Tips for New Lawn Care Professionals

You’ve started your business and have a few solid customers, but haven’t received any new ones for a while… now what? We have partnered with new businesses like yours for three years now and would like to share a few things we have learned from our business owners. Here are four tips that allow you to grow your business and continuously add new repeating customers.

Offer discounts or free mows for referrals.

Even though we have more tools at our fingertips than ever before thanks to the power of technology, word-of-mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool for businesses in this industry. In order to ensure that more of your current customers are telling their friends and family about your services, offer them an incentive.

Create a referral program that gives your customers a discount or a free service for sending one of their friends your way or for sharing their before and afters on their social media. For even more incentive, you can offer both the current and new customer a discount for the referral.

Marketing that has no upfront cost is typically a huge win. Yes, you won’t be making as much on those initial jobs, but, if that connects you to a new repeating customer, you’ll end up making more than if you had charged full price for that one job.

Post your before and afters on social media.

If you’re looking to branch out but don’t have much of a marketing budget, social media can be a helpful tool. Almost everyone has Facebook and/or Instagram, so take advantage of that!

Once you create social media pages for your business, post before and after photos of your latest jobs. This is a quick and easy way to create valuable content. Being able to see the work you do gives potential customers an idea of how you will complete their projects.

To expand your social media content outside of before and after photos, try sharing your company’s founding story, crew appreciation posts, holiday posts, and/or giveaways!

Keep in mind while sharing your business on social media that consistency is key. Even if you aren’t getting as many likes as you think you should, keep posting!

Here’s a great example of posting before and afters from Fargo Lawn and Snow Pro (@fargolawnandsnowpro on Instagram)!

Network with other lawn care professionals on social media.

Since you’re already using social media, be sure to follow and engage with other lawn care businesses in your area. Like their posts, comment helpful things, and create connections.

You may be wondering, “why should I support my competition?”

There are a few great reasons to build a relationship with other businesses and people in your industry:

1. Learn from one another. See what’s helping them be successful and implement some of the same tactics.
2. Partner with another company for giveaways and cross-promotion. This works best with a company that offers different services than you. Say you primarily offer mowing services and another company does great landscaping work. Come together and offer a giveaway for a new garden bed and a month of free mowing. Have people enter by following both pages and sharing your posts. That is an easy win-win!
3. Build strong relationships that could lead to referrals. If you have a solid connection with a company that offers different services, they can refer customers to you that are looking for services they don’t over (and vice versa). Additionally, if you have a good relationship with a company that offers the same services, they can send people your way when they have too much on their plate.

Treat all of your customers like new customers.

A lot of companies are so focused on getting new customers that they leave their current customers with subpar service. In order to build a successful business, it’s important to keep the customers you already have.

This may go without saying, but always make sure you (and your crew) are constantly doing their best work and treating customers well. We all have off days, of course. Consistently offering amazing service and amazing results ensures that your new and repeating customers are happy.

Think of it like this: which of these reviews would you make you want to use a service?

• “Just hired them and my yard looks great!”
• “I’ve been using this company for 5 years and they always provide the best lawn care!”

Choosing a company that is reliable and consistent is important to most home and business owners. It should be important for you, too, because it means you have steady, long-term income coming in!

Now that you’ve created a strategy for starting and maintaining customers relationships, be sure to keep those customers organized with Lawn Buddy! Along with easily managing your customers and properties, you can keep track of your crew, optimize your routes, create bids, automatically invoice your customers, and receive credit card payments.

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