaurants, and retail stores, may need lawn care services to maintain the grounds of their properties and create a positive first impression for customers.
- Landscaping companies: Landscaping companies may subcontract with lawn care companies to provide specialized services, such as aeration or overseeding, to their customers.
- Homeowners’ associations: Homeowners’ associations may contract with a lawn care company to provide services to the common areas of a neighborhood or community. This could include mowing, trimming, and landscaping for common areas like parks, playgrounds, and walking paths.
By identifying your target audience and tailoring your services to meet their needs, you can build a successful lawn care business.
Create a professional website
Your lawn care marketing website should include information about your services, pricing, and customer testimonials. It should also have a clear call to action, such as a phone number or contact form, to encourage potential customers to get in touch with you.
A good lawn care website should be professional, easy to navigate, and informative. Here are some key elements that a good lawn care website should include:
- A clear and attractive design: The design of your website should be visually appealing and reflect the professional nature of your business. Use high-quality photos and graphics to showcase your work and make your website stand out.
- Easy navigation: Make it easy for visitors to find the information they’re looking for on your website. Use clear and intuitive navigation, with well-organized menus and drop-down lists to make it easy for people to browse your site.
- Information about your services: Include detailed information about the lawn care services you offer, including pricing and any special promotions or packages you may have. Be sure to highlight the benefits of your services and what sets you apart from your competition.
- Customer testimonials: Include customer testimonials on your website to build trust and credibility with potential customers. Testimonials can be in the form of written reviews, ratings, or even videos of satisfied customers talking about their experience with your business.
- A call to action: Your website should have a clear call to action, such as a phone number or contact form, to encourage visitors to get in touch with you. Make it easy for people to request a quote or schedule a service, and be sure to include your contact information on every page of your website.
- Social media links: Include links to your social media accounts on your website, so that visitors can easily follow you and stay up-to-date with your latest news and offers.
A good lawn care website should effectively showcase your services and encourage visitors to take action and contact you for more information.
Use social media
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be a great way to connect with potential customers and showcase your work. Post regular updates and photos of your team in action to build trust and credibility. Here are some lawn care marketing tips to help you with your social media journey.
To advertise lawn care services on social media, you can use a combination of paid and organic (unpaid) strategies. Here are some tips:
- Paid advertising: Use paid advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to reach a targeted audience. You can create ads that promote your services and target them to people in your area who are likely to be interested in lawn care. This can be a cost-effective way to reach a large number of potential customers quickly.
- Organic content: Use organic content, such as posts and photos, to showcase your work and engage with your audience. Share photos of your team in action, before-and-after photos of your clients’ lawns, and tips and advice for maintaining a healthy lawn. Encourage your followers to share your content and tag their friends who may be interested in your services.
- Hashtags: Use relevant hashtags in your posts to make them more discoverable. For example, you could use hashtags like #lawncare, #greenthumb, and #landscaping to reach people who are interested in those topics.
- Customer reviews and testimonials: Ask your satisfied customers to leave reviews and testimonials on your social media pages and website. These can help build trust and credibility with potential customers.
- Contests and giveaways: Consider running contests or giveaways on social media to engage with your audience and attract new followers. For example, you could offer a free lawn care package to a lucky winner who shares your post and tags their friends.
The key to advertising lawn care services on social media is to be consistent, engaging, and professional. By sharing valuable content and interacting with your audience, you can build a strong online presence and attract new customers.
Offer a discount or special promotion
Consider offering a discount for first-time customers or a seasonal promotion to encourage people to try your services.
An example of a special promotion could be offering a discount on a lawn care package. For instance, a lawn care business could offer a discount of 10% off the regular price for a package that includes mowing, edging, and fertilization for the first three months of service. Another example could be offering a free service, such as aeration or overseeding, with the purchase of a regular lawn care package.
Special promotions can be a great way to attract new customers and generate buzz for your business.
Ask for referrals
Don’t be afraid to ask your satisfied customers to refer you to their friends and neighbors. Word-of-mouth marketing can be one of the most effective ways to grow your business.
The best way to ask for referrals is to do it in a way that is natural and unobtrusive. Here are some lawn care marketing tips for asking for referrals:
- Ask satisfied customers: If you have a customer who is happy with your work, don’t be afraid to ask them if they know anyone else who might be interested in your services. You can ask in person, over the phone, or even in a follow-up email or letter.
- Offer an incentive: Consider offering a discount, gift card, or other incentive to customers who refer new business to you. This can be a great way to encourage people to refer their friends and neighbors, and can help grow your business.
- Make it easy: Make it easy for customers to refer you. Provide them with your business card, brochures, or other materials that they can share with their friends. You can also create referral cards or coupons that they can give to their friends to redeem a discount or special offer.
