Word-of-Mouth Marketing for Landscapers: the How and the Why

In the landscaping business, getting promising leads is more than half the job done. Reaching there, however, is yet another feat. Everyone has heard about the various marketing strategies that work to get more clients to your door. But are you just starting your landscaping business? Are you not well versed in digital marketing for landscapers or haven’t started investing in it?

Do you have minimal to no budget or time to spare for marketing your business? Or is it just too much of a pain to keep up with digital posts and updates on your website at the end of a long, hard landscaping day? If any of these points resonate with you, word-of-mouth marketing is the way to go!

What is WOMM (Word of Mouth Marketing)?

It is a traditional marketing strategy that helps you bring in new customers using your old customers. This is one of the most powerful advertising tools in your armory. What’s more is that it reduces your marketing and advertising costs dramatically. This strategy works best for a local target market. In other words, deliver outstanding landscaping jobs that force the catered customer to rave about your services in their social circles, getting you more leads with minimal investment. Remember that a happy customer is your best salesperson.

However, getting a customer to recommend you to others can be a hard task to master. Some satisfied customers do so with no prodding. In the case of others, delivering an impressive job might not be enough and they might require more attention. More on this later on in here.

How effective is WOMM?

Would you trust a random Facebook Ad pop-up or a search result on Google over a friend’s or a neighbor’s recommendation? We’ll assume the latter. If you agree, then you now understand the effectiveness of this marketing strategy. The customer is likely to go with the recommendation of a person who he or she trusts over anyone else’s. When a person whose opinion matters to you recommends a service, this trust transfers to this service. So when you land a prospect with WOMM, chances are, he or she will become your client as they have some prior knowledge about your service, as opposed to landing a prospect through digital mediums, which requires work from scratch as you will have to develop this trust from the ground up.

Why do you need WOMM?

When talking about marketing for landscapers, this marketing strategy, being cost-effective, brings business and positive publicity in a target area. But if you need more reasons to adopt this strategy, here they are:

Makes your marketing budget economical

Digital and traditional marketing expenses, given the competition, can take a toll on your yearly budget. With paid social media and Google ads, print advert budgets can sometimes go higher than anticipated. To cut back on these, one should definitely consider WOMM.

It is a major help in getting your Brand Name out there

Tired of being asked who you are and what you do? WOMM is how you can change that. Having a certain level of brand awareness surely aids in better conversions. Get your friends, family, and past customers to recommend or talk about you more.

No time to spare for other marketing strategies

Being a landscape business owner can mean having no time to invest in planning or implementing digital marketing strategies. You are usually occupied with managing your crew, inventory, projects, and vendors. WOMM helps you get customers without having to spend a lot of time finding them, as they’ll be directed to you by others.

WOMM works even with no social engagement

This is the plight of all new landscaping businesses. Being new means developing the much-needed engagement on social media channels, which needs some serious sweat and time. During this waiting period, you can rely on your social circles to spread the word about you. Having talked about the reasons ‌why WOMM works, let’s talk about how to incorporate it into your business plan.

How to build Word-of-Mouth for your landscaping business?

Let your branding do the talking

You cannot completely depend on recommendations from your past landscaping clients. Some WOMM leads result from people seeing your brand name on your truck while you’re driving around town, door hangers, park benches, or your crew wearing hoodies with your company name on them. Consider the old-fashioned method of handing out business cards the best way to start.

Deliver a Customer Experience better than your competition

Here are a couple of ways you can deliver a better customer experience that leads to quality recommendations:1. Faster turnaround time in bidding: You can reduce the time it takes your team to come up with a bid by automating measurements; the most time-consuming aspect of the process.2. Share quality site maps with your customers: Detailed site maps in PDF and high-quality images make your customer believe you know the job to be done better than your competition. Attentive.ai lets you export high-quality site maps via shareable links, PDF or JPEGs.

Excellent Landscaping Project results

The one thing that you can count on for recommendations is high-quality work. Noone recommends a company offering subpar services. You might invest in incentives, referral bonuses, offers, etc, but if you’re not providing a memorable service, all this will go in vain. Doing the landscaping job well the first time means you will be called again in the coming years as the customer has now developed confidence in your service. Him praising your job in his social circle then becomes highly probable, followed by good recommendations and referrals. Your marketing is only as good as the quality of your job.

A two-way Referral Program

This growth marketing strategy furthermore encourages your customer to recommend your services. Here, you’re not only incentivizing your existing clients but also the ones to whom your service is being referred. Offer a signing-up bonus or a discount to new customers and a service add-on or a discount offer that can be redeemed in the future for your existing customers.

Go that Extra Mile

Let’s say your landscaping contract only was for general bed maintenance and detailing, but you offer a free PHC as an add-on. Extra measures like these taken, when least expected, will leave a long-lasting impression on your customer, translating into some serious word-of-mouth recommendations.

Don’t be afraid to ask

Do not shy away from asking your customers to recommend you. If you’re delivering exceptional services and leaving all your customers satisfied, they will gladly oblige. The not so obvious ways could be sending them follow-up emails or calling them after a week ‌of finishing a project to ‌ask if they’d be willing to recommend your services to others. Word-of-mouth marketing for landscapers is really about making it simple for your customer to sing praises about your services. The only way to do that is by outperforming yourself. Put your best foot forward in all the interactions you have with them. Ideal for new business owners and for old businesses looking to grow their client base, word-of-mouth marketing has the potential to do wonders for your landscaping business.