Landscape maintenance leads are out there waiting for you. You just need the right strategy to reach them and avoid losing each one to your competitors. What strategies can you opt for in order to achieve this goal? There are many options, from networking and referral programs to social media marketing and search engine optimization.
You just have to find the most suitable ones (because you need more than one) and adjust them to your goals and niche.
We have discovered and experienced that online options and offline ones are as effective for landscape maintenance businesses. However, when you combine them, results are much more appealing.
We know it can be hard to deal with lead generation. Thus, the idea of building a plan with several strategies is tough. However, it isn’t impossible.
Here, we will be sharing the best lead generation strategies for your landscape business. In that way, you won’t struggle to decide which ones to include in your plans.
Invest in A Killer Landscape Website
Your website is where you should always start. Otherwise, you won’t have a place where your leads can land.
Now, it should have two purposes:
1) To attract potential clients.
2) To turn website visitors into qualified leads that you can use for your sales team.
A killer website involves choosing a neat yet converting design with enough elements to turn visitors into leads (eventually).
In addition to the entire design and building, you will need to work on its optimization.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an oversimplified and misunderstood term. It is as simple as implementing online strategies on your lawn care website to help it rank higher in search engines for hundreds of keywords consumers searching for the terms.
Traffic is important, but it’s also important to convert at least 1-3% of website visitors into qualified leads. Of course, you need to make sure they find you first, and SEO solves over 65% of this problem.
Now, you might find that converting visitors isn’t that often to the point of reaching the minimum percentage, which is already very low.
This could be a sign of major problems with your user experience, images, and copywriting. Thus, you need more focus on these elements when you are creating your web pages and entire site.
This will ensure that organic website traffic and landscape maintenance leads increase over time. It will also help you to achieve long-lasting results.
In order to help you have success in this, here are some tips you should take notes of:
- When building a website, it is important to invest a lot of time. Thus, take it easy, and don’t worry much about how long it is taking as long as you know you’re doing things right.
- You can rank for hundreds of search terms by consistently creating long-form, useful blog content over the years. Expertise is essential to create a great content strategy and remarkable content (we will dive more into it later).
- You can create online directories with Google My Business and social media profiles. You should ensure that your company name, address, phone number, and website are consistent.
- Use high-quality, professionally-created visual and written content. You are a landscape maintenance expert. You can hire professionals to do these tasks better, but you should stick with what you know best.
- Your website should encourage visitors to take action on every page. Make it easy for visitors to do their research and get a quote or take action.
- Your strategy can be tested and refined. An excellent lawn care marketing agency will be able to identify and fix problems if you have the budget for them.
Pay Attention to Your Landing Pages
Landing pages are key to website lead generation. They will also help you to attract more customers to your landscaping business by, sometimes, skipping the leads part.
You can use some landing pages for informational purposes only. However, you can also find a new purpose based on what your prospects are looking for.
But more importantly, in all this, have you ever wondered what you should do after the content is read on those pages? It’s simple. It is now time to convert the readers.
With the right information on your landing page, visitors should be “pushed” to make a decision whether they want to hire your services.
This is possible by creating a landing page that converts. It should be optimized for a better user experience and contain conversion-focused elements. These are our tips for helping you achieve your goal:
- To avoid visitors leaving, you should remove anything that doesn’t help you convert web traffic to leads.
- Describe the service you provide and why it is beneficial to your clients.
- It is crucial to clearly define what happens to visitors when they click on an element.
- It is important to know exactly where they should click.
- You can reduce clicks. You should allow them only to click three times to reach the destination from your homepage, so they don’t get bored with the process.
Google Ads but Smart
While you work to improve your organic traffic, these ads can help increase your website visits and the resulting leads.
If you don’t use the right approach, Google Ads (also known as PPC or Pay-Per-Click) can lead to a poor return on investment. This strategy is best for landscape maintenance services with a short sales cycle and a high sense of urgency.
However, it ends up being quite vital for any business in the niche in the short and long run. In fact, we love mentioning that it is crucial to utilize this strategy.
If you listen to us (please do), these are some tips to remember:
- Google allows you to budget for at least $1,500 per calendar month. Your ads will not appear many times per day if you don’t do your best to reach this average, but don’t force yourself either if you don’t have the money. Only reach it when you know it is profitable and can afford it.
- Spend 5-10 hours per month with an agency working on improvement or take the time to learn about PPC to know what to do.
