Understanding the Northern NJ Landscaping Market
Before you can market your companies’ landscaping services to your ideal customers, first you need to really know who they are. This is the key to standing out in the super-competitive landscaping market that Northern New Jersey is known for.
Why? Because taking the time to craft a unique marketing message that addresses your ideal prospects will help your company cut through the marketing noise and have a much more compelling message. This will make potential customers trust you, make your company much more memorable, and ultimately increase your chances of getting and keeping new landscaping customers this season.
Think about it. Every landscaper you know is busy highlighting how great their services are. If you do the same, your message has no chance of sticking out. However, by taking a customer-centric approach to marketing, you can leapfrog over the competition and see real results from your marketing efforts.
Keep reading this post – as we’re about to explain exactly how you can use digital marketing to grow your landscaping company.
How Your New Jersey Landscaping Company Can Do Digital Marketing The Right Way
We’re sure you know other landscaping companies that always seem to be able to generate leads and land new customers all through their online marketing efforts. Imagine not having to do so many sales meetings and constant prospecting. Imagine having a set it and forget it online marketing strategy that is helping you generate new business 24/7. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
Well, it is possible and while this all may seem very complicated, the truth is that nothing we’re talking about here is rocket science.
With Digital Marketing, everything starts with knowing who your customer is and what your message is to them. You should also be setting marketing goals early on so you can see if your efforts are successful later. Once you know all this, then it’s all about figuring out what digital marketing strategies and tactics are going to help your landscaping company reach potential customers.
Once you really understand who your customers are and what makes them tick, you can then use the below digital marketing tactics to start driving new business for your landscaping company.
How Your Landscaping Website Can Be Your #1 Sales Tool
Your website is your most important digital marketing asset (that’s why we put this one here at the top). It’s basically the storefront to your business in today’s digital world. And trust us, the benefits of having a high performing website will completely transform your landscaping business. When done right, a website will act as your best salesperson and be a hub for all of your digital marketing activities to revolve around.
A website is what ties together your entire digital marketing strategy. Whenever you post on social media, for example, you should add a link back to your website. This way, you are always sending people to a place where they can learn more about your business. And whenever you produce content, you should add it to your website’s blog so people can find you when they are searching for landscaping companies on Google.
We could really nerd out here and tell you all the business advantages that a website with great design and a proper digital marketing strategy behind it will bring to your landscaping company. But we think you get the point. It’s a necessity in today’s online world and if you don’t have a great one already, your first priority should be to address that.
But if you do want to hear us go on about all the benefits a great website offers to your landscaping company, schedule a time to talk with us.
Use Google My Business To Help Local Customers Find You Online
Google My Business has become a great resource for small businesses and is definitely something all New Jersey landscaping companies should be actively using. If you’re not already familiar, Google My Business allows customers to easily find your business online and view your location, business hours, contact information and reviews. It’s become a one-stop-shop for people to find local businesses in their area. It’s essentially the Yellow Pages of the internet today.
So, why should you care?
For one, using Google My Business can dramatically help your landscaping company’s local SEO rankings. Meaning, when customers in your area search for services that your business offers, you will have a much better chance of ranking on the first page of Google by using this platform. Further, many consumers use the reviews listed on your business profile to evaluate your company before making contact – so you want to make sure you are encouraging your customers to leave you reviews to help you drive new business
Use Email Marketing To Automate Your Sales Follow Ups
Email Marketing refuses to die – and in fact it’s one of the most ROI positive digital marketing tactics out there today! So, what is it that makes email marketing so effective? And what role can it play in your landscaping company’s marketing strategy?
Simply put, email marketing allows you to directly engage with potential customers. It’s far better than social media – because you’re communicating with them in their email inbox, as opposed to the newsfeed of whatever social network they’re on. Meaning, you can have more personal conversations with your prospects and don’t have to compete with all of the noise on social media.
Finally, many prospects will first give you their email address (or download a piece of content requiring their email address) as a first step in doing business with you. These people are interested in what you have to offer, but are not 100% ready to call you up and hire you. To make that happen, we recommend using email marketing to promote your marketing content and send personalized messages to your list to nurture potential customers into paying customers.
Better yet, we recommend automating this so your email marketing strategy is working around the clock to close deals for you.
Sound cool, but don’t know where to start? Schedule a time to talk marketing strategy with us.
Get a CRM To Make Managing Sales Easy
Once you’ve got a great website built for digital marketing, your Google My Business profile set up, and have implemented a few email marketing automations, you’re likely going to have a good amount of leads to work with. So, now what?
Well, that’s where Hubspot or some other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool comes in. Basically, a CRM will help you easily manage all of your sales contacts and activities so you always know what you need to do to be closing new business. Gone are the days of managing everything by paper (or worse, keeping things in your head). We’re especially big fans of Hubspot (so much so, we were the first NJ Marketing Agency to become a Platinum Certified Agency Partner of theirs).
What’s great about Hubspot is it isn’t just a CRM – but rather a full-fledged marketing tool that can help you with social media, blogging, SEO, email marketing, and reporting on your marketing efforts. We recommend all landscaping companies in NJ use Hubspot as their CRM so they can finally see once and for all what marketing activities actually drive sales results.
