Is Your Lawn Care or Landscape Company Following These Foundational Marketing Practices?

You can put a ton of effort into your marketing efforts, but if you aren’t checking off the basics, this work can be for nothing without a strong foundation.

This includes creating a quality website, leveraging Google and SEO and being responsive in a timely manner.

“People will leave your website in less than two seconds if they can’t find what they’re looking for, and if it looks like crap, they won’t stay,” says Robert Murray, co-founder and CEO of Intrigue Media. “We need a world-class website with great photography.”  

There are three aspects of Google to tap into – Google ads, Google Maps and the organic listings.

“Build your Google reviews and make sure your Google business profile is filled out so you can start to get start to get your Maps listing,” Murray says.

Murray notes another basic premise that you might not think of as marketing is ensuring your team practices safe driving and is nice to people in the field. Otherwise, if your crews are driving recklessly and being rude to strangers, the calls your company will receive be complaints, not fresh leads.

He encourages companies to pick up the phone with a smile when they answer.

“The number of people that don’t pick up the phone at all, and when they do, just say their name is actually kind of crazy,” Murray says. “Saying ‘Rob’s Landscaping! This is Rob speaking. What can I help you with?’ There’s a bit of a smile. It’s simple. It goes a long way. We also see a lot of times people are sending people to their websites like, ‘Hey, if you just fill out the form on the website, upload some pictures, we’ll be able to get you a quote.’ Why not take some information and capture the lead and then follow up with them? This is simple stuff, but a lot of people don’t do it.”  

Measuring Success

What works for each lawn care or landscape company will vary, which is why it’s so critical to measure the effectiveness of your marketing tools.

Too often companies will spend a bunch of money on various marketing methods but not know what worked and what didn’t. Chad Diller, CEO of Landscape Leadership, a sales and marketing agency for lawn and landscape companies, says it’s important to measure the activities that lead to actual opportunities.

“There are many tools that you can use to measure your advertising marketing, whether it’s call tracking or people filling out forms and understanding what keyword they use to get to your website,” Murray says. “What campaign on Facebook or Instagram did they come through on? What campaign on Google or what organic term somebody used to come to your site? What’s driving traffic, what’s driving quotes and what’s driving revenue? I just can’t speak highly enough about attribution tools.”

Murray stresses having this knowledge will help you better know where to direct your marketing dollars. He says cost per lead, cost per qualified lead and customer acquisition cost are all useful metrics.

“Intentionality is critical,” says Corey Halstead, co-owner of HALSTEADMedia. “When reviewing your marketing efforts, work with your partner or internal team to design strategies aligned with your organization’s actual goals. Every dollar allocated should serve a specific purpose. Ask yourself, ‘What is this budget item doing to help us achieve our top three to five business goals for 2025?’”

Halstead notes that the integration of a CRM can provide additional insights.

“With a fully executed HubSpot strategy, you can see every page a lead visited, what ads, every offer they engaged with, and every piece of content they viewed,” Halstead says. “This is particularly valuable for commercial sales, providing deep insights into both the account and the individual person you’re working with. This level of data and integration transforms how marketing and sales are executed.”

Pitfalls to Leave in the Past

If your company’s goal is to grow, word of mouth alone will not suffice. Halstead this has been the case for years and adds word-of-mouth referrals only drive leads to go online to learn more about the company.

“If they find no proper marketing, no website, poor reviews, shoddy-looking work, or unprofessional looking employees, the referral often goes nowhere,” Halstead says. “The days of getting a referral and blindly trusting it are gone — or at the very least, it’s not a scalable approach for maintaining or growing a position in the marketplace.”

Diller agrees that while word of mouth is great, consumers visit your website to validate and depending solely on it will eventually plateau your growth.

Murray says one major mistake is not having a good sense of your customer base and their needs. Your messaging can be misaligned when it comes to their problems or only talk about your years in business and values.

“Customers don’t really care about you,” Murray says. “They care about themselves. They care about the problems they have and they care about the goals they want to accomplish. When we start to understand our customers better, we can speak to the problems they have and then show them how we’ve solved those problems for others.”

Positioning yourself as a trusted advisor will help you avoid competing on pricing.

If you manage to resonate with a lead, you can’t just assume the sale is in the bag after they contact you. Diller stresses the need to button up your sales process and respond to leads in a timely manner.

Murray says tying in email automations that are triggered after a customer inquiry can help keep a lead warm.

“The goal is to capture every possible email address and use it to nurture the pipeline, whether for residential or commercial leads, but especially for commercial,” Halstead says.