How to Get More Mowing Clients with $10,000 Marketing Budget

Hey, it's Mike over at Landscape Business Course, and I made a video on how to use less than $1,000 to get more mowing customers. So when it comes to marketing, if you have less than a thousand dollars, how do you use that? Well, a lot of you asked, well, if I have more than that, If I have 5, 6, 7, $10,000, what should I be using that money on? How should that be allocated in my marketing mix? Which medium should I be using? How should that process work? And so I want to just kind of give you a few tips. If you do have more than 1,000, if you have $10,000 worth of marketing money budget to spend, what should that be spent on? So I'm going to assume right now that your website's solid because really that money should be first spent on a good website. So I'm going to assume that first of all that's taken care of if you need to spend 2, $3,000 on getting a better website created. When we're Talking about a $10,000 marketing budget, it's one of two people that are ask either one, you are an established company that's doing already 2, 3, $400,000 in revenue and you're generating some real income, or we're talking about companies at 2 or 3 million dollars. They have quite a bit of money coming in here, so they're wanting to grow, expand their mowing base and accelerate that. And so they have some marketing dollars. That's the first type. The second type of people are asking this question is people that are just starting a business, but they have quite a bit of money saved up and they're willing to stop their current 9 to 5 job and go right into landscaping full time. They don't want to have to spend a year where it's like part time and they can't really take a salary out of the company. So they need to generate a whole bunch of sales right off the bat just to start getting compensation back and supplying for their family. So that's kind of two different ways of new people starting out that really need to get a big kick in sales. And then two is established businesses that have revenue and, and are trying to get more. So we're talking about someone that has a $10,000 marketing budget. And I'm assuming that your website is solid because that's the first thing you should be doing with your marketing budget because it is the number one lead generator as you move forward in your business. It's the best business card in the world. It should be Able to highlight customer testimonials and videos and should be very mobile based. So all of that aside, let's just talk about marketing and advertising, what that should be looking like for a $10,000 budget. So it really comes down to in one way, what your market's all about. For in our market, we can't do door hangers in most areas that we target because there's HOAs, homeowners associations, there are CC and RS that don't allow us to put door hangers and solicit and do even door to door in their daily communities. And so we aren't able to do a lot of those things. If you can, that's great. It's a little bit cheaper than what we do. And that is every door direct mail or every door direct marketing where we send postcards or flyers to particular demographics. So certain mail routes in the USPS United States Postal Service that we can see their demographic, we know their area obviously, but also their age and what their income range is. And if they're in our target audience, who the people we really want to be customers. And so that's what we use. So those are the two kind of starting places as far as print is. If you can do door hangers, great. If you can't do every door direct mail. So that's the first place I would start. And that's not the cheapest and it's not even the best highest conversion. But that's where a lot of people start because very targeted, you know exactly what addresses you're putting that piece of mail on the door or sending that to via every door direct marketing. It's very, very channeled and targeted. Another thing is I would follow up with just like I did in the previous video with people with low, low budgets, I would still hire someone. Doesn't mean someone super expensive, just an extroverted someone that likes to talk to people. Have them follow up with all of those every door direct mail pieces. So instead of sending out 10,000 mail pieces, maybe send out 3,000, but pay someone to follow up with all 3,000 and I promise you'll probably get the same amount of converted leads as if you send just a blank 10,000 out to a whole bunch of people and don't follow up. So I'd pay that extra money to follow up by someone going to the house, knocking on the door, making sure they got the piece of mail, seeing in person, making that second touch and seeing if that works. So that'd be another thing I'd be doing with their $10,000. Now, the next part is something we play a lot with in the past 24 months is really all we've done. Well, more like 20 months, 16 to 20 months. That's all we've done in our business. And that is Facebook ads. And you can play a lot with Facebook ads. And a lot of people get Facebook ads down very narrowly. But you can target, you can retarget, you can use pixels, lots and lots of stuff involved here. I'll make another video. More about Facebook ads, however.

