The Landscaper Marketing Machine | The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide
Introduction
Over the last few years, we’ve had success helping landscaping companies grow revenues for their various services in target locations.
We work with various landscaping companies throughout Canada: design, build and maintenance, as well as irrigation, lighting and even an installer and distributor of the world-leading German permeable paving engineering called Romex.
Based on our digital marketing campaigns, strategies and tactics, we developed a system called the Landscaper Marketing Machine.
We’ll begin with some of the standout results we’ve had with three companies:
The Great Canadian Landscaping Company
We’ve worked with the Great Canadian Landscaping Company for over two years and built their 20th-anniversary website, which was launched on Canada Day in 2020.
- Their revenues in peak months have increased to over a million dollars attributed from online sources through their website forms and calls.
- The total number of inquiries from February 2020 until the end of August 2022 is 3,891.
- The increase in website leads during this time compared to before is over 240%.
- The average number of inquiries per month on their website is 139. When you add in Google My Business calls and inquiries, this is over 200 and currently is more than that per month.
- The average cost per lead from Google Ads was around $100 when we first started working with Great Canadian Landscaping. After 28 months of working with them, the average has come down to $25. This is the average across all their target locations. It is also the average across all their services which are as diverse as snow removal, outdoor living, carpentry, hardscaping, softscaping and general landscape maintenance, design and installation campaigns.
- Web traffic has increased by 222%.
Hear what the founder of The Great Canadian Landscaping Company has to say, and see more of these Lead Generation Statistics here.
Earthscape Landscapes
Earthscape Landscapes is a company in Elmira in Ontario.
After only six months of working together, we’ve helped them grow from an $8 million company in 2021 to a $10 million plus annual revenue company in 2022.
- We’re able to attribute around $1.5 million from revenues to our Google Ads and Search Campaigns.
- The total number of online inquiries in the first six months has been 848.
- Their cost per lead hovers around $10-20 from Google Ads, which is better than the industry standard.
- We’ve increased their website traffic from all devices by over a hundred percent.
- The audience that we’ve been bringing in from ad campaigns is 125% more likely to convert than the average user.
- Revenues have increased from online sources by 300% year on year
Watch our interview with the founder of Earthscape Landscapes.
Romex Canada
Romex Canada is a combined B2B and B2C company that distributes and installs world-leading permeable paving products, originally developed and manufactured in Germany.
They’ve had some spectacular results in terms of engagement and growth in traffic.
- There’s been over a tenfold growth in new users coming to their site. When we started working with them, their website users were around 500 new users per month and recently it peaked at 5,869 in one month.
- They have a very engaging site: The average time on the site is about three minutes and the average session contains five different page views.
- What do people do on the site? They call, fill in a form, find a store, or download a PDF for safety sheets or guidelines on how to use a product. And there’s been 4,826 of those website actions recorded since 2018. And this is growing like crazy this year.
- We’ve even run Google Ads retargeting campaign where for $15 cost per inquiry. As well as being educational, informational and engaging, their site is converting now to what they want, which is more sales opportunities.
- They are on the top page of Google nationwide for 22 of their target industry keywords.
See what the Landscaper Marketing Machine did for Romex here.
The Landscaper Marketing Machine
Let’s dig in (pun intended!) and uncover the Landscaper Marketing Machine:
You can see this as a typical sales funnel.
There are four stages: awareness, engagement, lead generation, and results.
Various components that come into play in each different section.
Let’s take a deeper dive.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a combination of search engine optimization (SEO), Google paid ads (Google Adwords now rebranded to simply Google Ads), your Google business listing (Google My Business), Google Maps, and the local pack.
SEM is the most important vehicle to get people through your sales funnel online.
You can generate leads from the awareness phase through engagement directly to the results (lead generation) phase.
Someone who has never heard of you can click on an ad or a ranking in Google, they visit your website; they might watch a video, consume content, read a blog, check out your landing pages…
They engage with your content, but then it also leads to action if they are impressed by what they experience.
They might fill out a form or call to request a quote.
SEO, Google Ads, and Google My Business work perfectly in sync as they tap into the user intent that’s already there.
People are searching for keywords like ‘best landscaping company near me’.
They want to work with a company that sticks out from the crowd. A beautiful website, great reviews, and a wonderful customer experience will help you outshine your competitors.
We know that this user flow works well for landscaping companies to generate new customers via quality leads.
Not all keywords are created equal.
Some keywords you have to dominate. For landscaping, there are all sorts of different services that come under the main ‘landscaping’ umbrella keyword.
However, you have to rank for ‘landscaping’ where you are.
The reason being it’s the killer keyword.
There are over 40,500 monthly searches in Canada alone for this keyword.
