Home and Garden Shows are Often a Poor Choice of Marketing Strategy for Landscape Contractors…But Why?
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Originally published on September 28, 2015. Updated on October 7, 2022.
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If you set up a booth at home and garden shows expecting high-quality leads, you’ve likely had your fair share of disappointment. As a landscape professional, you may be hopeful that things will turn around. After all, if you've been in the business for at least a decade, you’re familiar with the days of showing up at a home show, driving leads, and booking out an entire year.
The trade show market sharply declined from a $15.5B market size in 2019 to just $3.86B in 2020. This number is slowly recovering but is projected to be smaller in 2026 than at its highest in 2019. The pandemic caused a shift, creating a new hybrid way of running trade shows—partly in person and partly online, and it’s likely going to stay that way, demonstrating the effectiveness of digital marketing and the gradual decline of in-person home show events.
Still, you might enjoy participating in home shows, as there’s excitement in the air and if you enjoy face-to-face conversations. But whether to participate in home and garden shows shouldn’t be an emotional decision; it has to be a logical, data-based business choice. Deciding whether setting up a booth at a home and garden show is worth it requires taking an honest look at your numbers and deciding if the cost of going still belongs in your marketing budget.
Determine the value of a lead, do the math, and make a decision based on the facts. While it may be hard to let go of a marketing strategy so ingrained in the green industry, remaining competitive in our industry means adapting to changes in the market just as you adjust to seasonal changes. The numbers don’t lie; if your ROI is suffering, it’s time to face the reality.
What’s the ROI for a Landscape Company Booth at a Home and Garden Show?
A home and garden show booth typically costs between $1.2K-$6K, depending on the size and show promotion, and materials can cost another $2K, not including time and labor.
These events require considerable preparation—building displays of outdoor living spaces, preparing branded banners and promotional materials, while also taking on logistics for travel, product delivery, storage, and rentals. It’s a lot of work that takes a lot of time—and time is money. With event prices increasing and lead generation at these events plummeting, your ROI is also taking a dive.
People aren’t as keen on attending in-person events as they have been in the past. Times have changed, and top landscaping companies have responded by adopting effective marketing strategies that meet their customers where they are. But where are customers hanging out if not at home and garden shows?
How the Customer Journey Has Changed for Good in the Landscape Industry
As a landscape contractor who targets projects well over $100K, you won’t find homeowners considering high-value landscape projects at home or garden shows. And if you do, they won’t be comfortable talking about that $150,000 outdoor kitchen project with so many people around. There’s a more effective way to reach these leads.
Today, the way people make purchases is entirely different than even five years ago. On average, a prospect takes 80 days before making a major purchase, and the customer journey begins online. Consumers typically start their buyer’s journey with a Google search. Even with a referral from a trusted friend or family member, they’ll research online before making a decision.
This primary shift in consumer buying habits has been the impetus for inbound marketing and content marketing across the board, and the landscape industry is no exception. While completely revolutionizing how businesses market and sell products and services, inbound marketing is a simple concept—market and sell to consumers in a way that aligns with how they shop.
The Incredible Possibilities of Inbound Marketing for Landscape Contractors
Inbound marketing is attraction marketing—it draws potential customers to you. Your website serves as your front-line sales team and helps the customer pre-qualify themselves, saving you both time and money. For example, when someone performs a Google search for landscape design, they might come across your website. They’ll browse, read articles, and look at photos of your beautiful projects. With paid ads, targeted campaigns, and repeated exposure to your content, they will establish trust in your business and view you as a leader in the industry.
When the prospect is ready, they may fill out a contact form and provide their email address and phone number. With built-in automatic flows on your website, their information is added to your CRM system. What happens next depends on the expectations you’ve set with the contact form—you’ll be in touch with them or send them the information they’ve requested. But it doesn’t end there.
How Landscape Professionals Can Work Smarter, Not Harder
With every website visit, you gain data to inform your marketing efforts. Your website analytics indicate what content the prospect browsed, how long they spent on a specific webpage, and more—such insights give you a sense of their intent and ideas for how to keep them engaged. This strategy might look like an automatic email campaign providing useful content about landscape design or ideas and inspiration for their resort-style backyard poolscape.
When the prospect shows interest by opening the emails and clicking on links to your content, this provides even more information that leads to a more targeted marketing approach. For example, your email flows may include budgeting or timeline information, and the prospect continues to move through your sales funnel automatically, thanks to the content you’ve provided. Eventually, you’ll be in touch with a pre-qualified prospect ready to close on the outdoor living space of their dreams. You’re working smarter, not harder.
If you look at a top landscape contractor’s website, they’ll make it look easy with an attractive website filled with professional photos and videos. But the truth is, they didn't get there overnight. Content marketing takes time, but it’s an investment that continues to build on itself.
Blogs need to be written, SEO efforts need to be made, your website needs to be attractive and well-organized, and you need professional photos and videos to include in your digital portfolio. Once the content is created, it will work for you repeatedly with prospect after prospect. For example, you may post a blog about the benefits of outdoor fireplaces. This blog post can be emailed to a targeted audience and shared on social media—not only today but for years afterward. Does a home show work this hard for you?
The Invaluable Insights of Content Marketing
Compare the content marketing process to the home and garden show process, and the answer is clear—home and garden shows aren’t nearly as effective. It’s impossible to know at what stage a home show prospect is in the customer journey until they tell you. When someone stops by your booth, you aren’t able to offer them the same type of tailored, valued information that you can offer online prospects, because you don’t have insight into their intentions and interests ahead of time.
Even worse, if all you have is a name and an email address, you don’t have much to go on once the show is over. The entire home show strategy is not scalable, and there is no adapting without the insight needed.
Your reach is limited to the people who walk by your booth, take the time to stop, and catch you at a time when you have a moment to meet them. Even so, you are limited to how many people you can talk to—you’re only one person, and even with a team of people, you may not be able to speak with everyone. This reach is limited to the days the show is running, whereas content marketing reach is ongoing with no end date.
The real question is, how many qualified leads are you getting from a home and garden show? Quantity isn’t important. People attend these shows for a variety of reasons. Families are looking for entertainment and to allow their children to spend time at the bouncy houses offered at some events, while some are looking for jobs or freebies, and others are salespeople hoping to sell you something—and there’s no way to filter out these home show attendees.
Content marketing functions as a filter and pre-qualifier. Contractors who provide quality content are up front with their pricing, and clearly represent the scope of the work they’re willing to take on will attract the right people. Analytics and targeted filtering capabilities will allow you to take your marketing efforts one step further by knowing what the prospect is looking for, saving you and the prospect valuable time.