- Follow up: Follow up with customers who have referred business to you to thank them and let them know how their referral has helped your business. This can help build loyalty and encourage them to refer more business to you in the future.
The key to asking for referrals is to be sincere, professional, and grateful. By thanking your customers for their referrals and making it easy for them to refer you, you can build a strong network of referral partners and grow your business.
Use local advertising
Consider placing ads in local newspapers, on billboards, or on radio or TV stations to reach a wider audience. Here are some lawn care marketing tips to help you with advertising.
Good local advertising is advertising that is targeted to a specific geographic area and designed to reach potential customers in that area. There are many different ways to advertise locally, including:
- Print advertising: Print advertising can include ads in local newspapers, magazines, or community newsletters. These ads can be effective for reaching a specific audience, but can be expensive and may not be as effective as other forms of advertising.
- Radio and TV advertising: Radio and TV advertising can be a great way to reach a large audience in a specific geographic area. You can use local radio or TV stations to advertise your services and target your ads to specific times and programs that are likely to be listened to or watched by your target audience.
- Outdoor advertising: Outdoor advertising includes signs, banners, and billboards. These can be effective for reaching people who are out and about in your local area, but can be expensive and may not be suitable for every business.
- Online advertising: Online advertising can be a cost-effective way to reach a targeted audience locally. You can use platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads to create ads that are only shown to people in your geographic area who are likely to be interested in your services.
Good local advertising should reach the right people at the right time and encourage them to take action and contact your business.
Join local business organizations
Consider joining your local chamber of commerce or other business organizations to network with other professionals for lawn care marketing tips and potentially find new customers.
There are several organizations that focus on lawn care and related topics. Here are a few examples:
- Professional Lawn Care Association of America (PLCAA): The PLCAA is a national trade association for lawn care professionals. The organization provides training, resources, and networking opportunities for its members, and advocates for the lawn care industry at the national level.
- National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP): The NALP is a professional association for landscape and lawn care companies. The organization provides education and training, industry research, and networking opportunities for its members.
- Turfgrass Producers International (TPI): TPI is a professional association for turfgrass producers, including sod farmers and turfgrass seed growers. The organization provides resources, education, and advocacy for its members.
- Lawn Institute: The Lawn Institute is a nonprofit organization that provides resources, research, and education on lawn care and turfgrass management. The organization also offers certification programs for lawn care professionals.
Joining one of these organizations can be a great way to connect with other professionals in the lawn care industry and stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices.
Invest in professional marketing materials
Invest in high-quality business cards, brochures, and other marketing materials to give to potential customers and leave behind after meetings.
Some good marketing materials for a lawn care business could include:
- Business cards: Business cards are a must-have for any professional. They should include your name, business name, contact information, and any relevant logos or graphics.
- Brochures: Brochures are a great way to provide potential customers with detailed information about your services and pricing. They should be well-designed and easy to read, with clear and compelling content.
- Flyers: Flyers are a cost-effective way to promote your business to a wide audience. You can distribute them door-to-door or at local events, or leave them at local businesses that may be interested in your services.
- Postcards: Postcards are a convenient and eye-catching way to remind potential customers about your services. You can mail them to a targeted list of potential customers, or leave them at local businesses as a reminder of your services.
- Signs and banners: Signs and banners are a great way to promote your business and attract attention at local events or in high-traffic areas. You can use them to advertise special promotions or showcase your services in a visual way.
The key is to create marketing materials that are professional, informative, and eye-catching. They should effectively promote your services and encourage potential customers to get in touch with you.
Check out our SEO Packages or reach out to our team so that we can help you get started if you’re struggling with SEO for your lawn or landscape business website.
As always, please feel free to reach out to the Lawn Pro Marketing team if you need any additional support, lawn care marketing tips, or guidance to help you promote your lawn & landscape business on Social Media
What is a Good Lawn Care Business SEO strategy?
Lawn Care Pros are always on the hunt for tips to help them run a successful lawn care business. If you’re not researching ‘how to run a successful lawn care business‘ then likely your client book is already full, or you have no desire to grow your business beyond it’s current capacity. If that’s the case then congrats, you can stop reading!
So you’ve got your new lawn business website up and running and now it’s time to let the world know who the best lawn company in town is. What next? Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). If they can’t find it, your time was wasted building a kickass website.
Lawn Care SEO can be a tricky thing for those who don’t fully understand what SEO is, and how it works. Keywords, Meta tags, image alt tags, proper use of structure and headings, it can be a daunting task. Fortunately the internet is chock full of good content for the DIY lawn care business pro to sharpen their skills and build a lawn business website that gets good rankings.