- Try different ad copies and see which one works best.
- You can create and refine landing pages to convert more clicks to leads, just as mentioned before.
Create a Direct Mail Strategy (It Works!)
A great way to generate leads for your business is to send postcards. If executed well, a campaign should yield a return of 1.5 to 3.5%. This means that if you send 10,000 postcards, 150-350 new landscape leads should be generated.
If this doesn’t happen, it could be a problem with your offer, timing, design, or landing page. Not because the strategy is useless.
If you want some help with this and we really encourage you to integrate it into your plan, consider this:
- Your design should be simple, with just one image per side. A compelling offer and customer-focused messaging are important. You also need multiple ways for them to reach you.
- For better reporting, create a unique number to track calls.
- QR codes make it easy for prospects to find the landing page they are looking for on your site.
- Send prospects to a landing page on your site that contains the most important information, a contact tracking number, and a form.
- Social proof can be used as a great Google Review for postcards.
Wrap Your Trucks to Build Awareness
Every company in this niche will have its trucks parking in a neighborhood at least twice per day. This is a crucial moment to generate leads.
Your vehicle should be wrapped in a stylish but unique way. This should not be done in an over-or underhanded manner. If you do it correctly, people will feel attracted and maybe contact you with the information you included in the wrapping.
Now, don’t go overboard with the strategy. Do it right by:
- Even if you have to use an outside graphic designer, it is worth paying for a professional design. This is not something that all sign shops can do well. Ask for examples of their work.
- Make sure your logo is large enough to be easily seen on the streets. Although phone and website addresses are great, most people will search the internet for your brand name.
- Wrap your back trucks.
- Look for vehicles that have large surface areas when you buy new fleet vehicles. Additional panels may be required for flatbed trucks to advertise this prime spot in lawn care advertising.
Yes, Email Marketing Works
You’ve done an excellent job collecting emails over the years from customers and prospects. If you haven’t because you are starting, you better work around this strategy.
The overall idea is that when you have enough emails, you need to contact them to nurture your leads constantly.
Seasonal tips and offers are a great way of increasing your customer value. You can also re-engage customers who have canceled the services requested.
Email marketing is a big move because you can get to know new leads or bring old ones back thanks to the value offered in every message.
Now, there are many things people do wrong with this lead generation strategy. So, to make sure you don’t ruin it, focus on:
- 2-4 emails per month are sufficient.
- Create short, engaging subject lines.
- Use great images and keep your email content short.
- Be helpful. You may need to make subtle promotions at times, but don’t beg for people’s business.
Advertise on Radio Stations for More Leads
This has worked for landscape maintenance businesses multiple times, and despite the internet, this isn’t getting old.
Radio ads can be used to complement other advertising campaigns. They will see your signs and trucks in their yards. Then they will get a postcard by the postman, and they’ll hear your radio spots. It is a combination of everything that builds to generate more qualified leads.
You can only hope that the prospect mentions the radio advertisement, which is not the most memorable of all the items. Your radio ad is unlikely to get people to stop what they are doing and call you.
They don’t have to be run, but you should consider your priorities and ROI. Radio ads are most effective for companies with a lot of brand equity over the past 10+ years. Thus, this might not be for you based on how much people in your local area listen to it as well.
Research and decide!
Contact Forms Are a Must
Visitors and leads will give you their contact information if you have a clean and optimized landing page. If you do want them to sign up, don’t ask for too much. We have mentioned this before. However, it is crucial to go over some details when talking about specific elements.
In seconds, your website can convert a prospect into a sales lead with the use of the correct contact forms in the landing pages.
Converting a lead into a customer may take several weeks or even months. Conversion and lead nurturing are easier when there’s more information. However, an email address is not necessary to get started.
If you need more information than an email address, you can ask for it. It should be easy with large fields clearly marked.
Remember that contact forms are important and should be placed where they are most needed.
You will see that each page of other people’s websites has one. However, this is not always the best strategy. Sometimes, you just need a couple.
Contact forms are a great way to track the success of your website’s lead generation efforts.
You can choose a blog post with high performance or a page that offers pillar services. If they have visited these pages before, you can encourage them to complete a contact form.
Digging Deep Enough Into SEO
Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is still the king of digital marketing. It will take your landscaping business to the top of Google and will help it stay there.
If your campaign is strong, SEO can suffice to generate most of the landscape maintenance leads.
