11 Essential Landscape Marketing Strategies
—
The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Customers looking to hire a leading landscaping company have done their homework before they even contact you. Did you know that your online presence is on the front lines of your business?
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In our increasingly tech-centered world, customers conduct extensive online research through a variety of channels and make a decision on the company, or companies, that they wish to work with before they do any outreach whatsoever. Gone are the days when a customer would casually contact a company after seeing a one-off ad.
In order to stay competitive in the booming, now over $100B landscape industry, you must adapt your marketing strategy to appeal to this new type of customer behavior. Today’s landscaping customers don’t have to put up with a subpar online experience; they can simply go to a competitor that has invested in creating a better online experience for them.
A silo approach, such as running standalone Facebook ads or having a well-designed website, in hopes it leads to more customer inquiries, is not a recipe for success. Instead, a systematized approach, where all of your marketing assets seamlessly complement and feed into one another, is an absolute must.
There are a lot of articles on the internet claiming that they have the best marketing advice for landscape contractors, but is it tested? The great news is that we at HALSTEAD have already put the time and work into establishing vetted landscape marketing strategies that have produced double-digit percentage growth for contractors in this industry.
This guide will give you the informational foundation required to create a systemized approach to landscape marketing. Along with providing a superior return on investment (ROI), such an approach will help you attain warmer leads for the right types of projects and allow for efficient and steady growth in the months and years to come.
As a Landscaper, Defining Your Business Goals & Marketing Strategy is Essential.
How can you go somewhere if you don’t know where you’re going? You need to clearly define your goals, including identifying who your target customer is and the scope and size of projects you are willing to take on. This information will influence every aspect of your marketing strategy.
Your Target Customer
The number of landscaping companies that craft comprehensive marketing campaigns without taking the time to define their ideal customer beforehand is nothing short of mind-boggling. Your capacity to take on projects is limited by your capacity for labor. It makes sense to use your existing infrastructure in the most profitable way possible, but many companies fail to do so, opting instead for a generalist approach that leads to non-targeted messaging, unwanted customer inquiries, and countless wasted ad dollars.
Defining your ideal customer requires more than taking an educated guess. Marketing campaigns perform well when they’re founded on hard data rather than vague ideas. To drill down, perform a comprehensive marketing audit and service offering analysis, engage in persona development and discovery, and take the time to conduct competitive analysis and brand positioning studies.
If you rush this part of the process, you’ll build your entire system around a non-ideal customer with projects that are not a good fit for your business. Every single marketing effort going forward will be inefficient, leading to mediocre results at best and thoroughly unsuccessful marketing campaigns at worst.
Your Budget
When investing in landscaper marketing, you need to be realistic about what is sustainable for your budget. Remember that one-off marketing campaigns will not be effective, but a consistent approach will be.
Leading firms are spending approximately 2%-5% of their top-line revenue on digital marketing. The specific percentage that you invest will depend on the size of your business.
Your Goals
While some landscapers focus on gaining social media followers, leading companies that are focused on actual marketing ROI leverage a different approach. A narrow focus on metrics like follower counts can often lead to lackluster tangible results. It’s far better to have 200 ultra-targeted local followers you acquired naturally than 20,000 followers from around the world who will never hire you.
Perhaps your goal is to grow your commercial maintenance department, or maybe you are looking to target a larger scale design/build project but only for certain geographical areas. The goal should be to saturate your local service market so that your company becomes the go-to landscaping business in your area. Whatever your goals, your strategy should align.
Brand Awareness
Building brand awareness is a strategy that will help you quickly establish the essential know, like, and trust factors with your potential customers. You want your business to be the local go-to in the landscape industry, and that begins with creating branding that will grab the attention of your target customer.
Today, branding is about so much more than a logo. It has a lot to do with how your brand makes your target customer feel. For example, if your landscaping company effectively communicates its values of integrity and trust, your target customers are likely to feel comfortable hiring your company for their landscaping project.
One of the best ways to create brand awareness is through the content that you share online, whether that be on your company website or social media posts. This content includes both copywriting and media such as photos and video.