If you compare that to say ‘hardscaping’, which has about 500 monthly searches in Canada, you can see the volume and why it’s so important to be in the top three for your map pack for your Google location, but also your website and Google Ads.
Google Ads
The Google Ads platform contains various formats: search text-based ads, display image ads, and YouTube video ads.
Search text-based ads are the main staple of growing your landscaping business online. People are still typing and searching for keywords in Google Search.
You’ve got to appear when someone types in ‘snow removal’ or when someone types in ‘best landscaping company’ or even when someone types in the name of a competitor of yours, you want to get in front of them.
Search ads perform amazingly well. They’re the bread and butter of Google Ads for landscaping.
With proper management, Google Ads can earn an ROI of above twenty to one. Our current clients are getting way above this.
With Google Ads, you can have a cost for inquiry in the range of $10 to $30. That is fantastic for landscaping, where the average design/build job may be as much as $150,000.
The cost per inquiry depends on and varies by location and service.
As long as you’re getting the margins, then you can be paying more for your inquiries if you are highly likely to convert them, but that’s the range we see for clients using the Landscaper Marketing Machine.
Seasonality is also key.
For example, we start advertising snow ice management in August so that companies can get winter contracts for the following months which are very important in the off-season for the majority of landscaping services.
Getting leads in the busy season is one thing but you have to prepare in advance for the off-season.
The nice thing about advertising campaigns using Pay Per Click (PPC) on Google is that you can increase or decrease the budget for a different landscaping service based on seasonality.
Display image ads are fantastic to improve the conversion rates of users who come to your website.
This is because when a prospect visits your landscaping website, they might not be ready to pull the trigger on their dream outdoor space project.
You, therefore, have to stay fresh in their minds for the next 4-8 weeks as they deliberate.
You do this through remarketing campaigns where you show up on websites as they browse the web.
When someone has been to your website, we will store some information in a cookie and we’ll add them to an audience list that we can then retarget when people are going around the web.
Retargeting campaigns can have amazing conversion rates where you have a strong brand and presence. They stand out and often our clients say their landscaping customers signed up with them while saying “they had to as you follow us around the web.”
This is exactly the kind of anecdotal evidence that we see in the data where the retargeting campaigns perform as well as search campaigns.
They’re able to scoop up those people in the deliberation process so that they become landscaping customers. It’s perfect for that.
If you’ve got great videos, get them viewed by your target audience using YouTube video ads.
It’s great for awareness, engagement, and brand recognition.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
For SEO, content is king.
You build content to rank for specific keywords so that you rank in your service areas for your services and location-specific landing pages and blog articles.
By building specific content for a specific area, having a Google map embedded, having information, and having images about that location, you can rank the pages for keywords in a target location.
Google My Business Profile
Google My Business is its own mini website generating calls and inquiries.
This is super important that you have that configured and you’re adding content all the time and continually optimizing it because it’s like its own separate website.
It’s crucial for local SEO.
You can fill in various fields such as categories, services, service areas, your business information, hours of operation, and you can use it like social media.
You can add posts and seasonal information to engage your audience. And the more you do this, the more you show up for searches in Google.
And if all goes well, you will rank number one in the Google Maps Pack.
So if someone is in a particular area and they type ‘best landscaping company near me’ you want to be number one in the hyper-local Google Maps Pack.
Blogging for Landscapers
You should write a blog for your website for various reasons: it’s a great way to explain to your prospective landscaping customers why they should work with you and how you do business and therefore manage their expectations.
It also helps you rank: every new post allows to rank for a cluster of keywords that are specific to your business.
Using effective content marketing strategies you can produce different categories of articles that engage your target audience.
By improving your SEO, you get more and more traffic to your website.
You get more and more people into your funnel. The more prospects you get in, the more you can engage them and then convert them.
Blogging is perfect for this.
Here are some blogging ideas for landscapers:
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Frequently asked questions from your clients e.g. if someone asks ‘what is your design process?’ Or ‘what kind of carpentry services do you do?’ Or ‘what’s your insurance like for snow and ice management contracts?’ If ever you get asked these questions, create blogs around them.
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Special news about work you do in the community e.g. if you helped raise money at community events or grow food for a local garden, make sure to promote that.
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Awards for the company or staff e.g. if you win an award at a horticultural event or in a local business magazine or if a staff member becomes a red seal landscape horticulturist, you should feature this in your website’s blog.
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Lawn care marketing ideas, landscaping tips, or downloadable resources.
Here are some great tips on blogging for your landscape business:
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Don’t let great be the enemy of good. Get writing or enlist staff members to help.
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Don’t be lazy, be extensive, create categories around your services and target locations
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Measure the success of your blogs and then promote and update your blog article
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Write for your audience. Don’t write for SEO purposes. Make the content useful.
