Fall is in full swing and it's prime time to close leads that are in your pipeline that maybe didn't convert all the way to a customer during the spring and summer. Many of your customers, your current customers, may not know just how much landscaping you can get done for them over the fall and winter. In today's podcast, I'm going to share with you seven marketing tactics that you can execute this fall to have a great end of the year, and also start the year off strong.
Hey, everyone. Jack Jostes here, and welcome to The Landscaper's Guide. This podcast is all about growing your snow and landscape company with sales, marketing, and leadership ideas.
Today, I've got some marketing ideas for you that I personally use myself, so I'm excited to share them with you because they work for me. I really believe they could work for any service business, and they absolutely work for landscaping.
7 Marketing Tactics To Have A Great End Of The Year
1. Remind Customers What Services You Provide
My first tip is to email your current customer base about the services that they can buy from you this fall and winter. I was just meeting with a client yesterday who is telling me, "Hey, a lot of our clients think that... Well, one, they think they can contact us in November and have their complete landscape installed before winter and they can't. But they also don't know just how much of the design phase they can be doing over the winter." Or, "I have clients in different regions throughout the country where they're landscaping all year round. But many clients are going to think that, "Oh, I can only get started in the spring. I'm going to wait until then."
Contact them now with email and let them know what services you offer. This could range from things like fall cleanup or sprinkler blowouts, things like that. If you do snow removal, you can let them know about that, but let them know about what kind of design or construction services or installations can you do for them.
2. Take Advantage Of Direct Mail Opportunities
Tip number two is to use direct mail with your current customers. At Ramblin Jackson, we use a ton of direct mail. We have a print monthly newsletter that has sales and marketing tips that are fun. We have little games and things that you can do. If you don't get this and you'd like to, grab our Landscaper's Marketing Toolbox at landscapersguide.com/toolbox. We'll mail you a box of beef jerky and our most recent newsletter and get you added to the list so you don't miss out each month.
But I send this to my current customers, and I also do things with postcards. You've probably gotten postcards from me for various things like, here's one from the summit that we had. And then here's one that's just kind of fun that we include in our toolbox or different things. It's actually my famous burger recipe. So I like doing a combination of digital marketing like this podcast or social media, email, text message, different things like that. And also analog marketing, print marketing, because you got to have multiple touches with your customer throughout the year, over time, depending on your sales process. And print just has the stick-around factor. Meaning like people get this and it sticks around their office, it's on their desk for a while, and when it's well designed and well printed, it adds a feeling of credibility to your brand when they can touch something and feel it and it looks good. And hey, if you want this burger recipe, let me know. What's most important is that you're using a good message, a good offer to the right people.
3. Reactivate Leads With A S.P.E.A.R. Email
My third tactic is to reactivate lost leads in your pipeline with a SPEAR email. So a SPEAR email stands for Short Personal Expecting a Reply. And if you check out our show notes, I have a whole episode on this. It's one of my favorite emails. It's also sometimes called a nine word email, and it could be an email like this. "Carl, are you thinking of finishing your landscaping this year?" It almost reads like a text message. So sending that SPEAR email to leads in your database, maybe you got as far as having an appointment scheduled, but they canceled. Or maybe you got as far as having a proposal sent to them and they totally ghosted and you haven't heard back from them.
Look through your notes. What were the reasons why. Were they going on vacation? Were they applying for a home equity line of credit? You could follow up and say, "Carl, did you end up closing on your home equity line of credit?" A lot of times people will reply, "Yes, I did, and I was just thinking of finishing my landscape and I lost your contact info. I'm glad that you emailed me." So the SPEAR is a great way, again, to reactivate leads who are in your pipeline. They've already contacted you, they've already expressed interest, they didn't close for some reason. Reactivate them and you'll drum up a bunch of sales.
4. Use Door Hangers For Neighborhood Marketing
Tactic number four is to use door hangers. So print door hangers are a great way to market to the neighbors of your clients. So if you're out even doing things like fall cleanup, sprinkler blowouts, different things like that, assign somebody on your crew who is going to give a print material. Maybe it's a door hanger or hey, you could repurpose your postcards. Whenever I do postcard campaigns, we always print another 20 to 50 and include them in whatever other marketing we're doing. They're just really handy. You can put this under somebody's windshield wiper blade or tuck it into their door, put it in their mailbox or whatever.