Facebook ads, you can target demographic, you can target their age, you can target what their income is like you can target what city they live in. You can target if they're followers of your page or friends of the followers of your page or if they like certain other pages around maybe home improvement or income ranges if they're homeowners. There's so many ways you can target particular demographics on Facebook and then create the ad that will speak to that audience. So if you're speaking to an older demographic, you're going to have a different text, you're going to have a different video, you're going to have a different picture than you would if you're trying to go after the working parents and that are needing to do the lawn care because they work eight hours a day. And so there's different ways to market to every single demographic. And Facebook allows you to put different text, different audio, different audio, different video, different creative in front of different demographics. So I would number one with the $10,000 is do these Facebook ads. But don't just do a one ad that says do you need mowing with a nice picture of Yuga of your team or a mower, a random mower off of Clipart and just throw that on there and think that's gonna convert very well. You need something that speaks to the particular audience and make it for them. If you're targeting a certain neighborhood, put in the text that it's just for the neighborhood of their particular demographic. For instance, we market to a certain area in our city called semiamu. Upscale houses are between 7 to $800,000 on average as far as value. A higher demographic as far as age, they're usually retired, 50 plus at least on average. And so when we do the Facebook ads, then I'll just put that are it's all for all the whole county. I will say in there. Semi AMU residents only mowing available. Like I make it particular specific to them. I make sure the picture of the video is recognizable in their area. So if they're looking at the picture, they can see semi amu, they see pictures of semi amu, they've driven by that property before. And so you can target really closely. Another thing I'd be doing on Facebook ads with that $10,000 is doing retargeting. So on Facebook it allows you to give you what's called a pixel. That pixel is a piece of snippet of code that you can put on your website. What that code is going to do is behind the scenes. You don't see it on your website, but it's going to track the people that are coming to your website. It's going to see if they have a Facebook account and then it'll categorize them under your pixel. What you can then do is put Facebook ads in front of the people only that have crossed that pixel. In other words, the people that have come to your website, shown interest, clicked on another ad or come to your website at some point or googled you got you, got you that pixel somehow that pixel. Then register that, keep it in a category and then you can retarget just the people that are on that list. So they've already seen you, they had need for your service at some point or clicked on an ad or somehow got to your website. So these are warm leads. Now you can market to, you can market them with different text, different creative and pictures and video. And so that's very, very powerful. That'll take a while, especially if you're just starting out to accumulate enough traff. But if you have $10,000 budget and you've been in business for five years and you're already pretty high on Google and you have 50 to 100 unique visitors to your website every day, that list of pixel that people have crossed that pixel is pretty big. And you can retarget those Facebook ads just to them very, very powerful. You can even go in depth to the point where you can make a text on the text of your ad for Facebook, put something like why didn't you use it? Like hired someone doing this before and all they said is why didn't you use us for your lawnmowing question mark. And that got people clicking because they already had been associated, they already seen the company, the logo, the name of the company. And so when they saw that and they said why haven't you? The first thing that cut consumers mind is how do they know I didn't go with their service? Or how do they know I went to their website? And so it's very, very unique. And personalized. That's why I'd be focusing on Facebook ads. A lot of people say Facebook ads is trash. It's a throwaway of money flushing money down the toilet. And a lot of times you look at their ad creative, some clipart mower just saying generic things like do you need mowing this spring? You've got to make it personalized to the demographic that you are targeting. So that's Facebook ads. So we talk about every door direct mow, the door hangers, the print part of it. We talked about following up with those. Number two, with the door to door, we talked about Facebook ads. Number four is these $50 gift cards I talk about to the neighbors of clients. So it only costs like $2 to make these, these gift cards. We want plastic gift cards that are like credit cards. Not just like a gift certificate, that's paper, like a coupon that they can cut out. You want a hard plastic, like hard to bend plastic card. That's a gift card. $50, like a high value one, not five bucks or not 10% off discount. Like you want to give them a solid high value gift card towards mowing our landscaping services. And so what that allows you to do is send those to the neighbors of your existing clients if you have a business already. So if you don't already have a business and you're sending these