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Don’t just publish your blog and expect it to take over the world. You have to share it on social media, on your personal and company pages, and then share it to Google My Business.
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Repurpose your content by creating a video or webinar for your potential customers. You could even create a podcast, put it on LinkedIn Pulse, or put it on Medium. Get the most out of your content.
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You should email local customers who might find the article useful. Utilize your blogs in your email marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing
You very rarely see direct conversions straight from social media for landscape companies when it comes to calls and form submissions on the website.
However, what social media does is build brand awareness.
It engages, and it gains trust and loyalty within your local area. So you can gain fans.
You can showcase things you do in the community, whether it’s in community gardens, growing food projects, helping schools, or whatever you’re doing, get it out there.
It helps build that fan base.
Whenever potential local customers make enough money or whenever they’ve got a project or they need landscape maintenance for their strata, or they are looking to get help with maintenance for their home, they’re going to think of you and reach out.
Here are some good tips about social media marketing for landscaping:
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You want to go where your customers are. That’s the first rule. So homeowners 35 plus are on Facebook. So whether you like it or not, that’s where you need to be with some posts.
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You also want visual media. Think of Instagram and YouTube. Landscaping is very visual. Show before and after pictures and videos.
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There are also different types of videos you can use, e.g. polished promos versus raw authentic footage. You can try and have that more salesy angle of showing testimonials, happy clients, and happy customers, or you can show your work culture and get behind the scenes.
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Be raw and authentic. Use Snapchat, use TikTok, or whatever you want to do to engage with Gen Z. This can be important for hiring young people.
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LinkedIn is great for hiring, but also great for B2B connections. If you are trying to work with a particular property management company or a strata company, this is a way if you can connect and network with them.
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Showcase your thought leadership on subjects ranging from sustainability to new methods of gardening, things that are becoming more important.
Niche Sites
There are always niche sites within any industry. For landscaping, there are a few:
Make sure you are on these directories and that they are full and you monitor them and make sure you get good reviews there.
For this, develop a review page that you encourage customers to use.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing is mainly about awareness because it can be costly and difficult to measure.
Make sure you take a targeted approach and use specific numbers or URLs. This is the way to measure what you’re doing.
For example, with direct mail, don’t just blanket mail a city.
You should pick a specific service area where they’re more likely to require lawn care service or other specific services.
Send out lawn care flyers to commercial properties with your contact details via a direct mail campaign.
For Radio paid advertising, it’s the same thing.
You want to go after niche radio stations that have a particular target audience in mind.
This could mean a specific language like Mandarin or some other angle.
For bus ads or billboards, you want to create a unique phone number to measure the number of calls.
We use call tracking with CallRail. You create a number that is specific to that ad. You’ll be able to then see what your campaign generates.
You can put QR codes on physical adverts or short URLs that get people to your website.
A short URL could be just your domain, if it’s short already, like gclc.ca then add /offer or /2022 to the end of the URL.
Whatever you do offline, you’ll rarely get people to go online direct from those campaigns.
It’s more of an awareness piece for when they are back on their computer later browsing.
And then you show up on the retargeting campaign or you show up on the search campaign or your social media gets in front of them.
Traditional marketing or offline marketing, working together with online marketing works together to create this marketing machine to generate more leads and potential clients.
Company Website
Your business website is the most important part of the marketing machine. It’s the central hub of awareness, engagement and lead generation.
Make sure your CTAs (your call to actions) are all prominent and visible, and people know exactly what to do when they go to your website, whether it’s to call or request a quote or apply for a job, whatever it is, you need them to.
You should have a core spine of pages that you need: your home page, services, location pages, partner pages, galleries, and blogs.
A typical landscaping website should have all these on there, especially things like partner pages for trusted contractors like painters, plumbers, hot tub suppliers, and all sorts of different things that are part of your ecosystem.
You generate referrals and qualified leads for them. They generate referrals for you. You generate links to them and vice versa and it helps your SEO.
And then you need to just measure everything. Measure everything over time: your traffic, your engagement, your conversion rates, and then make sure you try and improve it.
Lead Generation
80 plus percent of your inquiries should happen on your website, but there are other places you could get inquiries from, which you should be aware of.
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Direct from ads. People can call you directly from an ad without going to your website when they search online so you want to measure and take note of that.
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Google My Business. People will call or send messages or request quotes.
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Niche sites. You should have your sales team check these regularly. Make sure if inquiries are being sent that someone is there to respond.
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Referrals. People can just call you from a phone number because someone has referred you. That’s not easy to track if it’s just your central business phone number, but this all adds to your number of leads and potential revenues. You could even join a local chamber, a BNI, or start a referral program to find the best clients.
