As a landscaping business, you’re always searching for new leads. Even if you offer world-class services or maintain the most reliable team, they’re useless without landscaping leads. After all, how can you demonstrate your trade if prospects don’t even know you exist?
While some businesses may thrive in the lead-generation department, 61 percent of businesses say this is one of their biggest challenges.
That’s why one option that most landscapers may have considered is buying landscaping leads.
In today’s day and age, it’s easy to turn to the internet for help. A quick Google search will reveal a number of companies that specialize in selling leads. Since your company’s revenue is anchored on your high-quality leads, this option is often attractive to business owners.
The question is: should you buy leads for your landscaping business?
Here, we’ll discuss everything you have to know about landscaping leads. This includes the types of leads, risks associated and more importantly, strategies on how you can generate your own landscaping leads.
Things to Remember When Buying Landscaping Leads Online
Every online resource will warn you against buying leads because there’s always a caveat behind them. Aside from being risky and costly, the legitimacy of their data is also questionable.
However, if you’re not keen to build organic landscaping leads for your business, there are things you must know first. It’s important to understand what you’re getting yourself into. Having a clear, concrete and concise plan will enable you to get the most out of your purchased landscaping leads.
When you’re looking to buy landscaping leads, there are a few things you should remember. Here are some tips:
- Knowing Who to Target
The first and most important rule of buying landscaping leads is to know your target market. You wouldn’t want to waste time, money and effort on landscaping leads that will never convert.
To avoid this, you have to dissect your existing market first and perform strategic targeting to only buy ‘interested’ leads. Use your existing customers to get the demographic data and psychological information that will be used for your landscaping leads.
- Know What Exactly a Lead List Is
A lead list is simply a collection of names, contact information and other details regarding your business prospects. They’re the prospects your company aims to convert into paying customers.
It’s important to know and approve what sorts of details go into the list. Ideally, your landscaping leads will require a few more nudges to convert. This is possible if your leads conform to your company’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Here is the info you need from your landscaping leads:
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- Target’s name
- Job title
- Target’s contact information like number and e-mail address
- Target’s company name
- Pay Only for a Decent Lead List
Needless to say, make sure you’re also getting quality landscaping leads by buying them from a reputable source. A good vendor will discuss your preferences with you to sift the specific data you need.
Types of Leads You Can Actually Buy Online
If you ever decide to buy leads online, here is a quick breakdown of the leads available online:
- Sales Leads — These are individuals or companies that have displayed interest in the products or services you sell. Sales leads are qualified based on your business’s preferences. Landscaping leads typically fall into this category.
- MLM Leads — Like regular sales leads, MLM or multi-level marketing leads target people who expressed interest in your goods or services. The only difference is that some vendors allow you to use their name to increase your pitch’s credibility and persuasiveness.
- Real Estate Leads — Given the competitive nature of the real estate industry, realtors need high-quality buyers and sellers in their database. There are vendors dedicated to solely selling real-estate-related leads.
- SEO Leads — Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most competitive industries in digital marketing. SEO leads are used to help agencies acquire new prospects to support their business’s optimization efforts.
- Franchise Leads — These are the types of leads that brokers or franchisers regularly acquire.
Generating leads can be a very daunting task, especially for tight markets like the landscaping industry– but it’s not impossible. With expert guidance and a blueprint to follow, your landscape business won’t need to risk buying landscaping leads.
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Click here to claim Landscape Marketing Hero’s FREE growth map called The Hero’s Journey: A Guide to Growing.
The Risks of Buying Landscaping Leads Online
Buying landscaping leads can be a high-risk, high-reward process. However, if it were easy, buying leads would be the go-to strategy for all businesses. Since it’s not free of risks, here are the ones you should consider when purchasing landscaping leads:
1. Too Expensive for Your Landscaping Business to Handle
The landscaping industry is known for considerably high-profit margins ranging from 15 percent to 45 percent. But some landscapers may go as low as 5 percent according to Lawn Care Millionaire. This means that buying landscaping leads may be out of reach for most companies. If a contractor spends $1,000 on leads and only closes 1 percent, they’re already in the hole.
On top of that, it’s even worse if you don’t improve your cost per lead (CPL) over time. This means only the lead gen company earns money that your company throws at them. The money spent on leads must expand your database and network until you can thrive without buying leads. Otherwise, it’s a waste of effort and investment.
2. You’re Competing to Be the First to Contact the Lead
You have to understand that your company isn’t the only one buying landscaping leads. More often than not, businesses will be competing for the same market if they purchase from the same vendors. This means you’re probably buying into an already-tight competition and bidding against other landscapers.