How To Think About Marketing Your Landscaping Company Online
We’ve talked a lot about strategy and tactics here. But we would be doing you a disservice by not making it clear that to really succeed with digital marketing, you’re going to need to shift your mindset on what marketing is in the first place.
It’s not about getting your message in front of the most people for the cheapest possible price (real talk: most consumers are just going to tune you out anyway). And it’s not about being a pushy salesperson. The best marketers today understand that marketing is about being helpful, putting yourself in your potential prospect’s shoes, and providing upfront value before asking for the sale. These are some of the core concepts of Inbound Marketing.
What does this mean for your landscaping company? For one, you should always be producing content that your current customers and potential ones will find helpful and informative. The new way to sell your services is by educating. Whether you’re creating YouTube videos, publishing articles on your blog, or even looking to start a podcast – you need to have an outlet where you can reach people in your area looking to improve the appearance of their yard, and may just be willing to hire a landscaper to do it.
Google Ads for Landscapers
Google Ads is likely going to be one of the best digital marketing opportunities for your landscaping company. They allow you to show up at the top of Google’s search results whenever someone in your local area does a search related to your business and services. This gives your business the ability to show up right when people are looking for someone like you to solve their problems – how great is that?
The best thing about Google Ads is you never get charged unless someone actually clicks on your ad. This makes it a very cost-effective marketing solution and a great first step in experimenting with digital marketing for your landscaping company.
Pro Tip: Extensions should always be added to your Google Ad to provide more relevant information and offers. Extensions allow you to add things like phone numbers, special promotions, contact forms, and even pricing — directly in your ad! If you don’t see a major increase in your Click Through Rates after turning on extensions, we’ll buy you a beer.
Facebook Ads for Landscapers
Another great way to get started with digital marketing is to begin running Facebook Ads. They allow you to advertise to people on both Facebook and Instagram and give you a lot more room to be creative with your marketing compared to Google Ads.
Facebook ads are similar to regular posts – meaning you can use an image, video, and some text to promote your services. However, what really makes them special is the ability to have custom targeting. With Facebook Ads, you can advertise directly to your ideal customers. And, there are a ton of ways to “retarget” people who have already interacted with your business online. Similar to Email Marketing, this will help you nurture potential prospects with your content until they are ready to become a paying customer of yours.
With Facebook Ads, you can advertise directly to your ideal customers. You can target by the most common demographics, like their age, gender, zip code, and interests. But you can go way deeper than that — you could target your ad to parents of toddlers, using an image of kids playing in a beautifully manicured backyard. Aligning great messaging, creative and targeting is where the rubber hits the road. Posting randomly to the friends and family that already like your page…not so much.
Frequently Asked Questions About Digital Marketing for Landscaping Companies
Overall, digital marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your landscaping business. Many digital marketing activities are technically free – such as creating new content (blog, audio, or video), sending emails to your list, and posting organically on social media. You will have to pay for either Google or Facebook ads, but both platforms feature a lot of billing controls to make sure you never go over your pre-set budget. If you’re interested in hiring a digital marketing agency and want to know the cost of doing that, check out this post.
No, not at all! Certainly, there would have been advantages to begin doing some of these things years ago. And if you already have some marketing assets that fit in what we’ve talked about here, that’s great. However, if you don’t, you haven’t missed the boat. Digital marketing is always evolving and there is still plenty of time for you to shift your marketing strategy.
These services will allow you to pay for traffic. Instead of trying to get people to see your regular social media posts (which with the way the algorithm works, the majority of your followers likely won’t even see), you can simply pay to get your content in front of your ideal customers.
What you will find with organic digital marketing efforts like SEO and content marketing is that it takes time to see results. A lot of the strategy we’ve discussed here is a long term play and will require commitment. However, paid ads from Facebook and Google allow you to bypass this by paying for views and clicks to bring in more traffic to your site. Google and Facebook ads will help you see instant results on your time and effort.
We’re not going to lie to you – a lot goes into crafting a great digital marketing strategy. And when your first getting started with it, a lot of this can feel overwhelming.
As you begin to evaluate your current marketing strategy, we recommend taking a very close look at your website. But don’t just focus on its design (although that’s very important) – also review your sales records and see if it has generated any substantial business for you over the last 3-6 months. If the design is lacking and you’re not seeing any results, we’d recommend getting your website in order before moving forward with anything else.
Your business website is the hub all of your digital marketing activities should revolve around – so if it isn’t set up correctly, you’re not going to see the full benefits of the rest of your marketing efforts.
Now, if your website is newer and well designed, then you can move on to content production and working to generate leads with that. Just make sure you have a CRM also set up so you have a place to easily manage and follow up with your sales contacts.
It’s tough to give an exact answer here, but with digital marketing you can expect to see both short-term and long-term results. Short-term, we can use either Facebook or Google Ads to start driving traffic to your website, getting eyeballs on all your landscaping content, and eventually generating leads.
Long-term, you will start to see the results of your efforts start to compound over time. Meaning, the longer you are dedicated to advertising your company with a well thought out and executed digital marketing strategy, the more growth you can expect to see over the long-term. For example, as your email list grows, the easier it will be to generate more leads whenever you are looking to land more accounts by sending content out to that list. Also, the more content you produce, the better your website will rank on Google, and the more website traffic you will be able to generate for free with SEO.
So in short, we can help you see both immediate and long-term growth with digital marketing.