Content-Driven Marketing
You’ve probably heard the popular saying that “content is king,” and it couldn’t be more true. Whether the content is used for marketing your services, driving recruiting efforts, or even internal efforts, it is likely that you are sitting on unused marketing gold already that can be implemented. The three pillars of content are video, photos, and copywriting.
Video Content
Video is currently one of the most popular forms of media. According to The State of Video Marketing 2022 by explainer video company Wyzowl, 73% of people surveyed listed video as how they would most prefer to learn about a product or service. Plus, 93% of marketers surveyed reported that video has helped them increase brand awareness.
Investing in professional videography is recommended because it will show your business, your employees, and your work in the best way possible. While you are an expert at landscaping, leave the videography up to the videographers who are experts at what they do.
However, this is not to discount the value of daily diary iPhone videos that you may share on your social media channels. Videos that feature you or members of your crew are essential in adding the all-important personal touch that can connect with your audience.
Consistently sharing video content that shows your work, your company values, and its culture, while allowing your audience to hear your voice and see your face will increase brand awareness and develop trust quickly. In fact, developing a story with the use of video will help you make that emotional connection with your audience.
On that same note, consider asking your most loyal customers to say something nice about your company on camera. Perhaps have your employees share what they like about working for your company, which can serve as content you can use to boost your recruiting efforts. Video testimonials are some of the strongest social proof you can provide.
Landscapers can also use video to showcase their projects and maintenance services. Time-lapse videos of projects, or other jobs, from start to finish can be impactful. Drones can provide aerial shots that showcase an entire project while substantially increasing production value.
Photos
Professional photography is another great way to highlight your work. Having professional photos taken of your projects, commercial accounts, and teams will immediately set your business apart from landscaping companies that do not invest in high-quality photographs. Photos are especially useful for social media content because they draw attention to your posts.
For example, you can feature beautiful photos of an outdoor living space with a fire pit, outdoor kitchen, and inground pool. These photos will help your potential customer imagine the possibilities.
Copywriting
Copywriting is often underestimated in the landscape and pool industry. When communicating with a discerning consumer, whether residential or commercial, the copy is extremely important. The consumer has likely already done plenty of research before even visiting your website and needs to be communicated to in a way that matches their educational level. The copywriting needs to be persuasive but also answer potential questions that may need to be answered before making a purchasing decision.
High-quality copywriting helps establish the voice of your brand and create connections with your audience. If a prospect performs a Google search for “landscaping companies near me,” good copywriting will help your website rank at the top of the list and will direct the prospect to a landing page with information about your business and its values, and inspire them to want to learn more.
From there, the prospect may look at a case study on your website that features high-quality photos, videos, and detailed storytelling that shares the entire process of the project or maintenance job from start to finish. Strategic use of all three elements will help benefit your marketing efforts substantially.
Investing in Effective Website Design for Landscapers
Most people form an opinion about a business based on its website design and functionality. In today’s market, your website should be on track with current design trends, while being mobile responsive and easy to use. Since your website is at the center of marketing and conversion, investing in your website design is one of the most important marketing strategies that you can implement. But what makes an effective website design?
Properly Designed Landing Pages
A landing page is a specific page on a website that is often used to capture lead information through a call-to-action. The purpose of a landing page is to share relevant information with your target customer. For example, if your customer has performed a Google search for “paver patio builders,” this specific landing page will display information about paver patios and not every single other service that your company offers.
Conversely, a homepage is meant to introduce your company and your services but has a different purpose than a landing page. Keep in mind, homepages simply do not convert as well as custom landing pages do. In fact, sending visitors from paid ads to your homepage is a fantastic way to kill the efficacy of an ad campaign that would otherwise be a home run.
Frequent Updates
Just as landscape design trends change, so do website design trends—and probably more often than you might think. A website with old photos that are low-quality and blurry will not serve your business well.
Be consistent with website updates that include high-quality photos, videos, and case studies of recent projects. Aim to create an immersive experience for the visitor, making them feel as though they’re standing in the yards of your customers—to the point where they can smell the freshly cut grass. Your website should reflect the same level of attention to detail that you put into your landscape projects.
