subject: Lawn Care Marketing [print this page] It doesn't take much to get a basic lawn care business started. All one really needs is a lawn mower and a pickup truck. With that you can go around town and mow all the clients you have. The trick isn't in getting started, it's more in finding customers. That is where most new landscape business owners fail. They think that just because they have all this equipment and a few signs on their truck, they are a fully functioning business, but nothing could be further from the truth.
The first thing you need to do when you are looking to gain new customers is to create some business cards. These cards need to be handed out to your inner social circle. Start with your friends and family members. Don't just give them one card, give them a couple and ask them to hand them out to their friends and neighbors.
The next step you will want to take is expand that circle you are marketing too, farther out. Create some lawn care flyers and have a few thousand of them photocopied. With flyers in hand, go around town and put a flyer in each and every door of the homes you would like to mow. When doing this, you have to figure you will get about a 1% to 2% response rate. So for every thousand lawn care flyers you hand out, you may get between 10 and 20 return phone calls.
If you take the time to stop at each home and knock on the door, you will find the more people you talk to, the better your chances are of making a sale. Sure it will take more time to stop and talk to potential customers, but that is the ideal way to go. When you have a chance to talk to a homeowner, you can walk their property with them and point out different issues they may be having and how you can resolve those issues. After you walk the property, you can give the home owner a bid on the job and hopefully get them to agree right then and there.
Another trick you can consider doing when you are going door to door looking for new customers is to put your price to mow their lawn right on the flyer itself. This way, when the potential customer gets the flyer, they will be able to see how much you would charge them for service and that can help push them to the next step which would be to call you.
So while you are finding your lawn care business growing with all this lawn care marketing, you are going to need some lawn care business software. You need to make sure you are able to handle all this growth without imploding on yourself.
Everyday, go out and do a little marketing and over time, you will see growth. As my father would tell me, always remember to dream it, build it, gopher it!
