Landscape marketing used to be simple and straightforward: local ads and word-of-mouth was enough to keep your business running smoothly. But now, with the average American's daily screen time clocking in at a scary 7 hours a day, the marketing pipeline has changed.
Lawns and gardens in residential and commercial buildings all need landscapers to maintain their lush greenery and targeting local customers is crucial for all landscaping businesses.
Digital marketing for landscapers means that you're able to connect your business with your online customers, wherever they are. Two important aspects for successful digital marketing including: staying consistent and developing the right marketing mix for your business.
Easier said than done. There are a lot of challenges that landscaping digital marketing faces in the new age. Landscapers need to adapt in order to find new customers, expand their reach, and stay successful. Here are some common challenges we've noticed in landscape marketing:
1. Fierce Competition
New landscaping businesses enter the market every year, from summer break teenagers looking for a side job, to large multi-level companies. With over 1 million employees in the entire landscaping industry, and growing, the landscaping business is extremely oversaturated.
And it's understandable why so many people want a piece of the landscaping hedge. The same report showed that the 5-year growth of the landscaping industry has brought in 158.9bn in revenue, due to the 2022 boom in the housing market.
2. Lack of Digital Marketing Acumen
For all businesses, digital marketing has become a core business activity. But when traditional businesses lack digital marketing knowledge, they can really struggle to effectively market themselves online and they often miss out on potential customers. Landscaping digital marketing is still relatively new for many companies in the industry, and though many landscapers do have a strong grasp on traditional landscape marketing, many are losing valuable leads in the online sphere. Having a mix of traditional and digital marketing for landscapers is necessary to stand out and succeed.
3. Misrepresented Leads
Finding high-quality leads and closing deals has become harder than ever before. From stable pre-COVID times to stay-at-home ordinances to economic uncertainties, there have been a lot of rollercoaster changes in lead fluctuation. For the past few years, we've been experiencing dramatic upheavals and now, it's hard to know when leads are real or not.
Regardless of the endlessly shifting mirage of market trends, one thing in landscaping marketing remains true: a landscape marketing agency must adapt in order to maintain a competitive edge.
With more people staying at home than ever before now, the customer journey often begins online. Meeting and building a relationship with potential clients online is possible with personalized digital landscape marketing solutions that allow your business to navigate these challenges effectively.
How CMGs Gets Landscapers Over The Hedge
Not sure where to start? Digital marketing for landscapers is streamlined when you work with CMG. We'll make sure you have the proper marketing mix for your company to optimize best results for your region. When it comes to landscape digital marketing, it relies on mastering the art of adaptation and taking every opportunity you see to drive results.
When landscape businesses lack digital marketing acumen, they miss out on the opportunity to direct traffic to their website and generate new leads and ultimately, sales. Consistent marketing efforts help create stability over time and the right marketing mix increases your company's online visibility, driving results by helping you stand out from the competition and generating new leads.
Our service approach is aimed at driving conversions and maximizing revenue, using strategies like:
SEO
Search engine optimization is a long-term marketing process used to improve your online visibility through search engines. Search engines try to help users find your site through your keywords, phrases, and language and connect the user with the category they're searching for.
If you're using niche words that drive in very little online traffic, you're not optimizing your site to its fullest potential. It's important for a landscaping marketing agency to know which keywords are popular and which aren't in order to know if their SEO is actually converting into leads and sales.
At CMG, our SEO industry leading tools are able to perform market research and navigate the future of search. With our SEO management, we're able to stay relevant in an ever-evolving world of digital marketing for landscapers and find new, loyal customers for you.
PPC performance marketing
The most effective landscape marketing relies on a mix of unpaid marketing strategies, like SEO, and paid marketing strategies, like PPC. Pay-per-click marketing achieves similar visibility as SEO, which is bringing your website to the top of the search engine, but it's a short-term strategy because of its cost to play. Companies bid for placement of their ads online, and they pay for each click that's driven to their site. But as soon as payments stop, so do their top ad positions.
Our fully integrated approach to PPC performance marketing ensures that this is landscape marketing built exactly for your business needs. Customized PPC strategies will always outperform standardized plans, and remember: better PPC = better ROI.
Social Media
It's inescapable — to have a business in the 21st century means that you must be a part of social media. Social proof is a bigger influence now more than ever when informing and driving customer decisions and social media never sleeps. By showing success stories, before and after photos, case studies, and video testimonials, a landscape marketing agency like our social media strategists at CMG are able to leverage your social media to work for you, finding potential customers even while you sleep.
Social media is also a great way to measure insights from customers and gain better feedback for landscape digital marketing. When you create a welcoming online presence, you'll attract better customers who want to engage and lead to more sales.
Consistent branding over time creates customer loyalty, which is an important aspect in recurring landscape maintenance services. Are you advertised as a seamless, silent landscaping business that won't bother their customer who works from home? Or are you a friendly neighborhood landscape artist that loves to collaborate with their customers? Alongside the service you perform is the experience that you promise online and deliver in person.
Word-of-mouth and online reviews
Reviews are crucial pieces of social proof that turn leads into sales and the landscaping business relies heavily on word of mouth. In fact, 64% of marketing executives indicated that they believe word-of-mouth is the most effective form of marketing. But all it takes is one negative review they may see online that derails their plans to hire you.
Though word-of-mouth-marketing will always be important, online reviews have steadily equalized the impact of reviews in general because of their accessibility. Monitoring and responding to online reviews is a crucial part of landscape marketing, since businesses are now expected to provide quick and compassionate customer service.
Keep the Green in Your Pocket and Off the Table
At CMG, we adapt the right landscaping digital marketing strategies that lead to tangible business growth. With our landscape marketing agency, we seamlessly transition potential customers to loyal clients by staying ahead, cultivating the right media mix for your company, and understanding marketing trends.
Don't leave sales on the table because of poor landscape marketing decisions. Reach out to CMG today and ask us how we can help you.