Website Aesthetics
In addition to having high-quality photos, videos, and copywriting featured on your website, the overall website design is important. One of the features of an aesthetically pleasing website is the use of color. According to a study shared by SocialMediaToday, people make a subconscious judgment in an initial viewing within 90 seconds, and that assessment is primarily based on color alone. Professional website designers are knowledgeable about color psychology and can create a website color scheme that fits your brand and increases your conversion rates.
While color is important, so is white space. Your website design should have a clean appearance and not be cluttered so that the visitor does not have anywhere to rest their eyes. A cluttered website design is overwhelming and will cause potential customers to click off of your website.
Website Speed
Every page on your website should be fast—really fast. According to KissMetrics, 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less. Keep in mind that this applies to both desktop computers and mobile devices.
Visitors on mobile devices will sometimes be connected to mobile data, which isn’t as fast as a WiFi connection. Therefore, your website should load in far less than two seconds. You can use a tool like PageSpeed Insights to gauge website speed and pinpoint technical errors that are causing it to load slowly. Having a mobile responsive design is also a big factor.
Conversion Opportunities
You want to make sure that website visitors turn into leads, projects, and revenue. Your website should have features that allow you to capture lead information.
CONTACT FORMS
Once a contact form has been submitted, you still have the opportunity to further entice customers to convert. One such way to do this is with a tool like Acuity. Upon contact form submission, you can redirect visitors to book a consultation phone call with your company immediately.
Since all contact form submissions will contain an email address, get creative with how you use email addresses in follow-up marketing sequences. For example, if you receive an inquiry but fail to connect with the customer, you may place that email address into a specific follow-up sequence that aims to get the customer to reschedule the consultation phone call through Acuity.
Another idea is automatically adding email addresses from contact form submissions into a newsletter follow-up sequence, then sending out informational content and service promotions every week or month to keep your company in the minds of potential customers. Platforms like MailChimp integrate directly into the contact forms on your website to make follow-up a breeze, even with limited technical expertise.
ONLINE BOOKING SYSTEM
Online booking systems are often more effective than a contact form. The convenience that this feature provides will benefit both you and your prospects. It completely eliminates the need for your prospect to make a phone call to schedule an appointment, and you can simply block out times when you will be available each week.
Google My Business Tips for Landscapers
Many of your prospects will search for your business online, most likely on Google. They will either begin by typing your business name into a search engine, go directly to your website, or search for what they need by entering keywords like: “Best landscaper in [your town].” To stand out from your competitors in the landscape industry, it’s important for your business to have a strong online presence on various digital platforms.
Review Sites
While many prospects may land directly on your website, others will get directed to several listings, the majority of which will be search and review sites such as:
YP.com
Citysearch
Houzz.com
HomeAdvisor
Yelp
Angi
Thumbtack
Porch
It goes without saying that your company should have complete listings on every popular review website. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table. Potential customers will discover your competitors instead of you. Ensure that your landscaping business is listed on these sites, with your business profile data entered correctly, up-to-date, and filled with captivating photos of your work.
It is essential to register for a FREE Google My Business account. All information entered into your Google My Business account will be used to locate your business on Google, so you need to make sure that you have this data entered correctly, including:
Your business’s actual name
Address (Google will verify it)
Phone number
Hours of operation
Category of your business
Social Media
You can also increase your company’s online presence through the use of social media and harness the power of organic social leads. For example, your business could have a Facebook page, Instagram account, and LinkedIn profile. Social media needs to be updated regularly and will increase the online visibility of your business and establish your brand.
To stay relevant, not only do you have to post a steady stream of content, but you also need to interact with potential customers—and you need to do so quickly. According to HubSpot, 79% of consumers expect you to reply to their social media comments within 24 hours. 39% expect you to reply within an hour.
For a landscaping company, creating an organic social media presence is usually relatively straightforward. Simply post a steady stream of attractive images and videos from your customers’ yards. Aim to post once per week at a minimum. Tools like HootSuite can help automate the posting process and streamline replying to comments and messages across different platforms.
