Summer is already in full swing, and that only means one thing for people owning a landscape business: it’s already busy season! Well, at least it should be. Is your lawn care business or landscape company busy enough?
If not, you need more lawn care leads to keep your schedule jam-packed.
As a lawn care business owner, you’re always on the lookout for new lawn care leads. After all, without them, your business would quickly dry up. Unfortunately, even for long-standing businesses in the industry, lead generation can be a hassle.
But where do you find lawn care leads? And once you’ve found them, how do you convert them into paying customers?
Never fear! We’re here to help. In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about lawn care leads. That includes where to find them, then how to get them for free and finally, how to turn them into paying customers. Keep reading to learn more about lawn care leads.
Who Needs Lawn Care Service Leads?
Without lawn care leads, your business will quickly become a thing of the past. The only way to ensure your business’s longevity is through a steady stream of quality lawn care leads. On the other hand, you reap extensive benefits when your company obtains a good influx of quality leads. This includes:
- Increased premium and consistent projects
- Regular work for your team
- Improved bottom line and long-term profitability
- Business growth
These are huge benefits, but many people overlook the fact that these perks transcend lawn care businesses. Other entities and stakeholders can enjoy the same advantages from lawn care leads. Here are businesses that could use landscaping leads:
- Companies that provide lawn care services – These are the primary beneficiaries from lawn care leads. Lawn care providers use leads to increase their customer base and grow their business.
- Service providers who seek to expand their operations – These are businesses that offer lawn care as an ancillary service to complement their primary offerings. For example, general contractors, landscapers, and pool cleaners. Lawn care leads are helpful to these companies in generating new business.
- Businesses with the capacity to take on more tasks – These are companies with the infrastructure and personnel to support additional lawn care clients. They may be looking for ways to increase their revenue or market share.
- Businesses that do not wish to share leads with others – Some lawn care companies prefer to work with a select group of clients and don’t want to share leads with their competitors.
- Businesses that are serious about their customer service – Those who answer their phones diligently and reply to customers timely could use lawn care leads. Prospects can be used to find new customers who will appreciate their work.
- Complementary service providers – Hardscapers or plumbers who frequently work with yards may collaborate with lawn service providers to expand their customer base.
What does the above list mean?
It means that lawn care business owners are competing with other stakeholders on top of their primary competitors. The best way to attract lawn care leads is through effective lawn care advertising and marketing. To learn more about this, click here to claim your FREE growth map, The Hero’s Journey: A Guide to Growing.
Where Do Lawn Care Service Leads Come From?
Lawn care leads can come from a lot of different places. The most common method is through advertising and marketing, either online or offline. Another way to get leads is through referrals from satisfied customers, family or friends. Networking with other businesses in the landscaping industry can also support you here.
A popular approach among new lawn care businesses or those who struggle to maintain prospects is buying landscape leads. However, this does come with risk factors that may not be worth it, especially for businesses with limited cash flow.
In this era, gaining leads is more seamless than ever before because businesses are taps away from prospects. For instance, when users search phrases like “lawn care near me” or “lawn mowing + city” in Google.
Customers are then led to marketing funnels where they can get a quote or access contact details. With local SEO doing its magic, you can be sure every searcher is localized and qualified.
The point is that lawn care leads can come from all sources.
Is It Possible to Get FREE Leads?
Most lawn care businesses rely on paid advertising to get in front of their target market and generate leads. While this is certainly the fastest way to get results, it can also be one of the most expensive.
To reduce your lawn care marketing costs, you may be wondering if it’s possible to get free lawn care leads. The answer is yes– but it will take some time and effort on your part.
Here are some ways:
1. Send effective emails
Email remains one of the most effective marketing channels available, especially when it comes to generating leads. Crafting engaging, targeted and specific content that speaks to your ideal customer’s needs is the key to emails that get you results.
The question is: how do you get the emails you’ll contact?
You can start with the email addresses of your current customers or people who subscribed to your mailing list. If you don’t have any, you can try to reach out to friends, family and acquaintances.
The best way to do this is by offering value in exchange for their emails like lead magnets in the form of e-books. You can also buy email lists online, but make sure you’re purchasing a verified list from reputable providers.
Once you have a list of potential leads, it’s time to start emailing!
2. Keep track of your website’s visitors
Your website is a valuable tool for lead generation. Think of it as the virtual storefront of your lawn care business. Every person who lands on your website is a potential lead you can convert into buying customers. That’s why it’s important to track them, which means:
- Tracking how many visitors you receive.
