5 Ways to Make Your Lawn Care Marketing More Effective

Lawn care business owners across the globe pay us their hard earned money to make their phone ring every single month…

But a successful marketing strategy is more than just having a ringing phone…

Find out what YOU can do to make your marketing program even more effective!

Hi, everybody, Andrew here. I am in cold and chilly Montreal today. I came up here yesterday for a long consulting day. I’m about to get on a plane, head back where its warm and before I do that, I wanted to shoot a quick video about five ways you can make your marketing more effective. I’m going to assume for this conversation that you’re already doing the right things in marketing, okay? We’re not going to focus on the marketing you’re doing. We’re going to talk about the things that you can be doing that make your marketing more effective.

Let’s start with number one. Number one is answering your phone. You have to answer your phone. You need a phone strategy. You need to put a phone strategy in place. Do not let your phone calls go to voicemail. Seventy percent of the people who call you, if they get a voicemail, they are not going to be leaving you a message. They’re going to be hanging up and calling the next person that they see in Google. They’re going to be going down the list until they get a response. Your responsiveness, how you answer your phone when you’re dealing with a lead from your marketing is going to dictate the first impression that you give your potential prospects. It’s really important that we handle the phone strategy very well.

Keep in mind if you’ve hired a marketing agency, you’re paying that marketing agency to make their marketing the most effective they possibly can for the budget that you have to work with so when you’re not answering your phone, you’re squandering the leads that they’re bringing you. They’re making your phone ring so you want to do everything in your power to capture those leads and turn them into clients. That’s number one.

Number two, track your leads. This is going to be the foundation for the next three points that I’m going to make. You need to track your leads and this could be simply done just with a pen and pad or if you’re using a system like Service Autopilot, you can put your leads directly into their system. You can enter them right in when you’re talking to somebody on the phone or your phone staff can do that for you but it’s very important that we do this. What I see a lot of companies do is that they will answer their phone, they might give an estimate over the phone and then that’s the end of the relationship. There’s nothing else. They answer the phone. They talk for lead. They tell them their price. The lead says, “Oh, you’re too expensive.” That’s the end of the conversation. We want to do more than that. In order to do that, we need to track our leads. We need to get their name, address, phone number, as much information as we possibly can so think about some of the ways that you could get their additional information that they might not want to give. Otherwise, e-mail address for instance. We want to be able to market to them in the future. In order to get their e-mail address, why not tell them, “Hey, well, mind if I e-mail you a copy of your estimate as well?”

Think about the different ways that you can get their information. They’re going to have to give you their mailing address since you’re going to be estimating how much it’s going to cost to do their property. Track your leads. Put this into a database because we want to market to them in the future. We also want to log in the same log any objections that they have using your services. Why are they not signing up with you? We want to log that. We want to know if there’s any particular things about our business that people are objecting to. Price might be a big one but you also want to know where your leads are coming from. You want to know if it’s coming from your Google Adwords, your KPI, your website, the direct mail piece that you did. This is going to let you make your marketing more effective in the future. That’s number two.

Number three is follow up with the leads and this is something that I rarely see companies do. They get a phone call and then that’s it. There is no follow-up even though when you had the phone call, you got their phone number, you got their name, you got their address, you got their e-mail address. Think about ways that you can market to them. Even if they didn’t sign up originally, you have their information so maybe send them a follow-up letter. Maybe give them a second chance offer. Maybe send them an e-mail. Maybe market to them in another month. If you’re tracking your leads, you’re collecting this information so you need to follow-up with them, not just give them an estimate, say, “Here’s my price. Take it or leave it.” You need to call them the next day or you need to send them a letter. You need to do something to show them that you’re interested in having their business. If they made objections, maybe call them a day or two later and say, “Hey, have you found a company to take care of your property this season? If not, I’d like to give you a second chance. We’d still like to work with you and here is why,” and then lay out the case of why they should hire you.

The other thing that you should be doing when a lead calls you is that you need to set a specific time to follow up with them. If you can’t close them over the phone, you need to set a specific time to go and look at their property and give them an estimate, to speak to the woman at the house, whoever is on the property that you’re going to be speaking to. If you set an appointment or a specific time and date to follow up with them, this will help them and their search because remember, they have lots of choices in their lawn care provider so if you set a specific day and time to follow up with them, this will oftentimes keep them from continuing their search because they’re going to be waiting to hear back from you on your estimate if you went out to look at their property. They’re going to be waiting on you to make their decision.

Way number four, and that is to use multiple marketing methods. Using multiple marketing methods is going to increase the effectiveness of your marketing. That means doing SEO. That means doing offline marketing, print, direct mail. That means having a properly branded truck that sticks out in your prospects, in the minds when you’re driving through their neighborhoods. Think about all the different ways that you can market and how you can expand your reach.

Nielsen Research and Google did a study recently that showed that the more marketing methods that you use, the more times that you get your brand in front of your prospects using different media, the more effective your marketing is. Fifty percent more people will recall your brand if they see your marketing through different marketing channels.

Step number five is reinvest in your marketing. This is the key point here. I see a lot of companies that have the same marketing budget that they did five years ago but marketing is really the fuel behind growing your business. It’s the fuel to make your business grow. There is no such thing as free clients. There is no such thing as free leads. Even if you’re relying on word of mouth, there’s time involved, there’s effort in closing those leads so with the idea that you’re going to get any new clients for free is bunk. You’re going to always get clients and they’re always going to come at a cost. Word of mouth clients, that’s going to take an investment of time or money. There’s different marketing strategies you can implement where the cost is going to be more or less depending on the strategy that you implement but it’s always going to cause something to get a new client so we need to be reinvesting in our marketing budgets.

This also goes back to tracking your leads because when you track your leads, you’ll know which areas to reinvest in your marketing because you know where your leads are coming from so you could reinvest. You can increase your budget to those different strategies that are you’re most effective so it’s very important.

We also want to expand into additional marketing channels. We want to use multiple marketing methods like I mentioned in step number four, this makes your marketing more effective. In order to grow our business, we have to fuel our business engine. We have to keep filling the tank to reach our destination, to reach our business goal and marketing is the fuel in our business engine so we need to always be reinvesting in our business. We need to be watching our numbers. We need to be filling the tank over our marketing and that’s how we grow our business.

Let’s recap, five ways to make your marketing more effective. Number one is answer your phone. Number two is track your leads. Number three is follow up those leads. Number four is use multiple marketing methods and number five is reinvest in your marketing.

I’m Andrew over and out from Montreal. I will see you guys back in the States. Have a great one. Thank you.

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