A Google My Business account can be a great start for your SEO campaign. The next step is to start backlinking (linking other lawn and landscaping websites with high authority) or content marketing (sharing information about lawn care with potential customers).
An SEO expert can help you get your campaign started. An expert SEO can make suggestions to improve your SEO campaign’s effectiveness and assist you in implementing the initial strategy.
SEO is not all about keywords. This is what you may have thought after reading dozens of articles.
It is easy to get overwhelmed by all the information. But, if you want to build a relationship with your leads, you must not forget to take the time to do this.
Don’t Miss the Trust Signals
Social proof is synonymous to lead generation. It is the best way for your business that it has the right services and people to perform it.
Trust signals can be a great way to make your agency stand out in Google’s eyes. They also give potential clients confidence that the company is trustworthy.
These are the factors you need to consider to build trust:
- Collect Your Best Testimonials.
You can get testimonials from your customers to help lower your lead generation costs.
- Share your success stories.
Success stories are another way to demonstrate social proof.
These stories offer potential clients a glimpse into the experience of working with you and what you can offer.
They also demonstrate that you can live up to your commitments and deliver results that make a difference for them.
Visuals can be used as support for your content. To display success stories, you can use graphs and charts as well as visuals.
Blog Content… High-Quality One
A blog is a great way to increase leads for your company. However, the content must be high quality to get the best results.
You must spend as much time on content marketing as you do for the rest of the strategies or even more so you can get optimal results.
To start, think about the primary purpose of your content.
Relationships are the foundation of blog content. These people will be likely to convert into customers or leads and then clients when you put enough thought into the purpose and creation.
Before you begin writing a blog post about content, reflect on why you are investing in it as lead generation ideas. Also, consider how this will impact your business. Answer crucial questions like:
- How can you solve the problems of your target audience with free content?
- Which are the most visited websites where customers of our target market spend their online time? Are they reading blogs? Join LinkedIn groups? Google Search?
- Which would you prefer: 100 readers from your target market or 1,000 readers with a limited number of target customers? This will allow you to decide on the topics that you want to write about.
- Can you create high-quality content with your core competencies? If not, how can you attract the right people and make them work for you?
Once you have all of this information and have added a few more, you will find it easy to create ideas for blog content.
Focus On Your Customers/Clients
This tip isn’t as complicated as it sounds and can make a big difference in the quality and quantity of landscaping leads and jobs you get.
You just need to focus on four parts to give your customers the attention they need and also obtain elements for your lead generation efforts:
- Survey: Survey or research your customers and competitors to stay on top of market trends to offer clients everything they need.
- Listen: Talk to your ideal customers and current clients to find out their needs and what you can do to serve them best.
- Monitor: Look at consumer behavior and market trends to determine what’s working.
- Learn: Analyze your marketing strategy at key moments throughout the year in order to keep your lawn care business advancing.
Get Leads for Landscapers by Surveying the Area
Although it might sound like old-fashioned advertising, canvassing a local area for more landscaping leads may be a good idea.
After all, your ideal customers will be more likely to do business with you and to remember you if they meet you face to face.
Try canvassing after you have completed a local job. You will be able to name-drop your customer and show examples of your work.
To get the best results, you should:
- Even if you don’t get the response you desire, be polite and courteous.
- For each interaction, set a goal: Get their contact information, leave an email address and send them a business card.
- Prepare a script so that you are better prepared.
- After obtaining their information, follow up with potential customers to see if you can add them to your mailing list.
Online and Offline: Manage Your Business’s Image.
Did you know that 82% of people use the internet to find local landscapers in a hurry?
These same people also research your reputation to see what past customers have to say about your work and your pricing.
Are you able to show up on time and complete the task you promised? You probably have nothing to be concerned about if so.
You can also use word-of-mouth offline to your advantage. Ask satisfied customers to recommend any friends, family members, neighbors, or acquaintances that might be interested in your lawn care and landscaping services.
After you have completed a lawn service, give them lots of business cards and ask if they would mind putting a temporary sign in the yard.
You can list your landscaping company online on review sites and ask satisfied customers to leave reviews on Google. This will increase your chances of bringing in more landscaping leads.
Just make sure to always be outstanding in what you do, and positive reviews and your reputation will come and go up without issues.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Landscape Maintenance Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Landscape Maintenance Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Landscape Maintenance Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.