The primary goal is to have an active social media presence that indicates your company is both alive and interacting with customers on the platforms they most commonly use. With the right content, your social media presence also serves as an indirect form of marketing by allowing you to constantly showcase your exemplary quality of work.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the act of ranking pages on your website high on search engines, mainly Google, for certain search phrases. It’s an investment, rather than a spend—meaning that you will see the return on your investment consistently over time. SEO is essential to showing up in organic search results, and accomplishes multiple objectives simultaneously, including:
Allowing you to provide value to the customer while they do online research
Giving you the opportunity to close the customer via inbound marketing tactics
Populating your blog with a steady stream of content, keeping your website fresh
Attracting the warmest, most educated, and most prequalified leads
Some landscaping companies shy away from SEO because they’ve had a past experience where SEO was done incorrectly and they didn’t see the results they wanted. Many of our landscaping clients have been burned by unethical SEO agencies in the past—since SEO takes time to yield impactful results, generally about 3-6 months, they paid a monthly fee to an agency and were told that things were going swimmingly, but saw no tangible results in the form of new customer inquiries. That would leave a sour taste in anyone’s mouth and may leave you asking if SEO is even worth it.
The answer is yes. SEO is simply too important to ignore today. Every time a potential customer reads a piece of your content, they warm up to the idea of working with you. Further down the line, when they come across your other forms of direct advertising, they’re much more likely to interact with you because they already know you. Not to mention the direct leads that you’ll acquire from SEO. Those who stay the course with SEO typically see the great majority percentage of lead sources come from organic search results, with paid ads simply supplementing SEO.
Consider hiring a reputable agency to take care of your SEO marketing strategy. If you can find the right agency, you have the opportunity to harness an avenue of marketing that many of your competitors will be ignoring or putting minimal effort into. Here at HALSTEAD, we work with contractors in the landscape, pool, and outdoor living industries who have $2M+ annual revenue. We work together to create actionable SEO marketing campaigns that get real results. Contact us to learn more about how we can help.
Paid Online Advertising
Landscape contractors see the best results from online landscape marketing campaigns that utilize four primary channels of engagement—SEO, organic social, Google Ads, and paid social.
Google Ads
Google Ads are an important part of any landscape marketing strategy, but an over-reliance on them is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Lead quality is usually poor and costs are usually high. Additionally, studies have shown that paid search results sometimes receive very little interaction from search engine users. For example, a study conducted by eConsultancy showed that an astonishing 94% of users clicked on organic search results (SEO) and only 6% clicked on paid ads (Google Ads). In some cases, you’re competing with many other companies for a small fraction of total potential customers.
A better approach is using Google Ads in conjunction with an intelligent SEO strategy. Along with being able to access search engine users who ignore ads, you gain the ability to target a higher number of relevant keyword phrases in your area, even with a limited Google Ads marketing budget.
For example, imagine one of your target keyword phrases is “full-service lawn care Rochester, NY.” Your organic page for that search query is on the third page of Google and springtime is fast approaching. In this case, it makes sense to run Google Ads for that particular keyword phrase to appear on the first page of Google during the spring rush, and then continue to work on your organic SEO rankings in the meantime. Once you’re at the top of the first page for that keyword phrase with an organic website asset, you may choose to divert your Google Ads budget from that keyword over to other keywords that do not yet have first-page organic rankings.
Paid Social
Paid social ads are a secret weapon for landscape and pool companies looking to do effective online marketing. Platforms like Facebook offer the ability to create ultra-targeted advertisements that are perfectly catered to your ideal customer. Additionally, paid social ads allow you to showcase pictures and videos in a way that Google Ads does not. Overall, you have complete control over targeting, branding, content, and messaging. That’s powerful.
The key to your success will be dependent on achieving the ideal match between creatives (photos, videos, and words) and audience targeting parameters. Finding the perfect combination of these elements is not an exact science. To achieve the best results, you should be constantly testing and optimizing different combinations of ad creatives and audience parameters to find the combinations that work best.
Don’t fall into the trap of treating your ads like TV commercials and running just one or two sets of ads that contain your favorite creative material. Paid social platforms do not penalize you for running dozens (or hundreds) of ad variations, so opt to run 100 ads with a $2/day budget rather than two ads with a $100/day budget. The algorithms of paid social advertising platforms will naturally figure out which ads are most effective. Once the data has achieved statistical significance, consider moving most of your ad budget over to the creative combinations that have gotten the best results. That’s how you create a paid social ad campaign with monumental, rather than acceptable, ROI.
