Why Should Landscape Contractors’ Keep Marketing Even When They’re Booked Out?
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
A steady pipeline of work is every lawn, landscape, or outdoor living company’s dream. So why is it that most experience busy and slow times throughout the year? The secret lies in neglecting marketing when business is good, and then having to suddenly scramble to find new customers or reconnect with past customers when things slow down.
If this cycle sounds familiar, and you are never reaching the point of consistent over-demand, it’s time to consider how proper, consistent marketing leads to not only a steadier sales pipeline, but countless other benefits found in thriving businesses.
Industry leaders that consistently budget for marketing understand that the marketing engine must be running nonstop to realize true, long-term ROI from the spend. And it’s not always that the offerings from these leaders are head and shoulders above the competition, it’s because they continually remind their target audience that they exist and that they have solutions to their problems.
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The Marketing Mindset Shift: Moving from a Reactive to Proactive Approach.
If you want a consistent pipeline of work, and you want to grow and/or optimize your business year after year, thinking of marketing as food, not medicine, is critical. It’s a proactive approach of continually nurturing your audience—and potential employees—so that you can steadily move toward your long-term vision:
Many landscape firms, pool builders, and outdoor living pros take the reactive, yo-yo approach to marketing; only marketing when they need to, when business has slowed down. This is not a strategy that delivers long-term results, but rather increased stress on leadership and a 1-step forward, 1-step back effect. Why is this?
There’s a lag time between when your message reaches a prospective customer and when they act. In other words, your marketing efforts today are not for today: they are for tomorrow, next month, next year, and so on.
Out of sight = out of mind. If you have to remind people who you are and what you do, you will not be the first one they think of. The busy times will not continue if you’ve been forgotten. If your past customers never hear from you, how likely are they to refer you?
Think of ongoing, consistent marketing as an investment in your future—not as a bandage for when your business is wounded and you need an infusion of sales. Marketing proactively is the only way to ensure prolonged, steady growth, as well as develop your ability to work with your ideal customer.
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Why Should Lawn, Landscape & Pool Companies Keep Marketing?
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Keep the Pipeline (Over) Full
In a strong economy, competitors can eat away at your market share if you don’t continue your marketing efforts. For example, the uptick in interest in large remodeling projects during the pandemic summer of 2020 could have prompted some companies to think they could relax their marketing efforts. But that’s risky.
To keep your leadership status in your market and your target niche, you can’t relax. You can’t rely on word-of-mouth alone. You can’t rely on people automatically knowing who you are. You simply have to keep marketing. But not because we think so, because the approach is demonstrated and proven by the leaders in every niche.
Proactive marketing is an investment in your brand. Once you’re established, you can continue to win on the strength of your brand IF you keep marketing, if you stay top-of-mind, and if you continue to nurture relationships.
What about established companies that have never done any marketing and have relied on word-of-mouth referrals? Great question. Word-of-mouth can dry up, inexplicably, at what often seems like a moment’s notice to the owner. We’ve seen this happen time and time again. And then, without a strong market presence, companies whose word-of-mouth referrals stopped coming in are suddenly scrambling to gain market share in a service area they’ve worked in for 30 years.
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Selectivity
Consistent marketing helps you be more selective in the customers you work with.
Running a business without proactively marketing means running a passive business: waiting for customers to come along instead of actively grooming them. Worse, a passive business is waiting for “any'' customer… not the ideal customer.
With more work than you can handle, you are in the exact position every company strives to be in. For a landscape firm, for instance, this means instead of low value mowing-only maintenance accounts where the customer doesn’t purchase any add-ons, you begin curating more concierge-style maintenance accounts.
On the design/build side, you don’t have to take on every tiny remodeling project , but can become the go-to for luxury renovations, confidently set a minimum project price, and have customers lined up to work with you.
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Better Projects, Better Margins, and Better Talent
Selectivity creates a sense of urgency. Customers will be more eager to work with you if they feel you’re in demand (you must be good!) and if you’re in demand, you can grow. But not just grow for the sake of growing, calculated growth built on better quality projects and accounts, resulting in a better portfolio and better word-of-mouth referrals.
You will have control over the type of work you do (what you enjoy!), you will have customers in the pipeline who are willing to wait to work with you, and you will develop the ability to set higher rates and enjoy higher margins.
Exclusivity, a stronger brand, better customers and better projects mean you will attract better talent. Higher margins allow you to pay better rates. The best talent in the industry wants to work for the best companies, which snowballs into an even greater ability to scale.
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Responding to High Demand
What do you do when your marketing efforts yield results in the form of more work than you can handle? Based on your business goals, you could:
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Option 1: Prune and Optimize
Celebrate! This is a milestone that very few companies ever achieve.
Selectively decline the jobs you don’t want.
Optimize your business for the jobs you do want.
Reinforce that you’re worth the wait, to the customers whose projects you want to take on (you’re in demand because of your quality materials, creative design, craftsmanship, etc.). They will be content to wait knowing they will receive a superior end result.
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Option 2: Scale and Optimize
Celebrate! This is the growth you’ve been aiming for!
Hire top talent to meet demand.
Optimize and restructure crews, combining or separating to make your operation more efficient.
Systematize and productize, to streamline your offerings (maybe not all projects need to be bespoke).
Select trusted vendor partners and subcontract certain non-core offerings which frees up even more of your time and resources for the projects and specific project elements that you want to focus on.
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Strategy Adjustments
If you recognize the value of consistent proactive marketing and you’re in a flush state where business is good, what can you do to ensure you’re optimizing your marketing budget?
First, a proactive marketing strategy does not necessarily mean you do the same things all the time. You should still pivot focuses and adjust strategies as needed.
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Make Timely Changes to Your Marketing
Keeping up with marketing has led to a steady pipeline of business. Now, it’s time to reinvest that money into your brand. This is the time to focus on up-leveling your messaging with high quality videos, consistent blogging, and other means of nurturing your ideal relationships.
Dial in your intake process and messaging.
Think more long-term with SEO and content.
Shift focus from direct response advertising to brand marketing.
Across hundreds of industry-focused case studies, always-on marketers pull away from the competition long-term almost every time. Being overbooked is a great thing—in fact is a critical prerequisite to dominating your niche.