Mike Andes (YouTube) presents practical marketing guidance for landscaping/lawn-care businesses. He frames marketing as a catalyst to accelerate growth (vs. slow organic referral-only growth), reports his company’s sustained 40–50% annual growth attributed to marketing, and stresses tactical local-SEO and tools: content/blogs targeting keywords (usually “<city> + lawn care/landscaping”), and a must-have Google My Business presence (including service-area or address settings). He also highlights the estimate process as a critical marketing touchpoint.
Questions this video answers
40–50% per year (consistent minimum).
About 1.5 to 2 years old.
Chapters
What I would be looking for if I was you is one thing, just take one thing away from the entire conference.
So let's talk about marketing though. I want to say one quick thing, and that is a lot of people will get very confused.
By marketing and that is because you go on YouTube or you even hear successful landscaping companies, very successful landscaping companies that have been around for a long time and they will say this. I've never spent a dollar in marketing. We have referrals coming all the time. We have so many leads we don't know what to do with and that's fine. But they're at the point where they want to be at in terms of revenue. They've been mature in the market. Now you can do that. You can get to where they are at by not doing any marketing. It's just gonna take you a very long time. So marketing is a catalyst to growth. Like it gets your word out, gets the word out. It does cost money, it does cost time and energy and all of that. But there's no way I would have gotten to like a million plus in a few years if I would have had just referrals. There's just no way. Like I don't care how good your referral strategy is. So it's just a catalyst. It costs money. And you gotta figure this out if you wanna grow quickly. If you're gonna grow at 10% every year, you could really easily get away with just like word of mouth referrals, cultivating your email list, things like that. Easily 10% growth. If you're 1 to 30 plus, you're gonna start thinking about marketing. So we've had a consistent 40 to 50% growth every single year at minimum. And it's only because of the marketing. So and marketing as we're gonna talk about today, just like you can talk about that from advertising and ads and Google Ads and Facebook ads. But marketing flows into every single aspect of our business and especially what we're going to focus on in the last part of this session. And that is your estimate process. You got to nail that down. It's a huge part of marketing. So I'm going to kind of just talk about a few different aspects of marketing and advertising that we all know about and just kind of give my kind of State of the union on a few different aspects of them, some of which have changed if you've watched the course. So the course is about a year and a half, two years old, and I'm going to be redoing that section simply because it's changing so fast and I want my actual truth to be on there still. And so some of this will actually go against what I say on the course because I do feel like it's changing pretty rapidly. So blogs. So if you want to take notes, I'm going to basically just give a general theme of marketing, for instance, blogs or Google Ads or whatever, and then just kind of deal a few pointers or tips or things that I'm noticing. As I see a lot of landscaping companies, blogs. So informational and educational content. This is everything from how to mow a lawn to how to trim your bushes to ways of educating the client about lawn care and landscaping. I push this big time in the course. And the reason for that is all SEO. You want to know keywords, making sure you get links on those blogs that say your keywords. What are your keywords? Almost all the time it should be your city name and lawn care. City name and landscaping, because those are the words that people are looking for. And if you listen to the course, you do know this part. And the reason why you want your name of your city or town that your demographic is in is for one reason. Because when I go into Siri and ask Siri about a lawn care company, what lawn care company I should use is doing one thing, the first question it's going to ask its algorithm is where is this individual at? Because it needs to figure that out in order to give me whatever's closest to me. All right, so I know we're not first, but let's see who is in this market. Lawn care company near me.
Okay, Michael, here's what I found. Okay, so this is who I'm competing against right now with none of my lawn care like landscapers are on here. But this is who I'm competing with. Home Depot, Lowe's, a nursery, Trugreen, and then a couple lawn care companies. So what you have to do is make sure that your keyword, your city name, is very relevant. Because the reason it gave me Home Depot is because it's the closest to me 2.4 miles. You need to make sure you have an address on your Google Ad page or your Google My business page. You need to download the Google My business app. If you do not have the Google my business app, you need to download that right away. You need to have a page on there. And they've made the app very user friendly to not only create ads, but track all of your web traffic. How many people are calling you, looking you up on a map, how many impressions you're getting and where you're ranking. Absolutely. Must have Google My Business. It's on all the app stores on your phone, so sometimes those maps aren't exactly where you're at. Is there a way to update that to Google or. Yeah, so they just recently changed their algorithm. On Google My Business, you do not have to put an address. You can do a service area. It's called. So you do a township and then a radius of service area. And that is great.
If you have an address like a shop, it's valuable to have that because if I was over on the guide meridian close to my location, Siri will show us first.
And just like that's what's taking over, right? Alexa in people's car, hands free stuff. Just wait until it's like, hey, I need lawn care service this weekend. Can you set it up for me? And it's gonna call somebody. Just make sure that's you, right?