Retargeting is Everything in the Landscaping Industry
Retargeting is the act of creating advertisements that are shown specifically to visitors who have already interacted with your company assets, such as your website, at least once. Since these types of visitors are already warmed up to your brand, website visitors who are retargeted are more likely to convert.
Paid social ads lend themselves to retargeting ads perfectly. Imagine a potential customer Googles a certain informational phrase related to lawn care and lands on one of your website pages. Then, the visitor leaves your website without contacting you. Before, you never had the ability to follow up with that visitor. Now, with retargeting, you do.
For example, you can install Facebook’s tracking pixel on your website and then create custom Facebook Ads campaigns that are shown only to potential customers who have previously visited your website. Retargeting allows you to track and target visitors over time, regardless of which platform they used to originally discover your company.
Due to the comprehensiveness of modern-day website tracking, retargeting allows you to create ad campaigns that are based on very particular parameters. For example, you may use two different ad creatives to target one-page visitors vs. visitors who visited multiple pages on your website. Another example is creating ads that are specific to visitors who visited your contact page. You could also upload your customer file to an ad platform and then run retargeting ads pushing your past customers to leave a review on Yelp or Houzz.
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
Almost all landscaping companies understand the importance of online review platforms like Yelp and Houzz, but few take full advantage of these platforms to appeal to customers.
Adding Content to Review Sites
Your pages on review platforms are not completely out of your control. You almost always have the ability to add your own photos to your page. Take advantage of this feature to create an attractive review page that looks better than your competitors’ pages. It’s great if your customers add photos of their own, but these photos will likely not be professional, which may lead to an inaccurate perception of the quality of your work.
To beef up your review pages, politely ask past customers to leave reviews. An easy way to do this is with a follow-up automation tool like MailChimp. Once you complete a project for a customer, add that customer’s email address into a custom email follow-up campaign. Not all of your customers will leave reviews when you ask them to, but even if a small percentage of them do, you’ll create a steady stream of 5-star reviews for your company, which will help with organic discovery on review platforms and improve your company’s image overall.
Responding to Reviews
Every landscaping company will eventually receive at least one negative review. It matters little whether or not the review is justified—potential customers will take note of it regardless. Take the time to create carefully crafted responses to negative reviews. Offer to rectify the situation with the customer. If necessary, be firm and honest about what happened during the project. With the right replies, you can negate the negative influence of negative reviews.
Don’t forget to reply to the positive reviews, too. A personalized thank you is a simple way to let the reviewer know they’re appreciated. Ideally, you have a stream of 5-star reviews coming in from your follow-up marketing efforts to get ahead of negative reviews. One negative review among dozens of 5-star reviews is far less influential than one negative review among just a couple of 5-star reviews.
Offline Promotions
Traditional offline marketing tactics still have their place in our digital-focused world. As with website design, customers will be judging you based on the quality of the assets you display. Again, lean into this natural judgment to give yourself an edge. Rather than printing 10,000 flyers and sending them to every mailing address you can find, print 500 luxury brochures and target only your ideal customers.
If you’re able to catch the interest of a potential customer with an offline promotion, that customer will likely go online to do more research about your company. However, if the customer simply searches for your company name on Google, you have almost no way of determining the efficacy of a particular offline promotion.
Attempt to send potential customers from one specific offline promotion to one specific custom landing page on your website. Then, leverage Google Analytics and Call and Form Tracking to gauge results. You’ll be able to see how much interest you receive from a particular offline promotion. If any visitors convert and send you inquiries, you’ll be able to track those customers through every part of the sales process.
Ongoing Optimization
Once you’ve created a systematic approach to landscape marketing, it’s time to analyze all of your assets to see what’s performing well and what needs work.
Which pages on your website are getting the most traffic?
Which types of blog posts are ranking highest on Google?
Which organic social content is receiving the most interaction on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms?
Which avenues of advertising, either online or offline, are resulting in the highest number of inquiries from your ideal customer?
Begin diverting marketing resources to the types of marketing that are working best for your company in particular. Don’t stop building on your foundation—that’s a mistake. Rather, implement small adjustments to increase profitability while also maintaining the system that allowed your marketing efforts to become successful in the first place.
