3 Strategies For Growing Your Landscaping Business

You may have a green thumb for yellow patches of lawn and precise landscaping skills, but if you can’t grow your landscaping operation, then you can’t serve your community and keep your business dreams alive. 

At America DIY, we’re connectors, movers, and jivers, keeping an ear to the ground, introducing people and projects to the best local landscapers out there. That’s our specialty. You need mulch, we’ve got a local mulch guy, and his stuff is better than the big box stores. 

We help folks support local and we help local landscapers thrive. 

On the business side of things, we’ve rounded up a few strategies that will strengthen your landscaping business and bring in new customers so there’s less yellow patches along the way. 

Craft your value proposition

A value proposition describes what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it in a unique and superior way compared to the rest of the market. 

First ask yourself, “What is my landscaping business best at?”

Unless you have a powerful and trusted stream of word-of-mouth business, most people will check out 4-5 landscapers online before deciding on your business or another one.

If your value proposition is clear and easy to comprehend, you have a better chance of standing out and conveying your value to a potential customer.

When sitting down to write your value proposition, make sure to touch on all the necessary elements. HubSpot, an enormous CRM and inbound marketing company, lists three core elements: the headline, the sub-headline or description, and a visual.

• The headline can be fun and creative, but needs to ultimately convey the core benefit or benefits you are offering customers. Your benefit should solve a major problem that many customers share.

• The sub-headline or description further expands upon how your business solves this problem. It should talk about why your work is important, where the value lies for the customer, and how your company does what you do so well.

• The visual element should be a breather from the text but still work to convey the same message as the headline or sub-headline. A good visual will illustrate your benefit in action and help convince the customer of the value.

Lastly, you should list a call-to-action. After you’ve shown a potential customer who you are, what you offer, and why you’re different, now it’s time to nudge them to take action. This could be asking for their email or asking them to reach out for an estimate. Give them a button to click on or a form to fill out. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA6TG4wMcUU

Value Proposition Example

If your landscaping company specializes in lawn care and maintenance, be sure to specifically mention lawn care in your headline so customers looking for this type of service immediately stop when they see your page.

In the sub-headline, you would further describe the unique grass formulas or methods you implement to revitalize customer’s lawns and help them stay healthy and strong in the future.

As a visual, you might include a before and after photo of one dreary, lifeless lawn suddenly becoming green and nourished after the customer hired your services.

Your call-to-action might be a button that reads, “Save my lawn now!” and takes the customer to the contact page on your website. 

Align your brand across all platforms

Now that you have your value proposition in place, it’s time to update the words and content you use to communicate with your customers and audience—at every possible touchpoint.

If you run a landscape architecture business, you want your messaging to be the same everywhere. 

Whether a customer stumbles across your website, your Instagram, your Facebook, your Yelp profile, or pulls into your parking lot and steps inside your physical store, you want them to quickly learn that you are a landscape architecture service.

You can align your brand on multiple platforms by using the same effective language and descriptions in multiple places. Write one or two really potent headlines, a stellar description, and a few short, punchy taglines that hammer home your benefits.

After establishing this copy, employ it in multiple places, from your social media captions to your in-store banners This will help your brand come across as cohesive, consistent, and confident in the services you provide.

Keep in mind that you may need to tweak descriptions for different platforms. You can be more long-winded on your website than on Instagram, where your bio has a shorter word limit and your messaging is rapidly consumed.

Turn on the megaphone

Once you have your value proposition and your messaging in place, it’s time to spread your message to the community.

Create your own visuals

Start by completing simple, free tasks like shooting your own photographs and short clips and updating your logo, fonts, and the colors of your brand if needed.

A visual refresh will help you stand out in a cluttered market. High-res photos of your landscapers in action will show potential customers the real, hard work your business regularly completes.

Shoot short clips revealing the technicalities of what you do. What’s the proper way to irrigate? How does one plant a spring bulb? What is the best technique for trimming the edges of a lawn? These are all potential pieces of content that provide free, useful value to potential customers.

Post and advertise

Sit down and write out a content plan. You might decide you want to post to Instagram three times per week and send out one email per week. Be open to iteration and making subtle tweaks as you go.

Curate the photos and clips you took and write captions that fit with the visual content. Try to add value to every single post by educating or inspiring or riffing on relevant topics in the landscaping industry and within your specific niche.

Set aside a small budget and launch an ad on Instagram, Google, Facebook, or Yelp. Take note of how many people your ad reached, who clicked on it, and how many new leads you received as a direct result. Now you have fresh data to anchor your efforts.

Make a few creative changes and launch another small ad. Did it perform better or worse than the first ad? 

If your company specializes in yard clean-up, trimming, and maintenance, sit down and imagine yourself as the customer. If you had an overgrown yard riddled with debris and dead growth, what benefits would you be looking for? What would you want to see if you went online looking for a solution? Then crank out content that addresses those very questions.

Go and grow

Define your value proposition, create consistent, potent messaging across every platform where your business lives, then turn on the megaphone and tell your community who you are and why you can solve their landscaping problems.

You’ve already got the green thumb, now spread that same magic to the roots of your business and enjoy healthy growth into the future. Good luck friends!