At LPM our strategy is somewhat unique. We focus on the use of organic content and rely less on expensive pay per click campaigns to drive traffic to our clients lawn care sites.
Let’s take a look at some of the basic elements of good lawn care SEO to get you going on the right foot. While the following information is by no means a comprehensive list to get your lawn business website on the top of google rankings, you’ll find it’s a great start.
In this post we’re going to take a quick look at the following key metrics for quality SEO:
- Meta Information
- Page Quality
- Page Structure
- Links
- Server
- External
META INFORMATION
Website Title: This is the title of your lawn business website. The length of your website meta title should be no more than 60 characters. Refrain from using duplicate words in the title.
Meta Description: This is the summary of what your site is about. Most SEO amateurs try to fill this up with keywords. Don’t do it! – This is not the place for that. Focus on writing a well thought out description about your badass lawn care website. Save the lawn care business keywords for your content on the website. Be mindful not to exceed 160 characters in length.
PAGE QUALITY
Content: This is the meat of your lawn care website. This is where you want to start feathering in your keywords. All pages should have roughly 800 words or more. Keywords used in the page title should also be used in the page content. Words from the H1 heading should also be used in the page content.
Here at LPM we’ve learned the best way to write good content is to study your competition to see what keywords they’re ranking with. Use tools like Answer The Public to understand what people search for. Then start writing! Don’t bog yourself down on crafting a masterpiece of literature. Just get the words on the page. Fine tuning can happen later.
Image SEO: aka ‘alt tags’ for images. Spend 5 minutes and understand what they are and why you should use them. There are countless lawn care websites out there that look great but sadly they’re not using alt tags on their images and this is costing them traffic. Note: don’t use the same alt tags over and over again. Mix them up.
Pro Tip: Use alt tags like ‘landscaping service near me, lawn care Houston, leaf cleanup Austin, Affordable lawn care, etc…
Social Networks: It’s very important to add your social sharing icons to your content pages to drive users to your social sites so they can see up to date social posts.
PAGE STRUCTURE
Headings: It’s important to understand what H1-H5 headings are and how to use them correctly. Proper website structure is very important for search engines when indexing your site. We’ll post another article at a later date with more depth on proper use of header structure.
Here’s an example of a proper heading structure:
H1 – ABC Company Services
H2 – Mowing
H2 – Fertilizing
H2 – Winter Cleanups
H2 – Irrigation
LINKS
Internal Links: Use them! When you have a paragraph that is explaining something related to fertilizing, link “Fertilizing” to your internal page that has information about your fertilizing service. If you reference a specific brand of equipment elsewhere on your site and have an equipment page, then link that content to other pages in your site. It keeps the user on your site and increases your visit time. You want that!
External Links: Use these too. Don’t be afraid to send traffic away from your site. If you use a specific brand of fertilizer and you want to share the specifics of that brand, use an external link and send them to Milorganite.com or Scotts.com or whoever. There’s a little thing called backlinks if you’re not aware of them. Milorganite will see I’m sending traffic to them and they may feel inclined to share a backlink to my site in the future. Website owners pay big money for backlinks and this is your opportunity to gain the possibility of snagging one for free. We will discuss backlink strategies in a future blog post.
SERVER
Performance: No one likes a slow loading lawn care website. Often lawn and landscape companies have very nice images of their work but they forget those images taken with their iphones are upwards of 5mb each. This is not good! Optimizing images for fast loading is critical to a good end user experience. Most website building tools like WordPress have optimization tools available to compress images. Use them!
Page load speeds are greatly affected by the number of CSS and JavaScript files on your site. There are tools in WordPress to combine CSS files and reduce JavaScript file sizes. These should be used.
Pro Tip: Backup your site before you start optimizing server settings. Often when you begin manipulating server settings you may damage the site structure and you’ll be glad you had a backup to revert to.
Check out our SEO Packages or reach out to our team so that we can help you get started if you’re struggling with SEO for your lawn or landscape business website.
As always, please feel free to reach out to the Lawn Pro Marketing team if you need any additional support or guidance to help you promote your lawn & landscape business on Social Media
Lawn Care SEO Tips for Small Businesses
The Lawn Pro Marketing team would like to share some simple SEO tips that will help you rank higher in search engines for lawn care related keywords. Please feel free to check out our SEO Packages or reach out to our team so that we can help you get started if you’re struggling with SEO for your lawn or landscape business website.
While this is not a comprehensive guide, it will help you to better increase your Google rankings. Before you get started make sure you’ve got your Google Search property set up so you can understand keywords that are currently being used to find your lawn care business website.
Also, it’s VERY important to study what keywords the competition is using to bring traffic to their site. This level of insight will help you determine keywords you can use in your content to increase your search results.