out, you can send it to your very localized market to try to get a tight route. But what you can do, if you already have a business, you can send all of these out with some marketing promotional material in the mail or even in person and send these gift cards out to the neighbors of your clients to increase route density. So what you're trying to do there is if you have a client on somehow on some road, when you park your truck, you want to have like three or four houses that you can mow all at the same time. Reduces drive time and increases efficiency and increases the amount of time that people in your crew are actually working and mowing lawns, making money. So increase that route efficiency, increase that route density. You can send those $50 gift cards to the neighbors of your existing clients. The last way that I would be telling you, if you have a $10,000 marketing budget and you've done all those things, I would be trying to farm your existing clients, whether that be through referrals. But another way that I'm gonna tell you about right now is through mail. And you call it lumpy mail or letters or whatever. You wanna talk about it? I'm not talking about like a print marketing campaign. I'm talking about letters, card stock, things that are special to your existing customers that are going to get them to refer you. Another way of looking at this is though sending mail to every single person you do an estimate for. So what we do in our business, we have these little cards and after someone does an estimate, they fill up that card with a handwritten personalized note and a picture of our team. And that card says thank you, thank you for allowing us to do your business. We just assume they're going to do business with us. So we say thank you, we look forward to servicing your property. And then we throw in a line that has something very specific and personalized just to them. So if they had talked all about their vacation home in Arizona, we might mention something about that. If they mentioned that their family member was sick, we'd say we hope they get well. All in that little letter handwritten by the estimator with a business card and a picture of our team. And that is sent out to every single estimate that we do. And so they're going to get a picture of our team, a thank you very personalized handwritten letter. And that might take a few dollars and a few minutes of our estimators time. Then when we do a bigger landscaping job, like over $2,000, cleanups, bark mulch, install, small landscaping, excavation, whatever it is, tree work, and it's like a 15, 2000 or above job, we're going to send them a very nice card stock letter. On that letter then we are all going to sign by hand. All the people that were working on the job are going to write our signatures, say thank you for allowing us to work. And in that letter we're going to put two business cards them to refer us to someone else. And that's in addition to sending an email and asking for a review. But we're trying to give that personalized touch. So that last, this last thing, this last part of a $10,000 marketing budget is really, if I was to sum it up, I just say personalization and when I say that I mean not don't use the email. Like email is so generic now. People love getting stuff in the mail they weren't expecting for. And not that's not spammy, that is personalized and that has handwritten letter on it and it has a signatures that are with real pen on it and have a little gifts for them. They love that stuff. We're considering putting gift cards in. All those little cards that we send out to every single estimate. Because if I can convert, if I can convert more, if I increase that conversion ratio, that's a massive amount. So what I'd be doing if I was you, if you had that $10,000 budget, farm your existing clients, send them gifts, send them mail, I'd be trying to farm those existing leads. The people that have already asked for an estimate or that have already expressed interest, send them mail, send them a personalized gift, send them something that they mentioned on the estimate. And you knew if you send them it might be $5, $6 little gifts, something small, some candy they mentioned they liked. Whatever it is, you keep track of that stuff. You keep track of that customer intelligence so that when you follow up and you make that personalized marketing, that there's absolutely no way they can say no. And so if you have that $10,000 budget, we're doing the mailers, we're following up with them. If we're doing mailer door hangers, we're doing Facebook ads and retargeting it and working with a pixel on our, on our Facebook, our website, we're doing those $50 gift cards with real plastic high value for the either the customers around, the potential customers around our existing customers. So we increase route density or to the tight demographic that we're trying to break into their market, giving that high value gift card to them. People use that sometimes for referral programs as well. The last one like we just talked about is giving that written card, that personalization, that personalized gift, spending an extra 10, $15 on each customer, but increasing your, your lifetime value of the customer, that's going to stay with you a lot longer and also the return on investment and really increasing how many of your estimates convert to paying customers. So I hope that helped a little bit. If you have that larger marketing budget, if you have more ways that you've done it or you have more questions about it in the comments below. Let me know how those have worked for you. Thanks so much.