- Identifying from what channels they come from.
- Analyzing what they do on your website.
For example, let’s say you find out that most of your website visitors come from Facebook. You can then focus your lawn care lead generation efforts on that platform. Or, if you see that visitors spend a lot of time on your pricing page, you can work on making your pricing more attractive.
One of the most powerful tools for this is Google Analytics. You’ll need to initially sign up and install a bit of code on your website, but it’s well worth it. Google Analytics is free, and it provides an incredible amount of data that you can use to improve your lawn care lead generation efforts.
3. Make use of social media
Social media is one of the most popular tools today if you want to generate leads. Facebook, for instance, uses an algorithm that lets your business reach customers searching for related or relevant content. By creating and sharing quality posts, you can attract potential leads and build relationships with them.
It’s important to be active on social media platforms so you can address any comments and reply to messages. Paid options are also possible if you have the budget, which will allow you to localize and target ads.
4. Improve your blog’s content
Your website shouldn’t only house your offers and everything there is to know about your business. The landscape or lawn care company that wins lawn care leads are those that are reliable. Blog articles help position your business as a trustworthy and expert source of information.
By creating high-quality and informative articles, you improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. This means that your visibility in Google or other search engines increases. In other words, leads will have an easier time finding you.
5. Make use of guest posts
Like native blog articles, guest posts have SEO-boosting capability thanks to backlinks that take leads back to your homepage. More importantly, you get to expand your reach because you’ll be talking to readers outside your customer base. This is a good practice if you’re after collaboration with other related businesses like hardscapers or plumbers.
6. Collaboration with an influencer
Not all lawn care providers have access to influencer marketing, especially since every influencer is paid to advertise. However, there are some who accept services or products in exchange for collaboration.
Influencers have their very own customer bases which are normally wide. So collaborating with them is useful if you want to help your business reach greater lengths. Just make sure the influencer’s audience is relevant to your business.
For example, YouTubers whose market is teens will most probably have nothing to do with lawn care. Therefore, targeting them as lawn care leads will be pretty much useless.
7. Boost customer referrals
Customer referrals are undoubtedly one of the best and easiest ways to generate leads. They can come naturally, or you can give your audience exclusive offers if they refer your business to others.
The simplest way is to provide excellent service. Customers who witnessed your efficiency and reliability will naturally share the good news with friends and family. You can also give them a small discount or other perks for every new customer they bring in.
What Information Can You Get From Each Lead?
It begins with establishing an effective system where you can fish leads from obscurity. Once you’ve set those strategies, whether paid or free options, this is the information you can get from your leads:
- Prospect’s name
- Target’s address/location
- Lawn care services they are interested in
- Budget for lawn care services
- Contact information (email, phone number, social media)
- The type of property that the lead owns (residential or commercial)
- Approximate size of their lawn
From there, you can start to develop a relationship with your lawn care leads and eventually convert them into paying customers!
How to Convert a Lead Into a Prospect?
Before knowing how to transform leads to prospects, it’s important to understand the two terms first. In a nutshell, leads are unqualified contacts while prospects are their qualified counterparts who have moved into the sales process.
The key to transforming leads into prospects is by inserting them into your sales qualification process. In this stage, you assess if your solutions and your lead match.
Here are the three steps:
- Organization-Level Qualification
Once you get the information you need, you can now start to qualify your lawn care leads. You can do this by evaluating each lead according to the information they have given you. See if they match your ideal customer profile (demographic info, industry, lawn size, etc.)
- Opportunity-Level Qualification
During this phase, you now try to determine if your company’s offering matches the needs of your lead. Consider the benefits they’ll be getting from your services. You can do this by studying your lawn care lead’s lawn and seeing the current condition it is in. From there, you can recommend the best lawn care services to help improve their lawn’s condition.
- Stakeholder-Level Qualification
This comes after you’ve qualified the lead according to your buyer persona and determined how they can benefit from your services. It’s now time to confirm if they have the ability to commit to the purchase. Otherwise, you may have to determine the correct stakeholder to proceed down the funnel.
Acquiring lawn care leads is not the easiest task that business owners face. Even seasoned entrepreneurs can have a hard time dealing with it. It normally boils down to effective marketing and advertising. With a solid system in place, finding lawn care leads is within reach.
If your lawn care business needs any help in this aspect, Landscape Marketing Hero can help. It all begins with clicking here and filling up the form to claim your FREE growth map, The Hero’s Journey: A Guide to Growing.