Transform Your Marketing Game: Get Intentional in 2025

The beginning of the new year is a time for change and resolutions. One area your business can work on improving in 2025 is your marketing.

“2025 is the year for the landscape industry to get more intentional with marketing,” says Corey Halstead, co-owner of HALSTEADMedia. “Too many dollars are allocated and wasted without clear expectations for each element of the strategy. Fundamentally, marketing is still about finding the right people, at the right time, and delivering a message (photo, video, written word) that compels them to feel something and, ultimately, act.” 

Planning Ahead and Budgeting

Chad Diller, CEO of Landscape Leadership, a sales and marketing agency for lawn and landscape companies, says a major aspect of marketing effectively is to plan ahead. Rather than reaching out to a marketing firm in September and November to have everything ready by March 1, he recommends reaching out in mid-summer

“Then they have plenty of time to vet people they’re going to work with and to really have the bandwidth for their team to plan things out well and not be rushing,” Diller says.

Robert Murray, co-founder and CEO of Intrigue Media, agrees that planning the year in advance will prevent you from pursuing various marketing opportunities as they pop up, like a billboard becoming available in April or advertising in a local magazine later in the year.

Your company should budget anywhere from 2% to 5% of your gross revenue toward your marketing efforts. Diller says it does depend on the owner and how aggressive they want to be.

“If you’re just getting started, and you’re a $1 million business, 2% is $20,000, it’s not crazy,” Murray says. “It’s not going to be massively impactful, but working with a good partner, you’ll feel an impact by the end of the season.”

If you have a limited budget, Halstead says you should still focus on search, social and your website.

Diller adds Google Local Services ads tend to have good costs per lead and are fairly easy to set up. Also, don’t overlook SMS and email marketing.

“SMS and email marketing are great,” Diller says. “The cost for those types of tools is pretty good. In a lot of cases, you’re emailing and messaging clients. If you can be creative and have good offers and you’re timely, that’s an opportunity to instead of trying to go out and spending the money to acquire new customers, you’re taking a customer you have, and you’re making them worth more, and the loyalty will be better there.”  

Differentiate Your Brand

With a competitive market and consumers requiring more work to close a sale, the need to differentiate your business has never been more important.

Diller says landscape companies should always be looking to refine their position, not just on an annual basis.

“What are you doing and who are you doing it for?” Diller says. “Are you going to be a specialist, or are you going to be a generalist? Companies will try to play it safe where they’ll try to do as many different things as they can for different audiences because they’re trying to insulate themselves from downturns and that sort of thing. But a lot of the companies that I’ve seen that have been the most profitable and have grown the most aggressively have refined their positioning to say no to certain types of clients and say no to certain types of work.”

Murray says by finding your niche you can also enable you become a master of all the specific nuances of that type of work.

“If you’re a specialist in it, you understand the problems people have better than they do, and your team gets really good at it,” Murray says. “There’s a lot of value in niching, which then creates a position in a marketplace. That is a strategic decision to make.”

Also, how you go about conveying your message is important. Rather than being company-centric, Diller and Murray agree your marketing should be focused on the client and their needs. Halstead says it’s essential to understand the real motivators behind a customer’s decisions so you can craft messaging that resonates deeply.

“We conducted a study of hundreds of landscaping websites and found that less than 4% had truly differentiated messaging,” Halstead says. “Most companies sounded the same: ‘We’re the best. We’ve been around forever.’ You could swap logos, and it wouldn’t matter. Companies need to focus on messaging that clearly communicates what sets them apart and why they’re the right choice. In order to do this, however, the company must actually understand who they are – aka their unique value proposition. Some companies will need to start there before anything else.” 

Murray says some of those differentiators could be anything from the length of the warranty you offer to the level of communication you provide.

“Tell people how you communicate,” Murray says. “Do you use SMS? Do you use phone calls? What’s the turnaround time and responsiveness? What do people expect?”

If you have an established brand, you could be wondering when or if a ‘rebrand’ is necessary to stay relevant.

Diller acknowledges that the larger your company becomes, the more daunting a change like this becomes due to the number of trucks and uniforms that must be updated. However, making a bold change to a logo that doesn’t involve grass, trees or the color green does provide a chance to break the mold and stand out from the crowd.

Murray argues that what a business does impacts how they are perceived more than a logo.

“I believe the Nike swoosh became iconic because they made really good shoes for a really long time,” Murray says. “The swoosh didn’t make their shoes better, and it didn’t make Nike a great company.”  

Halstead advises companies to always evaluate what’s working, review new trends and base their marketing strategy around KPIs and the main goals of the organization.

AI Integration and Areas to Expand

This year can also provide an opportunity to expand your marketing efforts into new technologies and invest in video content. Halstead notes that AI tools can help draft blog posts and automate internal processes.

Diller sees AI agents on company websites being more common this year. He also says it can be a useful marketing tool.

“I really feel like AI is a helpful assistant to help break creative blocks and help you start seeing blind spots you’re not seeing and help you refine what you’re doing,” Diller says. “But I still believe that humans have a lot to offer, and as there’s more and more AI content out there, people need to be adding true perspective and opinions and depth of content because everything’s just going to start looking like I typed an answer in ChatGPT and this is what it told me.”

Halstead says AI has also begun to impact the game of search and SEO.

“Having a partner that is following these changes and pivoting strategies as necessary will be key to stay ahead in the search results,” Halstead says. “Most SEO experts agree things are just getting plain wacky and there will be some major changes to the old ways to keep up.” 

Automations, integrations and CRMs can also provide better data tracking and increased efficiency.

“Tools like HubSpot are finally gaining traction in the industry, connecting marketing data to CRM systems, streamlining workflows, and making life easier for sales and marketing teams with automations and AI,” Halstead says. “For example, a lead can fill out a form, book an appointment automatically, and enter an email automation workflow — all while updating the deals pipeline stage.”

Murray highly recommends investing in a CRM to store leads on the sales and marketing side.

“I think it’s important that we need to get back to understanding where are our leads at?” Murray says. “What stage are they in? How are they progressing? What opportunities have opened? Who’s closing at what rate?”  

Another area Diller encourages landscape companies to invest in is building out a library of photo and video assets. These investments will pay dividends in years to come as you can repackage them in different formats.

“We’ve heard story after story of people watching videos and then requesting the person that they’ve seen in the videos be on their job,” Murray says.

Murray says you can use your videos to educate and build trust, showcasing transparency and expertise.