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RFPs and proposals. These can be more lucrative, but harder to win commercial and government contracts. You might have a sales team searching the web and local resources trying to find these opportunities. If you put in the time and effort and connect with the right people they can pay off, especially in the long run if you maintain the contract for years with a particular strata company or building.
Advanced Call Tracking
This is something we set up because calls are so important for landscaping businesses.
If you don’t have it set up, you’re going to be missing a lot of calls on your data sheet that shows you your results at the end of the month.
This is because someone can go to your website and they can just put in the number on their phone.
They’re not clicking on anything. You’re not going to be able to measure that.
You don’t know that happens through your web metrics.
Call tracking fixes this problem.
You’ve got a bunch of dynamically altering numbers based on where they come from online.
If someone comes from a Google ad, it’ll show them a different number. If someone comes from SEO, it’ll show them a different number. If someone comes from Google My Business, a different number.
You can set up a pool of different numbers so that you are more informed of where your calls are coming from.
You might find out for example that Google Ads has generated ten calls with four of them missed.
This lets us know that maybe the ad time needs adjusting or maybe certain people, your receptionist or sales team, are taking their lunch at a different time than what Google Ads thinks it is.
It gives us insights to grow and improve.
Google Ads typically is the best source of first-time callers, which directly affects and brings in new business.
You can listen back to calls and you can see keywords that brought them in from Google campaigns. It’s powerful stuff.
You can look at stats month on month, year on year, and you can assign your marketing dollars dependent on where you’re getting more qualified leads.
Results
Once you have your monthly data, you can use figures to calculate your ROI and analyze your landscaping marketing strategies.
You want to calculate your total marketing spend (ad budget for the month plus what you pay your marketing agency). You then need to count your qualified leads and anticipated transactional revenue and life-time-value of new customer acquisition.
Once you have these inputs, you can calculate the anticipated ROI of your digital marketing activities for the month.
It’s even better if you are using a CRM and you can sync this with a marketing platform to tie together real customers and revenues with spending.
For Google Ads, you should use more inputs: the cost per click, how many clicks you’re getting, the click-through rate, conversion rate, how many leads or conversions and the cost per lead.
For example, for an ad spend of $3,488, if you are getting 105 leads, it works out to an average cost per lead of $14.
Inquiries from Google Ads tend to be very qualified because you can set the demographics and the targeting and the keywords so they should be well qualified.
So, if 100/105 are qualified and your conversion rate is 50% with an average revenue of $5,000 and LTV at $10,000, you should be generating $250,000 in transactional revenue with a lifetime value of $500,000.
Happy Customers
Great results mean happy customers for landscaping companies.
For current customers, make sure you get online reviews. This is the key.
Certain review sites are more important than others, but Google Reviews is the most important.
There are some kinks in the system, sometimes you get reviews and they don’t add them, which is something we’ve suffered with.
Make sure you’re asking people to review you on all these platforms, wherever you have a large and growing presence and where you get business from.
If most of your business is coming from Google, get reviews.
Facebook is good for awareness but less important for converting customers.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is really about re-engaging people up and down the funnel to improve the conversion rates of people who are deliberating or checking out the competition.
You want to hit them with various touch points and reminders that you are around and you are the best to work with.
90% of people in your funnel probably are not a client yet. How can we get them to convert?
There are remarketing ads, which we’ve already covered.
There’s also automation where you can have certain triggers and actions.
If someone comes to your social media, it can alert you.
Maybe you send an email newsletter to them based on their interests.
You can have retargeting lists that you use online in different places and then use drip campaigns based on what kind of service they’re interested in.
You can set this up so that in the first month to two months you hit them up more often, and then you just put them on a long drip campaign where you hit them up every one to two months.
Conclusion
This is our proven holistic marketing program for landscapers.
We’ve got amazing results for our current clients on it.
It helps you grow your business online, but ultimately what’s important is your capacity to grow.
This works if you are ready to grow and can invest.
Your marketing strategy, ad spend, and landscaping marketing plan depends on your growth goals and resources.
If you come to us and plug into our machine with certain numbers, we can reverse engineer and tell you exactly what it will cost for you to grow to that, and what is a realistic timeframe, and work with your goals.
If that’s to grow landscape design in a certain area or landscape maintenance in a certain area, then we can adjust that so that we build in the return on investment and the revenues for your company.
If you are committed to growing your business, explore if we’re a good fit.
Schedule a virtual meeting with us and we can answer any questions.
When everything looks like it’s a great fit, we send a proposal and you can review it.
You would sign an agreement, and then we pick a date for your onboarding together, and we get going on the next phase of growth together for your landscaping business.
Please refer to the full embedded Google Slides presentation below…