Create a website with a blog
A website with a blog is an excellent way to build authority and credibility online. It also helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field. If you’re looking to start a business, having a website with a blog is one of the first things you should do. The Lawn Pro Marketing team recommends adding at least one new blog post per week.
Add relevant pages to your site
You can add more pages to your site by using Google’s Structured Data Markup Tool. This will help search engines understand what each page is about. To use the tool, go to the URL of any page on your site and click “Add structured data.” Then, enter the title, description, and other details into the fields provided.
If the above is a bit too complicated, just stick writing content that is relevant to the services your lawn care company offers and valuable information you’d like to share with those browsing your site.
Write unique content
If you’re writing about a subject that isn’t very popular, then you’ll need to write unique content. Unique content means something that hasn’t been written before. It’s not just about being original; it’s also about being informative and interesting.
Build links
In order to build links, you need to do two things:
1) Create high quality content
2) Promote that content through social media channels.
The Lawn Pro Marketing team recommends getting started by posting your newly published content on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you have experience with LinkedIn we recommend sharing your content there as a professional resource.
Promote your site
If you’re looking to promote your website, there are several ways to go about doing so. The Lawn Pro Marketing team specializes in organic content building which can take search engines longer to index but is much more cost effective for startup companies.
If Budget is a non-issue, you can use paid advertising platforms like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads. Or, you can try using free tools like Twitter Cards, Shareaholic, and Open Graph.
The most important thing you can do to build site visitors is stay diligent and always be posting fresh content for your audience. LPM offers social media management packages to keep your scheduled content in front of viewers.
As always, please feel free to reach out to the Lawn Pro Marketing team if you need any additional support or guidance to help you promote your lawn & landscape business on Social Media
Social Media Tips for your business
Lawn Care Marketing Strategies – How To Grow Your Business With Social Media
The Lawn Pro Marketing team is dedicated to helping lawn care businesses succeed online through dynamic website development and social media. We provide free resources, articles, and guides to help lawn care professionals build their online presence. Our goal is to help lawn care professionals become better marketers so they can increase sales and profits.
1. Set Social Media Marketing Goals
Social media goals are a great way to track your progress and help you stay focused on the right strategies.
It’s good practice to create a spreadsheet with these basic goals in mind:
- Weekly goals – Number of posts, interactions, likes, follows, reposts, etc
- Monthly goals
- Quarterly goals
- Annual goals
Examples of goals might look like:
- 5 Facebook posts per week
- 20 Facebook shares per month
- 5 Instagram project posts per week
- 30 Instagram follows per month
Keep track of your goals. Write them down! Don’t be afraid to re-evaluate your goals after you get started. Often you’ll learn your goals will change as you continue to evolve your lawn care business. There are many tools available online for tracking goals as well but, a good old fashioned spreadsheet is a great place to start.
2. Choose Your Social Channels
There are many social media channels to market your lawn business. The Lawn Pro Marketing team recommends getting comfortable with the following 4 social channels before you get too far ahead of yourself.
- Facebook – The gold standard for marketing your lawn care business.
- Instagram – Very easy to post quick photos of completed landscaping projects and team photos
- Twitter – Great resource for your lawn business to interact with other companies
- LInkedIn – Credibility speaks volumes and having a LinkedIn page for your company shows you’re serious about promoting your business.
3. Post Good Content
The problem most lawn businesses have on social media is they try sell their lawn services in every post. Don’t do it!
It’s important to know that people buy from people they trust, and you need to establish your credibility before you start asking for business. Sharing your knowledge of the lawn care business with the community is a more effective tool that will eventually bring the clients organically.
Keep these two things in mind when you’re posting about your lawn business on social media:
- Provide Value – There’s a balance between value and selling. Be mindful of it.
- Keep your content relevant – Stay on topic with your posts and be strategic.
We recommend posting on facebook 5-7 times per week and no more than 1-2 times per day on Instagram
Here are some examples of relevant lawn related posts your clients care about:
- Lawn Care Tips
- Company News
- Customer Reviews/Testimonials
- New Employee Intros
- Completed Project Photos Before/After
- Award & Achievements
The more relevant content you post the more your customers will engage with you. The Lawn Pro Marketing team recommends keeping your post short with no more than 1-2 sentences in each post.
4. Additional Social Media Tips
- Use Video if possible (short video clips can be very effective)
- Take and Share Quality Photos Only (High quality photos make all the difference)
- Use Hashtags (Study the competition and see what hashtags they’re using)
- Share Giveaways & Special Promotions
- Have Fun with it!
As always, please feel free to reach out to the Lawn Pro Marketing team if you need any additional support or guidance to help you promote your lawn & landscape business on Social Media.