How to Get More Mowing Clients with Less than $1000 Budget

Hi, it's Mike over at Landscape Business Course, and I just wanted to outline really briefly how to get more mowing customers when you have under $1,000 to spend. So obviously to get more mowing clients, if you have a whole bunch of money, you can go out and get a bunch of direct mail, you do a whole bunch of postcards of thousands, or you can make flyers for your newspaper or put a radio ad out, or do a bunch of Facebook or Google AdWords or YouTube ads. And so there's a who lot of ways you can do it. But if you don't have a lot of money, so many people ask me, I have 500, $600, what can I do to get more mowing customers? So this is the basic equation. If you have lots of money, you can go out and buy those customers using other marketing methods and pay 100, $200 per mowing customer getting that customer value. Because you're going to spend a couple thousand dollars with you on over the course of a year. Now, if you don't have that money, you have one other thing, that's time. So if you don't have money and you don't have the money to spend on the customers, you're going to have to spend time, sweat equity. You're going to put that in. So how do we do this? So my suggestion is if you're trying to get mowing customers and you don't have much money, you have under $1,000 to spend on marketing. This is how I would do it. So the first option is going to take the most, the majority, the dollars is going to be spent in the first step. And the second part doesn't cost very much, but it takes a lot more time. And so what I would suggest doing is actually doing the step two twice. One before and after step one. But let me go through this real quick. So step one is to do an every door direct marketing piece. And that is you could do, you could do door hangers for this. It's actually cheaper doing door hangers. Or you can do every door direct mail to like maybe two neighborhoods. So we're talking about spending about four to five hundred dollars here. And what you're going to do is create the marketing piece. You can get these printed out, whether it be postcards, eight and a half by 11, whatever it is, every door direct marking is going to cost you about 17, 18 cents per address to get those delivered in their mailbox. Or you can print off door hangers and get those and you can deliver those. So Doing that is going to be cheaper if you do those, the delivery yourself with the door hangers. But it just comes down to your area. And if you're allowed to do door hangers at all. In my area, a lot of HOAs and a lot of CC and RS don't allow us to put door hangers out. So every door direct mail and sending out those via every door direct mail on USPS, if you want to check it out, you just USPS.com and search every door direct mail. And you can search for a neighborhood and we'll do a whole other video on every door direct mail, but you can search for specific mail routes and neighborhoods that you want to target. So what we're going to plan to do here is make that marketing piece a postcard, a mailer, whatever it is, or do door hangers send it out either every door direct mail or do the door hangers to maybe a thousand people, like a max of a thousand people. And you're going to spend probably $400 to $500 doing that, printing them off and then delivering them either by yourself or every door direct mail through usps. That's step one. Step two is the follow up process. And what a lot of companies will not do is so you send out that mailer, right? The next thing you should be doing is two to three days later you should be knocking on every single one of those doors, all thousand of those addresses. So what you need to do is look at every door direct mail if you're sending it out to a certain mail route and go through every single one of those addresses. If you do door hangers, wait two or three days and follow up knock on their door. Make sure you first, make sure that you first identify and establish that they did receive that mailer or they did receive that door hanger and they did see it because then they're gonna, it's gonna trigger probably if you have something like a shirt or some sort of logo on you, they're gonna recognize you from the day or two before. You know, one or two out of those thousand might, you know, grind you for trying to get mad at you for putting a door hanger or sending them mail that they didn't want. And, and that's fine. Like you're just gonna have to live with that. And that's part of having the guts to go do this follow up. Step two, that is really where the money's at, is that follow up. So you know, you sent your mailers and you did door hangers, but now Every single one of those addresses, you go knock on their door, say, hey, I just sent you a mail the other day. We're looking for mowing clients in your neighborhood. We already have your neighbors down the street here. If you have those clients, you can tell them that you have them down the street. If not, you say you're trying to break into their area and you're trying to serve their neighborhood and, and develop that relationship. That follow up is where you'll make the money. On that initial mailer, you're lucky to get like 1 to 2% response rate. If you follow up, I truly believe that goes to 4 to 5% response rate, not converted clients. But you literally triple, if not more, your response rate when you follow up with them. And what I would do if I was you, and you really didn't have a lot of money and you wanted to capitalize as much as you possibly could on, on that one marketing piece, that $1,000 that you might have, if not less, this is what I would do. Obviously, when you're going door to door, you're going to have a business card maybe, or a little brochure for 100 bucks, make a whole bunch of those. Now what you do is instead of just doing mailer, door hanger, and then follow up, why not do this, Go door to door on your target market, Those addresses that you want to hit the neighborhoods that are close to your shop, do all of those. Or if you're just trying to get more mowing clients, and even if you have a business existing already, focus on that one area. Okay, get their addresses, go door to door in every single one. Then start with step one, send the mailer. That's your second touch now with this customer, because they've seen you door to door, that you might have given your business card to them or a little brochure, then they saw you in the mail or on their door hanger, whichever way out, you go there. And then follow up a third time by coming to the door again, you say, well, you're coming to the door twice. Well, the first time you introduced yourself, gave a business card, the second time you gave a brochure or you put a door hanger on their door. The third time, all you're doing is say, hey, just making sure you got that, and see what they say. This multiple touch is much more time involved. You don't have much money, though, so you're going to have to make up for it. Giving your time, sweat equity, whether it be delivering those door hangers or whether it be just knocking on doors. There's a certain amount of follow up that you're going to take because you don't have the money to just send them a nine piece marketing mailers over the course of two months. Like you don't have that money. So what you gotta do is capitalize on that one mailer or that one door hanger and do before and after follow ups in person and that's the best return investment you're gonna get. You know, I believe that sending out a mailer you're gonna get like 1 to 2% response rate. I think if you follow up with that person, you're gonna get 4 to 5%. I think if you do a door to door like in person before and after that marketing, I truly believe you're going to get 6 to 7% response rate because people have seen you multiple times. That's the power of branding. And that's why massive companies, you'll see them on TV, then you'll see them on YouTube, then you'll see them on Facebook, then you'll see them on Google AdWords and they're trying to touch all the different places that you would go. You don't have the luxury to spend all those money on all those different places. But what you can do is take that one marketing piece, that mailer or that door hanger and capitalize on it by letting them see you before and after or at least just following up after. So that's what I would do if I had only $1,000, if I was either A just getting started or B, maybe you don't have a lot of cash, you're still trying to grow the business, you put a lot into equipment and hiring people and you don't have a whole lot of money to market, but you need more mowing clients. That's what I would do. If you already have a marketing base, the best way to do is do that sequence just to the people next to your existing clients. But that's if you already have a business. If you don't have a business, you're just starting out and you only have less than $1,000. It's a great way to use that thousand dollars is have that marketing piece but do a pre and a post follow up so that you can really maximize your dollars when you're starting out and trying to get those mowing customers. So I hope that helped. If you have less than $1,000, that's one way to do it. There's a lot of other ways we'll get into those in the future. But I think that's one way that will be the best bang for your buck and the best ROI on the money that you spend for advertising.