Top 12 Easy Tips to Market Your Landscaping Business Offline
By Intrigue
As a landscaping professional, marketing your business is essential to experiencing steady growth. In addition to digital strategies, there are a number of simple and cost-effective ways you can generate new business offline.
In this blog, we cover 12 tips on how to effectively market your landscaping business offline. Follow these easy tips and you’ll be reaching a larger audience and generating new qualified leads in no time.
How to Get Landscaping Customers, Fast
If you’re looking to grow your landscaping customers, these strategies are for you. Follow these offline marketing tips to build your clientele from the ground up.
Tip #1. Begin Marketing Before Busy Season
It pays to start marketing early. The work you put in outside of your busy season can set you up for success once your season begins.
To get you started, you can offer a pre-pay discount to lock in a certain amount of business early. As a bonus, it can help with your cash flow to get things off the ground.
As you secure client business early, you can map out your schedule.
Tip #2. Create a Customer Referral Program
Who can vouch for your quality of work better than your current clients? Encourage your customers to spread the news and suggest you to their neighbors, friends, and relatives.
Customer referrals are also valuable because they don’t cost much to acquire. Plus, there is inherent trust in a customer’s referral. In fact, referrals are 18% more loyal and spend 13% more than the average customer.
For example, a referral program may offer your current client a discount on their next service if they refer someone new to you, while their referral receives a discount on their first service.
To launch a successful referral program for your landscaping company, follow this step-by-step process:
- Start with your goals: do you want to generate more sales? Find long-term customers?
- Create customer referral templates: these are emails or social media messages for your team to leverage when reaching out for a referral.
- Research where referrals are currently coming from: are there any opportunities in plain sight?
- Create your customer profile(s): who is the target customer?
- Research and identify your outreach channels: how will you be getting in touch?
- Identify incentives for referrals: a bonus service or referral discount can sweeten the deal.
- Create resources to alert customers: automated email marketing or a scheduled follow up call can work great.
- Track the results and improve: see what works and continually improve your referral program.
- Say thank you: don’t forget to say thank you to your customers. You may want to send them a handwritten thank-you card…it can go a long way!
Once your referral program is created, now it’s time to…
Tip #3. Target New Moves in Your Area
On average, 7% of households move each year. Many of these people are looking to upgrade or improve their landscaping — and they need your services!
To generate additional business you could set up a “new-to-town” program. Through partnerships with local moving companies or through targeted online advertising, you can get new clients before they even search for your competition.
Tip #4. Connect With Other Industry Professionals
Consider the many other professionals who work with homeowners. These people have already built a rapport with their clients based on trust, so when they recommend you to their customers, they bring a lot of credibility
You may reach out to local realtors, handymen, plumbers, home builders, property managers, and hardware stores who work in the area. Let them know about your business and that by suggesting you to their customers, you’ll return the favor. By doing so, you can both build trusted customer relationships.
Tip #5. Send Out Hand-Written Letters.
These may be sent directly to a homeowner’s door, mailbox, or delivered in-person. With content that conveys trust and experience, you can easily target homeowners in a certain region or neighborhood.
If possible, include high-resolution photographs of lawns from the neighborhood. Make them as bright, colorful, and attention-grabbing as your flyers, and use high-quality paper with a glossy finish for a finishing touch of professionalism.
Tip #6. Create and Distribute Landscaping Brochures
You can usually pin up your advertisements at local coffee shops and small enterprises’ community boards. Ask your satisfied customers if you could leave a few of them behind for their friends and neighbors to share. You can even distribute them door-to-door.
To draw the attention of passers-by, use professional graphics and vivid colors on your landscaping brochure. Use an easy-to-read bulleted list of your landscape maintenance services.
Make sure you include your contact information in bold text with a unique discount code so you can track how many people respond to your fliers. Finally, ensure that the paper you’re using is high-quality and long-lasting.
Tip #7. Invest in Lawn Signage.
Ask your clients if you can put up a lawn sign advertising your services in their yard while you’re working on their property.
To entice them, consider offering a continuing discount for as long as the sign is visible. All you need is a simple design with your name, website, and phone number on it, proudly showcasing the great job you did on their lawn.
Tip #8. Print Advertisements in Local Media.
You can target niche audiences through print advertising in local publications and magazines just as you can with direct mail. Local homeowners’ magazines, neighborhood newsletters, city papers, or local coupon books are some examples of these.
Use a compelling tagline, attractive photographs of your landscaping projects, and a brief list of your services with a call-to-action to contact you or visit your website.
Tip #9. Turn Your Commercial Vehicles into Mobile Billboards.
Why not capitalize on every available square foot of advertising space?
Your vehicle is on display while you drive around town and while your crew works to perfection so that neighbors have plenty of time to notice your business name.
Tip #10. Join the Community
Sponsoring local nonprofits or sports teams is a fantastic way to get your brand in front of new people.
The goal is to pick organizations that host events or games so that you maximize exposure for your business. The better their turnout, the more people you’ll reach.
Remember to line up your target audience with that of the organization in order to reach as many potential consumers as possible.
Tip #11. Purchase a Billboard for Advertising
When people are stuck in traffic, they need something to look at. Maybe a billboard advertising your landscaping services?
Include your name, website, and phone number as well as a professional photo of your greatest work.
Tip #12. Use the 3 / 11 Method
Have your landscaping team get you more leads while working on site in three simple steps:
- Send out a crew of 3 to complete the job
- While two of them stay at the customer’s location, the third goes to the 11 nearest homes or businesses and hands out fliers or door hangers.
- Once finished handing out the marketing material, the third crew member heads back to the job site.
This is a low-cost way to promote your business offline and earn more potential clients.
In Conclusion…
Just like watering a lawn, all it takes is a little bit of marketing to help your landscaping business grow. Commercial and residential customers will be more at ease if they know their project is secure with a reliable, trustworthy, and experienced service like yours.
Want to take your business to the next level? See what Intrigue can do for your landscaping company and contact us today!
Lots of good suggestions there. For Tip #2, item 9, sending handwritten cards or notes can be very impactful. To make this process easier you might want to check out Thankster.com. It lets you automate the process by integrating it with your CRM or other software or apps. Or it can help you with one-off projects and custom cards. You can contact us for more info via the contact form at Thankster.com. Or go to bit.ly/postsamp to get a free sample.