Spring Tips for Marketing a Landscape Business
Even though snow is hitting the ground, marketing preparations for landscape and lawn & garden businesses are happening NOW! Have you checked in on your brand? The success of your business can be directly tied to a strong brand and your customer’s experience. Here are a few tips to ensure you are ready for this growing season!
Where to start?
How you are found, both physically and online, and what customers are saying about you is the best place to start! Here are a few simple check ups:
Search your business name online. What did you find? At the very least, you should have a Google profile that pops up. Ensure your business contact information is accurate and check that links to your website or Facebook page are connected on your Google Profile. If you don’t have a Google Profile, start by creating one! Check out this YouTube tutorial on how to set one up.
Were you able to find your name easily? If you search the name of your business, your business should populate on the first page, along with your social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram. Facebook and Instagram are FREE ways to help increase your popularity on Google searches, which result in helping YOUR business be found! If you do not have Facebook or Instagram do not worry, you can easily sign up for them! Click here to set up Facebook. Click here to set up Instagram . Even if you do not have someone dedicated to posting, it is still recommended to have the accounts in your business’s name to 1) ensure no one else will snatch your business name and 2) to increase search results when someone IS tying to find you!
What if customers don’t know you exist?
A recommendation for any landscape company marketing their business is to invest in building long-term brand awareness and accelerate advertising when you need to increase lead generation. You may be thinking, the longer term means more money, right? Not necessarily, if you do your homework! Let us look at this scenario. Likely, you service a specific geographic area, say 20 miles, and you want to increase lead generation and increase brand awareness. What do you do?
Evaluate your advertising strategy.
You may be asking yourself, what should I look for when evaluating advertising? Look at the specific media’s reach as is relevant to your areas of service, the cost, and effectiveness. A good rule of thumb is to look at media’s CPM (Cost per Thousand) – what it costs to reach 1,000 people. You will find that billboard advertising, also referred to as Out-of-Home advertising (OOH), is the most cost-effective marketing strategy for landscaping businesses. How much is billboard advertising? It generally costs about $2-$5 CPM but even better, billboard advertising drives four times more online activity per ad spend compared to television, radio, and print. Click for full study.
Nearly five in ten US adults (46%) have used Google, Bing, Yahoo, or another Internet search engine to look up information after seeing or hearing something advertised on an OOH format in the past six months. Nearly 40 percent have visited a Facebook page or posted a message on Facebook after seeing an OOH ad. Read more about Nielsen’s findings here.
What should I advertise?
There are many ways to advertise your landscaping and lawn & garden business. Feature vs. Benefit advertising are two separate ways of crafting a message. Feature driven messaging can cause immediate call to action and can be product specific (Miracle Grow $19.99!). On the other hand, benefit driven messaging can connect with the viewer emotively and create a lasting impression of your brand (check out the smiley face below!). Here are a few more ideas on how you can market your landscaping or lawn and garden business. If you would like to discuss your marketing strategy or creative design ideas with one of our advertising experts for free, email us at info@kegerreis.com!
Written by Jennifer - January 1, 2021
Share
