Lawn care marketing used to be primarily driven by customer referrals. You’d ask your existing customers who else they knew that needed landscaping and lawn care. And you can still do that today.
But nowadays, digital marketing has overtaken many types of traditional marketing, and is the best bet to keep your business growing. Digital marketing is more cost-effective than radio, TV, or print ads. And a lot of digital marketing occurs before someone ever talks to you, meaning you don’t have to qualify leads for your Lawn care marketing.
Digital Lawn Care Marketing
There are some easy steps you can take without spending much time to get your digital marketing in New York started. Some of them are free of charge.
- Google My Business for Lawn Care
When people look for information about landscaping and lawn care services, they search for it on the internet. We have all become accustomed to using Google to get answers quickly. And Google is a great place to start giving your business a digital presence. The first thing to do is to claim and complete your Google My Business listing.
Google My Business is free to use, and it gives you an identity on Google’s search engine. When you go to Google My Business, you may find that your business already has a rudimentary listing. You can search for your business and claim the listing already there.
Once claimed, you can fill out all the fields, add images, and list your lawn care services and geographical area you cover. All this information will become part of Google and can turn up on the results page when someone is searching for lawn care in your town.
- Social Media Marketing for Lawn Care
Social media is extremely popular and a great way to network with local folks. Both commercial and residential clients spend time networking and posting on social media sites. This gives you an opportunity to use social media as another free avenue for lawn care marketing.
It doesn’t take long to create accounts for your lawn care business on various social media sites. Facebook is a good starting point because it gives you a lot of options when creating a business account. It’s free to join and use Facebook, so you can easily add your contact information, address, phone, and email address.
If you have a website, you can link to it. Next, describe your business, where you work, and what you do. Then, if you can, add images and video of completed work or work in progress. Easy peasy. Even if you never post on Facebook, you have established a profile that will appear in Facebook search and on Google.
- Customer Reviews Build Trust
One factor that makes referrals an easy way to market to potential clients, is that they already trust the source of the referral, and that trust then transfers to you. When using digital marketing to find new business, you have to earn the trust of new leads.
The best way to build trust online is through customer reviews. Customer reviews offer proof from a third-party uninvolved with your company or the potential client. You can list reviews on any of your digital accounts, on Google My Business, Facebook, or industry directories.
And you can ask your current customers to give you a review when you send them a thank you text or email by adding a link to the review site. Or you can hand out business or thank you cards in person with the review site link on them.
There are other places to get reviews, like Angi, and Yelp, where your initial listing is free, but you need to pay a fee for the best use of the platform.
- Lawn Care Website to Establish Authority
While offline networking is still a good source of leads in your immediate vicinity, when you run a landscaping business, odds are that you have very limited time to meet new leads.
This is one place where digital lawn care marketing really shines. You can create a simple website (or hire someone to create it), then the website acts on its own to establish your legitimacy and authority to potential clients.
Even if your lead found out about you from a trusted friend, they will still look you up online to find out more about you. Your website should at the very least convey some basic information about you and your business, such as:
- Name of company
- Physical address
- Phone number
- Email Address
- List of services with brief description
- Area you serve
- Hours you work
- Company branding if applicable
- Customer reviews
- Links to your social media, Google My Business, and industry directory profiles
Additional information can help people find you on search engines, including:
- How-to videos
- Pictures of you at work or to illustrate a point
- Content about lawn care in your region, what to do if you have problems with your lawn, where to get the best plants, etc.
- Any awards or certifications
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Bios of your employees
- History of your business
- A list of your commercial clients (if they give permission)
- Anything else that you think potential clients want to know about
- Blog
One of the biggest things to keep in mind about digital marketing is that most people will have looked you up online long before they contact you. If you have content that answers their questions, you know that they are interested by the time you meet them.
- Email Marketing
Although one of the original types of digital marketing, email marketing is still very effective. And most of it can be done automatically, saving you time. Some email companies offer a free account to get you started, but usually there is a monthly fee based on your account type and how many people are on your email list.
Email is a good way to keep people interested, educate them about new products, or recent lawn care issues. You can advertise products, or any new services. You can tell funny stories or embed how-to videos. By keeping in touch, your email recipients will think of you first when they need lawn care.