In addition to developing an effective marketing campaign, landscapers must be consistent with this marketing. Landscaping businesses are often seasonal and face stiff local competition, making year-round marketing strategies necessary. By marketing throughout the year, landscapers can more consistently attract leads to ensure steady sales and new business.
If you want to get the most from your landscape business marketing efforts, the following are steps to take when building your strategies.
Identify Your Target Audience
The first step of any lawn care business marketing strategy is identifying your target audience. Unless you understand your audience, you're going to have a hard time connecting with potential customers. If you know your audience well enough, this will give you some guidance when developing content for your campaigns.
Your target audience will be people in and around Eau Claire who will most likely buy your services. In identifying this audience, determine its demographics, where to find your audience, specific geographic locations, needs, available budget, and more.
Define Your Goals
With your target audience in mind, you can begin setting goals that help you reach them. You must have plans to give your marketing strategy a clear direction, as they allow you to gauge the success of your campaigns.
You can set many goals for your business, from gaining a certain level of website traffic to attracting more social media followers. Other goals could include attracting a set number of leads, achieving a specific dollar amount in sales, or different thresholds.
After setting your goals, you can determine which tactics to use. Your tactics must align with your goals to ensure you can achieve them. With clear goals, you can also effectively analyze and measure your progress.
Ensure Marketing Is Year-Round
Landscaping, lawn care, and other home services are often seasonal. Despite this seasonality of the business, marketing should be consistent and never fall behind.
Marketing must occur all year to avert feast or famine cycles for your business. You may want to redirect your budget to different marketing efforts based on the services you want to sell or other factors. However, you should never cease your efforts entirely at any point.
5 Marketing Strategies for Landscapers
If you're unsure where to start with your marketing efforts, here are some effective marketing strategies for landscapers that are worth implementing.
1. Pay-Per-Click AdsLandscapers must build a strong online presence, which can take time. Consider using pay-per-click ad campaigns for more immediate results that accelerate the process.
While other efforts, such as search engine optimization (SEO), can help you rank well in search engines over time, you'll get faster results with PPC ads that essentially allow you to cut in line. A good PPC ad campaign will not only land you on the first page of search results but also get you to the top of the page.
If you bid on the right keywords, people entering them into search engines will find you over competitors.
2. Social MediaContractors must have a consistent social media presence and strategy to establish their online presence.
You can approach social media marketing in many ways—post content, consistently post, and connect with followers. There are also many platforms you can use for these campaigns.
For example, Instagram is one of the most visual platforms, making it great for posts such as before and after images that showcase your landscaping services. At the same time, you can target other audiences on Facebook to attract customer reviews and engage in conversation. TikTok, on the other hand, would be ideal for posting everything from FAQs and tutorials to videos and project progress.
Social media ads can also help target prospective customers in your area.
3. RadioRadio ads offer another great way to connect with locals within your service area. Radio has many faithful audiences who regularly tune into their favorite stations daily.
In addition to reaching faithful listeners, you'll be able to expand your reach, with as many as thousands of people hearing your ads every day. Also, broadcast radio goes beyond the car; people listen to it at work, at home, on their phones, at the gym, and just about anywhere else. You can maximize your reach using this platform via streaming radio that connects with online listeners.
4. Event MarketingAnother way to reach your audiences is through event marketing. You can introduce people to your brand through live events and significantly increase exposure.
There are several ways to get into event marketing. For instance, you can sponsor events, get live mentions from hosts, or have a representative attend the event and put a face to your company. Someone attending on your business's behalf could mingle and share business cards while attracting new business.
5. Email MarketingEmail marketing can help you stay top of mind among your target audience. This channel lets you connect with leads by sharing reviews, services, content, and more.
You can build your email contact list by offering something of value on your website in exchange for email addresses. Through email marketing, you can keep your leads engaged until they need your services and convert them into customers.
Work With a Media Partner to Succeed in Marketing
To excel with your marketing efforts, you need an effective multichannel strategy that fully uses all relevant platforms. If you don't have the time or resources to devote to your marketing efforts, a media partner like Mid-West Family Eau Claire can help. Contact us today to find out what we can do for your landscape business and get started on your next strategy.