8 Lawn Care Marketing Tips to Scale Your Business and Boost Revenue

Establish a Marketing Plan

• Set a strategy with clearly defined goals and measurements

• Use a variety of marketing channels to reach the most people

Your lawn care marketing efforts need to derive from a well-thought-out marketing plan. Include detailed information, such as budget, preferred marketing channels, timelines, key performance indicators (KPIs), business goals, and--most important—how you’ll measure the results of your marketing campaigns.

To maximize success and reach the most potential customers, plan your marketing strategy with a variety of tactics, from old-school flyers and signage, to social media ads, search engine marketing, and highly targeted email marketing campaigns.

To streamline these processes and boost results, many home services companies, including lawn care and landscaping businesses, turn to cutting-edge customer relationship management software.

Build a Lawn Care Website

• Include all pertinent business information

• Use SEO best practices to make it easy to find

Considering that 93 percent of consumers use the internet to find local businesses, it’s paramount for any lawn care business to establish a robust online presence, including a website and social media presence.

Fortunately, you don’t need professional experience to design and build a lawn care website. Use a drag-and-drop platform with pre-made templates, such as WordPress or Wix, to easily create a business page for your lawn care service.

Your lawn care website should include your business name, contact information, phone number, photos of completed jobs, and positive customer testimonials. Also consider linking to your social media sites and any business listings on consumer review sites, such as Yelp and Angie’s List.

Make sure your lawn care website mentions all of the services you offer: lawn mowing, lawn maintenance, landscaping, mower service and repair, lawn fertilization and treatment, etc. It’s also a good idea to promote special offers, pricing, and memberships.

Once you build a website, make it as easy as possible for potential customers to find your business with a simple Google search. To better position your website in the search rankings, practice search engine optimization (SEO), which involves researching the top-searched keywords around lawn care services and including them prominently throughout your website. Tools like SEMrush and Google AdWords can help you determine the right keywords to use.

Utilize Email Marketing

• Segment email promotions to different customer profiles

• Tweak future campaigns based on performance metrics

Targeted email marketing allows you to tailor messaging and campaigns to different customer segments, such as hot or cold leads, current customers who participate in membership or loyalty programs, and long-term, repeat customers. Email marketing also works really well. In fact, studies show email marketing offers the highest return on investment (ROI) for many small businesses, while companies that segment messaging to different customer profiles see up to a 760% increase in revenue. 

ServiceTitan Marketing Pro enables your lawn care service to automate customized email campaigns with targeted messages to each of your customer profiles. Instead of mass, spam-like emails, customers receive timely reminders for membership renewal, unsold estimates, special offers, or scheduled lawn mowing or lawn maintenance. 

Marketing Pro also makes it easy to measure the success of your lawn care marketing campaigns, by offering key metrics on open rates, conversions, and more, so you can continue to optimize and improve future email sends and online marketing efforts.

Practice Social Media Marketing

• Only use social media platforms you can actively manage

• Consider paid social media ads to target customers based on key demographics

With more than half of the world’s population active on social media, managing an online presence offers a key (and often free) marketing channel for lawn care businesses. 

But that doesn’t mean you should add your company profile to each and every platform. Social media pros recommend signing up only for platforms you intend to manage full-time, otherwise you quickly become overwhelmed. For best results, research the platforms your customers prefer, so you can focus your efforts on those with the most traffic—and highest payoff.

Use your social media channels to promote a well-done job with beautiful, high-definition photos and videos, showcase customer testimonials, promote services and hours of operation, and highlight special offers, promos, and giveaways. You may also want to consider allowing customers to contact you through social media sites, as well as schedule a lawn mowing or fertilizer treatment.

Social media platforms also offer the opportunity to highly target potential customers based on location, income, preferences, and more. Consider investing in Facebook Ads, or paid promotions on Instagram or Twitter to meet your customers online.

Invest in PPC

• Use PPC to place your lawn care ads in search engine rankings

• Evaluate keyword phrases based on intent, cost, and performance

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is an effective digital marketing tactic where you can place lawn care ads for your business in internet search engine rankings. 

Here’s how it works: 

• You bid on a group of keyword phrases, such as “best lawn care in Indianapolis,” and the search engine brings up your advertisement when someone searches those terms. 

• The cost for each keyword phrase depends on its competitiveness, and may range from a few cents up to $50. 

• As the lawn care business owner, you only have to pay the PPC fee when a searcher clicks on your ad. 

Unlike passive advertisements, PPC offers an effective marketing tool because it more directly reflects the user’s intent (they’re looking to hire now). 

Don’t Forget Direct Mail

• Use direct mail to reach customers who may not use a computer or social media

• Get creative with direct mail promotions to stand out

It might feel old-fashioned in today’s tech-centric world, yet many lawn care business owners continue to find success using print and direct-mail marketing. With millions of emails landing in spam folders each day, sometimes a postcard or mailer proves most effective.

ServiceTitan’s Direct Mail marketing feature allows your lawn care company to automate and send out direct mail pieces using existing customer data, and track deliverability of each postcard, magnet or other promotion, so you can see which ones convert to sales, and ultimately revenue.

There’s a reason why many lawn care companies send direct mail in the form of refrigerator magnets or calendars. It’s a strategic decision to hopefully get a homeowner to place the promo front and center in their kitchen, so the company stays top of mind whenever the homeowner needs service.

Collect Online Reviews

• Send automated links to leave a review after every job

• Respond to happy customers to further demonstrate exceptional customer service

Prioritizing the customer experience in every job leads to happy, repeat customers, more word-of-mouth referrals, and ultimately positive online reviews. Remember, virtually all consumers check online reviews before making a hiring decision, so give them assurance that your company performs top-notch work by showcasing five-star customer testimonials.

Use ServiceTitan’s customer experience software to keep customers in the loop at every stage of the job. You can send them a technician bio and photo so they can see who’s coming to their home, and they can even track the tech’s location in real time using ServiceTitan’s live GPS tracking. That way, customers don’t have to wait around (sometimes for hours) wondering when the tech will arrive.

When it comes time for that review, the software automatically sends a personalized text to the customer, complete with a link to your company’s preferred review site to generate more high-quality reviews. Make sure to acknowledge and follow up with each customer, so potential customers see your company’s professionalism and commitment to customer service.

Measuring Marketing ROI

• Establish goals and KPIs for all of your marketing campaigns

• Analyze results and optimize future campaigns to boost ROI

Measure the success of your marketing strategies by calculating return on investment from each marketing campaign. 

ServiceTitan streamlines this process by enabling your lawn care business to make data-driven decisions about your marketing efforts and track key field service metrics. ServiceTitan’s Marketing Scorecard ranks all of your campaigns by revenue across each marketing channel and shows the number of generated leads and phone calls, booked appointments, cost per lead, and more, so you can truly understand your marketing ROI. 

Additionally, the included heat map reveals the service areas where your company is most profitable, so you can optimize your lawn care advertising efforts to maximize revenue.