How A Successful Lawn Mowing Marketing Plan Can Quadruple Your Customer Growth
Customer growth doesn’t happen by accident.
A well-crafted marketing plan is essential for any small business owner who wants to take their business to the next level. Developing a successful lawn mowing marketing plan can quadruple your customer growth. By creating a marketing plan, you’ll map a path forward to help you reach your goals and grow your business.
Still, trying to figure out where to start?
This blog post will show you how to create a marketing plan for your lawn mowing business, step by step.
Figure out your target market.
The first step in creating a marketing plan is to figure out who your target market is. This may seem obvious, but it’s essential to be as specific as possible.
Ask yourself:
Who are my ideal customers?
For example, we target small lawns because we operate without trailers and want to quickly get in and out of a property using smaller push mowers.
We don’t want hedge or tree work, so apartments with tiny lawns and no trees are a good fit for us.
This means we will avoid areas with large lawns or rural or lifestyle blocks.
What are their demographics?
Lawn-mowing business owners hate the word demographics. It sounds like something really complicated that has nothing to do with lawn mowing.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. Your demographic is the person most likely to want the particular service you offer.
Giving you a real-life example means that our ideal customer usually has one child or less and lives in a densely populated area.
This would be a professional working couple, a small family or a retired couple.
What do they need or want from my business?
Once you understand your target market, you’ll be able to craft targeted marketing messages that resonate with them and help you plan a successful lawn mowing marketing plan.
We don’t mention tree trimming, hedge cutting or gardening in our ads because it’s not the work we want.
We would say something like
- For professionals, “Too busy to mow your lawn, then call us.”
- For retirees, “ We can take care of your lawn, so you don’t have to.”
Set some goals.
Once you know who your target market is, it’s time to set some goals.
When working with lawn mowing businesses, I actively encourage them to bring at least two new customers weekly.
Two customers is a manageable goal; if you manage to do it for a year, you have 100 lawns on your books. Now wouldn’t you feel great about that?
What do you want to achieve with your marketing efforts?
Considering the 100 new customers in a year scenario, you would need to work backwards from there—one hundred new customers = two a week.
How many quotes do you have to do to secure two new customers?
As your business grows, you can quote higher and secure less work, but start trying to keep your prices in a range that will assure you one quote out of two.
This means that you want to bring in at least four leads a week
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Do you want to increase brand awareness?
Brand awareness is great, and you should definitely go there.
Our business name ranks in the top six searches in our town of over seventy thousand people, but you want to put your money elsewhere when you start.
Make sure you have some sort of brand (business name and logo), but in the early days, it will cost you precious marketing dollars that could be better spent on getting phone calls.
Build your business to a reasonable size before you start spending anything on branding marketing alone.
Drive more traffic to your website?
This is another place where the newer lawn mowing business trip up.
When lawn mowing businesses hire me to do their marketing, and I ask what they are looking for, they will tell me they want website traffic.
When I ask why they want website traffic, they tell me it’s because they want phone calls.
This means that what they really want is incoming leads. Not website traffic.
When someone lands on my website, I don’t want them to spend time looking at all the pictures and reviews.
I want them to ring me or fill out an online form for a quote.
The best marketing gets them calling you before they have even looked at your site.
Get more calls?
This is the main goal for most lawn-mowing businesses. Incoming phone leads are the lifeblood of a growing lawn mowing business.
You need to be active in answering your calls too. Get a headset and get used to wearing it all day. I play podcasts and audiobooks on mine while I work, so I am always available to secure the next lead.
Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (S.M.A.R.T.).
Decide on your budget.
Marketing can be expensive, so it’s essential to decide on a budget before you get started. Remember that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to produce results. Plenty of low-cost or even free marketing activities can be just as effective as paid campaigns (e.g., content marketing, social media marketing, etc.)
A successful lawn mowing marketing plan will have ways to take advantage of less costly marketing methods as well.
Video Five Things to Do to Grow Your Lawn Business Faster
Choose your channels.
Now that you know who you’re targeting and what you want to achieve, it’s time to choose the channels through which you’ll share your message. There are endless possibilities for marketing channels (e.g., online vs offline, paid vs earned), so it’s important to choose the ones that make the most sense for your business and budget.
