The Best Landscape Marketing Strategies to Get High-End Customers

Customer acquisition can make or break your landscaping business. Here are the best landscape marketing strategies to take your growth to the next level.

Google Ads

Google Ads are one of the quickest dials you can turn for lead generation. Empty schedule? Ramp up your ad spend. Full of appointments? Reduce instead.

With Search Ads, you can advertise to people Googling phrases like “landscapers near me” or “best landscaping company in [your city].” This is often the most lucrative landscape marketing strategy (businesses earn an average of $2 for every $1 they spend on PPC). Leads are very close to buying – they know they want your service and they are looking for it now.

Set up conversion tracking for quote requests or phone calls to see exactly how much each lead costs and monitor your ROI.

Speaking of phone calls, Click-to-Call Ads and Extensions are a great way to quickly connect with hot landscaping leads. These may be

1. older people who prefer calling a company over reading their website
2. homeowners who’ve seen your brand before and don’t need to be sold anymore
3. busy individuals who decide quickly and don’t like to mess around

Finally, Display Ads can put you in front of people who are in the market for landscaping services, but aren’t actively looking for them right now. You can target them based on visits to your website, or “in-market audiences” – a fancy way of saying the people that Google believes want landscaping, according to their extensive stalking capabilities. Hurray for Big Brother.

The big knock on Google Ads is if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s easy to spend a lot of money and get no results. If that doesn’t scare you and you’ve got money to blow invest in your education, create an ad and throw some relevant keywords in there. Use Exact, Phrase, and maybe Broad Match Modified keywords to start (stay away from Broad Match keywords).

There are tons of resources for learning Google Ads, but experience is the best teacher.

Local SEO

A while back, Google figured out that when someone searches for “landscape design services”, they’re not looking for a blog post. They want the best companies that offer landscape design. They capitalized on this by adding the “map pack” for local businesses.

Marketing your landscape business for the map pack is completely different than traditional SEO, however. With local SEO, you’re essentially ranking your Google My Business page, NOT your website.

Three quick tips every landscaping company should follow:

1. complete every field of your Google My Business profile
2. ensure your business information is exactly the same across the web
3. contact local organizations and see if they’ll link back to your site

Traditional SEO

These are the main search results that formed the backbone of Google’s business since the beginning. It’s a bit misleading to call the previous section “Local SEO” because these results are local as well, but that’s nitpicking. The important thing is this section ranks your website based on how relevant Google thinks it is to the search term. Also, these are often considered the “real results” by searchers, and the first result on average receives 30% of all search traffic!

An aside, because this is important. Google is in the business of connecting people with the information they seek. The best way to do landscaping SEO is to prove to Google that you’re a valuable source of information! Don’t get caught up in “hacks” and “secrets” to rank your website. You’ll pay the price sooner or later, and it’s a long road to redemption if they blacklist you.

In short, quality content is the best SEO. That being said, there are best practices you should employ to help your site get to the first page.

1. Add value. Understand the intent behind the keyword you’re targeting, and answer that question well.
2. Write for humans first. Write for Google’s algorithms second.
3. Link to other relevant posts. Some your stuff, some high-authority, external pages.
4. Don’t keyword stuff. Google is on to you and you will be penalized.
5. Don’t cannibalize content. Writing another article on the “best summer plants” dilutes your message and splits your ranking between two pages.

Website Optimization

Site optimization affects pretty much every other online marketing strategy. Here’s what to concentrate on:

1. Mobile responsiveness. Google has switched most pages to mobile-first indexing, meaning they’re primarily assessing your site on its mobile performance. You can no longer get by with a subpar mobile experience.
2. Site loading time below 3 seconds. Half of mobile visitors abandon the page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Test your site and follow Google’s recommendations using their tool.
3. Create dedicated landing pages. Should be obvious by now, but if someone searches for “drought tolerant landscaping ideas”, they should see a page about drought-tolerant landscaping. This will dramatically improve your ad performance and shows Google that you care about answering users’ questions.

Facebook Advertising

A few years ago, Facebook was the best value in online advertising. Now it’s still good, especially if you already have a large customer base. Here’s what landscapers should focus on:

1. Custom audiences. Facebook allows you to target the 1% of people most similar to your existing list of customers. This is huge for conversions, as Facebook’s algorithm has way more data points about us than an individual would think to target. For a creepy view on this, read how Target predicted a teen was pregnant before her father knew.
2. Great images. A good image matters more than anything else in a Facebook ad. It’s difficult to tell what will work best, so split-test multiple variations and double down on winners. Choose images that don’t trigger the part of the brain that says “this is an ad.”
3. Compelling headline. Facebook ad headlines matter to a lesser extent when marketing landscaping. However, it’ll account for ~20% of the success of your ad.
4. Engaging text. The main text of your ad needs to draw people in. Oftentimes, stories where your prospects can put themselves in it work best. Again, split-testing is key.

Another aspect that works great on Facebook is retargeting. For a few dollars per day, you can advertise to the people who were highly engaged on your website but did not convert. This is typically very high ROI.

Reviews & 3rd-Party Sites

Reviews are a crucial part of any good landscape marketing strategy. Most landscapers intuitively understand the value of these since they’re so important for their own purchasing decisions, so we won’t say much more about them other than create a system to relentless collect reviews on Google, Yelp, Angie’s List, etc…

Speaking of 3rd-party sites, you can optimize these for Google results just as you would any other of your pages. The nice thing about doing so is oftentimes these sites have a higher “domain authority” than you, meaning Google will rank them highly quickly. Quality reviews and complete profiles that are consistent with your Google My Business listing are the most important aspects to ranking well.

Which Landscape Marketing Strategy Works Best For You?

Unfortunately, getting in the weeds (pun intended) of landscape marketing takes a tremendous amount of time and specialized knowledge. Most landscape companies can’t keep up, and slowly lose market share to competitors.

So what to do?

One option is to hire a proven landscape marketing company. For the cost of an intern you can short-circuit the learning curve and immediately implement landscape marketing best practices, setting your company on the path to growth from day 1. To consider this, schedule a 15-minute call with us here.

Another option is to invest the time to learn it yourself. This guide is a starting point for those bold enough to go this second route. We’ll dive deeper into each aspect in future articles. For now, if you have any questions, comment on this post or email us at info@wildoakmedia.com.