3. Some New Landscape Contractors Are Willing to Underbid to Win the Business
With any new business, they’re always looking for ways to increase profits and get more landscaping jobs. In order to do this, some landscapers are willing to underbid other companies’ landscaping leads for the same job. This could work to your disadvantage if you’re not the low-cost provider in your area.
4. You Get Bumped With Tire Kickers on Angie’s List or HomeAdvisor
If your vendor is selling low-quality leads, it goes without saying that results will be disappointing. The landscaping industry is very competitive, and the lead gen companies are aware of this. They can get away with charging a premium because they know that landscapers are willing to pay for quality leads.
Why You Need to Generate Your Own Landscaping Leads
Buying landscaping leads is a band-aid solution to a long game. This means it can give you quick wins, but without leveraging your business, you’re bound to lose in the end. Investing in your landscape company and marketing campaigns is the time-tested key to generating enduring leads.
If you’re serious about growing your landscaping business, you need to build your own leads. There are a number of ways to do this, and here are some approaches…
Organic Strategies
For startups that have no network yet and are still on a shoestring budget, organic strategies are the best options. Using organic methods gives you no-cost traffic and lowers your overall cost per acquisition. Although building landscaping leads organically may be a learning curve, it has significantly less risk than buying from lead gens.
The difference between building your rapport through marketing and instant leads is that you maintain full control of your leads. With instant leads, you’re at the mercy of the lead gen site’s quality.
Organic digital marketing allows you to create solid foundations and bridge relationships with your leads. Below are two ways you can generate landscaping leads through organic strategies:
- SEO
SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to rank better on search engine results pages.
Search engines like Google or Bing use bots that crawl websites to collect information. They then use those to rank websites by relevance to a searcher’s user intent. This is done by using the right keywords, providing great content and having a well-designed site.
SEO normally takes time to produce results, but it is a long-term strategy that will eventually pay off. The higher quality content your landscaping business offers, the more landscaping leads you can obtain.
Another SEO strategy you can use is local SEO. This ensures your business’s visibility whenever searchers within your area search “landscapers near me.” You can do this by signing your business up on Google My Business.
- Social Media Marketing
Did you know that 69 percent of Americans use Facebook? This means that the likelihood of having your targets scrolling through Facebook and other social media sites is high. Social media marketing is an organic strategy to help you meet customers where they already are.
Social media marketing gives you a platform to reach your customers through relevant posts. You can show off your landscaping skills by posting before and after photos of the projects you’ve worked on. Another way is to post blog articles relating to landscaping tips, tricks and advice.
Fast Result of Acquiring Targeted Leads
Organic methods are not the only ways you can build your landscaping leads list. Paid methods can be quick methods to acquire targeted leads, minus the risk of buying leads from lead gen companies.
Paid advertising tactics simply give businesses a leg-up compared to those who just establish their rapport organically. Think of it as a boost for landscaping businesses that are starting from scratch or are limited on time.
Here are paid methods to acquire targeted leads:
- Paid Search
Aside from ranking high through SEO, paid search is an alternative to bag the top spot on search engine results. Paid search allows you to bag the top spot of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) ahead of organic listings. The only difference is that paid searches come with a little box that says “ad.”
You can launch paid ad campaigns via Google Ads, which charges you every time someone clicks on your ad. Paid searches let you drive traffic to your website where you can finally complete the transaction.
- Local Service Ads
Google’s Local Service Ads (LSAs) are a program that landscaping businesses can sign up for. Google verifies and certifies businesses in a certain service area. The businesses that participate in LSAs can show up as the top result in Google Maps for related searches. On top of that, LSA is a pay-per-lead tool which means you are not charged per click. Instead, the cost only comes when a lead contacts you from the ad.
- Social Media Ads
Just like Google Ads, you can also run ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The great thing about these platforms is that you can target your ads to very specific audiences.
For example, imagine you only want to show your landscaping ad to people who live in a certain locality. Using social media ads, you can qualify leads based on their zip code and interests to land high-quality prospects.
The downside to social media ads is that they can be pretty expensive. Facebook, in particular, has gotten very strict with its ad policies. It has also become harder and harder to run successful landscaping ads on the platform. If you do want to give social media ads a try, make sure you have a large budget set aside.
Own Your Lead Generation
Lead generation is one of the foundations of any successful business, not just in the landscaping industry. That’s why it’s important to ensure the landscaping leads you get are high-quality and interested in your business. The only way to do this is by building meaningful relationships with your prospects.
Unfortunately, just buying instant landscaping leads won’t cut it, especially if you don’t have a concrete plan to manage them. Remember that everything that’s meaningful takes time– this includes lead generation.
Relying on digital marketing tactics is still the best way to generate long-lasting and loyal landscaping leads.
If you don’t know how, Landscape Marketing Hero can help you out. Click here and fill out the form to claim your FREE growth map, The Hero’s Journey: A Guide to Growing.