By the rule of thumb, I may spend up to 10% of turnover if I am aggressively growing a lawn mowing business. For a business that is happy to grow slowly, then 5% or less is acceptable.
Still, trying to figure out where to start? Here are some common marketing channels used by small businesses:
Content marketing (e.g., blog posts, infographics)
I do some of this with my lawn mowing business, but I cannot control the reach. I get people ringing me from all over New Zealand with questions about their lawns, and I only service one town.
If you were doing something like installing landscaping or tree work, it could be more effective. They might find you by searching for an article on how to trim a particular tree and, after reading your article, decide that they might just get you to do it instead.
Social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
Our business posts daily on Social media. We created a database of 90 posts and put them on autopilot. No one will ever scroll through ninety posts, so no one notices. However, this does get us around half a dozen leads a month.
If you want to get good results these days, you need to be really active. Post work that you are doing every couple of days. Let people get to know you as a person. A really good example of this is Lilli Pot Rubbish Removal. I watched her grow from 50 to 500 followers in a few months by posting engaging content.
Cold calling
One of my favourite methods back in the day. Knock on fifty doors, and you can get a customer. It’s free, and all it costs is a bit of courage. It’s incredible how quickly you get used to the “NOs” I used to count them, and when I got to fifty “Nos”, I got excited because it meant that a “Yes” was just around the corner.
I used to telemarket too. You can’t do that these days, but you can telemarket businesses if you want to build a commercial business. That is free too.
Email marketing
When you deal with someone, then put them on your email list. Email once a week with seasonal information and tips and tricks. Then if you ever want to get a bit more work, you can email your list with a tree pruning, hedge trimming or similar offer.
This is an excellent method for bringing in work from your existing customers when things are a bit slow.
Paid advertising
Google Adwords
I run Google advertising for a lot of lawn-mowing businesses around New Zealand. It can bring in good results with a small amount of spend. My guys only spend $150 monthly for 1-2 new customers weekly.
You need to watch with Google Ads because it can cost you a bomb if you do it wrong. I recommend getting a bit of training first. I plan to launch a course on this soon. You can check out the lessons I have available at lawnmowing101.
If you want to avoid doing this yourself, then you can always give me a yell, and I can run it for you.
Facebook Marketing
I have had success with my Facebook marketing with lawnmowing101, but not so much for lawnmowing itself.
Their geotagging isn’t that good. When I ran a campaign for a lawn mowing company on the North Shore in Auckland, they even got calls from Hamilton 100kms away.
I prefer to spend money on Google Ads myself.
Google My Business
The best thing about this is that it’s free and it works. It can take a bit of effort to set this up, and it does take some time to start showing in Google searches.
However, if you get lots of good reviews and post regularly, it’s well worth the effort.
PR/media relations
This is basically getting mentioned in local media, newspapers, tv etc.
I have managed to grace the local paper’s front page a couple of times.
The best way to do this is to let their reporters know that you exist and are a local authority on the subject. It helps to have an interesting backstory too.
This is something I came across today, and this is an example of a good background story being used to promote this small lawnmowing business.
Events/trade shows
This is set up a stand at local shows like the “Home and Garden Show”. This can be effective if you run a competition to collect names and numbers. However, it is more of a branding exercise.
Referral programs
Introduce a new customer and get a free mow or something similar. This can work, but you need to ensure that the new customer sticks around.
I prefer to avoid new customer discounts. It attracts the wrong customer. You could have a monthly referral competition with a free mow as a prize. That may work better.
If your service is good, you will pick up customer referrals anyway. We get one to two a month organically.
Don’t feel like you have to use all these channels—start with one or two and see how they work for you before branching out into new areas.
Create your content calendar.
Once you know which channels to use, it’s time to start creating content. A content calendar will help you stay organised and ensure that y our content is timely and relevant. Start by brainstorming topics for each channel and then create individual editorial calendars.
Seasonal content is always good, and also, if you do something like coach a little league team or volunteer for anything, you should definitely mention that.
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In closing
By creating a detailed marketing plan, you’ll be on your way to achieving your business goals and growing your company.
Follow the steps outlined in this blog post to get started -and if you need help along the way, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional like lawnmowing101.
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