So again, marketing to the neighbors of your clients. Some people call this the Cloverleaf Strategy, making the symbol of a cloverleaf hitting the house here, the house there, the house there, house there. The point is, you're already there. This is how you can build some serious route density for your maintenance crew and just get in front of those people. Now they're seeing your vehicle, they're seeing your crew in branded shirts, and they have a postcard or a door hanger, ideally with some kind of offer that's going to expire within the next month. That will give them more of a reason to reply during that timeframe than just say, a brand awareness postcard that doesn't really have an offer.
5. Repurpose Materials For Social Media
Tip number five is to repurpose whatever you've decided to do from here on your social media. Whenever I'm making content like this video or a graphic for my postcards or a graphic for anything, I'm thinking about, "How can I resize this and publish it on social media?" So if you come up with some sort of fall offer for fall services, fall cleanup, whatever you're doing in your print marketing is a great thing to also post on your social media. And another great thing is selfie videos, recording videos on your phone, posting straight to Instagram and Facebook about whatever services you're doing. Like, "Hey, we're doing a leaf cleanup at Johnson residence. Look at this giant pile of leaves. And did you know that we can help you with this, in addition to mulching," and whatever other fall services you do. Tell people to check out your website.
6. Ask Your Clients For Reviews
Tip number six is to get reviews. So hopefully asking for reviews is as much of a part of your process as is sending invoices. At my company it is, we systematically send a request for feedback at a certain milestone during our projects and then at launch, and then I do it quarterly with my clients. And with landscaping, it's very similar. You might collect feedback midway through the project, after it launches. And for maintenance, I recommend asking every quarter. The key is assigning a person on your team who's going to ask the client in person like, "Hey, Bob, halfway through the project, I'm going to send you an email requesting feedback. Will you fill that out for me? Cool, Bob, thank you." Then halfway through the project, "Hey Bob, remember when I told you earlier that I was going to send you an email for feedback? Cool. Hey, I'm going to send that later, and I'd really appreciate it if you'd fill it out."
Now Bob has already told me, yes, he's going to do it. He's going to be way more likely to follow through than just randomly getting it. But the key is send something, make it easy. We use Ramblin reviews, we use a software that automates all this for our clients. If you're not doing that yet, don't get stuck on this. Send them a link to your Google review link, right? So just go to your Google listing, click on reviews, and copy that big ugly URL and put that in an email that people can click on and get reviews. So this is a good time of year. If you do more design, build, installation, maybe you've had a very busy spring and summer. If you haven't asked all of those clients, go back, pick up the phone, call them, see how they're doing, and ask them, "Hey, would you do me a favor and write a review on Google? I'm going to send you an email with a link. It'd mean a lot to me if you did that."
7. Send Gifts To Your Top Clients
And then my last tip is to send gifts to your best clients. So sending a gift in the mail goes a long way with a lot of people. I personally like sending food gifts. Somebody who wrote a book about giftology, they said that sending food is a bad idea. I like doing it because I think it's cool. I enjoy trying different foods and I get positive feedback from my clients that they enjoy receiving those types of gifts. And if you want to get some ideas for how to, what kinds of gifts and things, our newsletter, make sure you read our print newsletter in November, because it has a whole bunch of gift ideas for landscapers. Things that you can send your customers that make sense as a gift from a landscaper. So stay tuned for that.
And this fall, this winter is a good time to get your branding, get your website, get your SEO totally dialed in. It's a good time to build that. So that when comes the next spring rush, you have a sales machine. Your website is a system that filters the right leads, funnels them through, and puts them on your calendar and weeds out the people who are not a fit. We do this with advanced strategies like pricing pages, online scheduling, and we customize these strategies based on our client's local market, their ideal customer, their hell yes customer, and many other things. So if you'd like to work with a team who's done this with literally hundreds of clients, that'll bring you proactive ideas to solve your biggest sales and marketing challenges, I invite you to schedule a 15-minute marketing brainstorm call with our marketing team.
So we will meet with you on the phone, learn about your biggest challenges, try and help you out. And sometimes that means we can help you. Sometimes it means we point you in the direction of a podcast we've done or somebody else in our network that may be a better fit to help you. So check that out. Book your call today at landscapersguide.com/brainstorm. And again, if you're thinking about launching your website this spring, contact us now, right? Don't be like your clients who call you in May and say, "Hey, can you launch my landscape in June?" And you're like, "It doesn't happen that fast. It takes time to do these things well," and we're ready to help you. landscapersguide.com/brainstorm. My name's Jack Jostes. Hopefully you got some value from these tips. I'd love to hear from you about which ones work, and I look forward to talking with you next week on The Landscaper's Guide.