Marketing for a Growing Landscaping Company (When You’re Still Wearing All the Hats)

I'm not a landscaper but I do have a higher ticket average so I understand a little bit about what it takes to get those higher value jobs. When you are looking at outsourcing there's a couple things to consider:

• I hear a lot of contractors try to hand off marketing to an agency and them wasting a lot of money doing it. The marketing companies will charge a premium for results that COULD occur months down the road so it becomes hard to evaluate and an expensive lesson to learn.
• Marketing is one of those things you should try to learn which means you'll need to free up some time which will probably have to come from one of the other hats you are wearing. Not knowing anything about your business, maybe look at promoting someone from your existing crew to help you manage crews and free you up.
• I've always liked doing things that help build the infrastructure of your website to help SEO rather than paying someone to manage it. A couple really good podcasts on this:
  

  Contractor evolution:   https://open.spotify.com/episode/5ef56HPWgbsgw99L39oFDo?si=_vIO9-xdRXiNO0B8MOnQ8A

  Jobber Podcast:  

  https://open.spotify.com/episode/7MODGlDZ9Pp9L3Yyo41m1K?si=HeRwW0HhSpGMsn-7pzoQnQ

You could probably pay someone to do these things for your website. 

• You also need to evaluate your intake methods if you are going to dumb a bunch of money in to this project. You don't want to waste the good leads so you need to have some sales funnels set up so when the leads come in you are addressing them quickly. 

Not sure if any of that helped or made it more confusing but just my opinion!!

Full disclosure, my username gives away that I’m in the direct-mail world, but I’d be careful about jumping straight into an agency before you know exactly what kind of jobs you want more of.

For higher-ticket landscaping work, I’d start by narrowing down the neighborhoods and property types that are most likely to need those projects, then test one or two channels against that audience and track actual estimates and closed jobs.

Whether you use an agency, freelancer, or do it in-house, I’d want them to show you how they’re going to target the right homeowners and measure results—not just generate clicks or “leads.”

The split matters more than the hire, in my experience. Some of it I'd never hand over, and some of it I'd outsource tomorrow.

Keep in-house: reviews and your Google profile. It's under an hour a week once it's a habit — ask on the day the job wraps, reply to what comes in, add real photos now and then. It's also the asset that compounds. A freelancer will do it adequately; nobody will chase it like the person whose name is on the trucks, and it's the first thing a homeowner checks before calling about a big project anyway.

Outsource first: the website pages for the high-value work you actually want more of. Design-build, patios, retaining walls — those deserve their own pages with your real project photos and rough price ranges, and that's a defined build with an end date, which is exactly the kind of thing an outsider can deliver well. It also happens to be your experience gap, by your own description. Ongoing "SEO management" with no clear deliverable is where shops your size usually burn money.

One question sorts most providers out: how will I know this brought me a booked job? If the reporting is impressions, traffic and rankings, keep looking. The answer you want is tied to calls, estimate requests and the specific towns they came from.

On timing: the spend starts making sense when your marketing hours are costing you crew hours — when you're delaying maintenance work that already sells itself because you're behind a laptop. That's the point where buying back your time isn't a luxury anymore. And the Canada part doesn't really change the math; the Google profile and review side behaves the same.

I work on the marketing side for home service companies (at LocalCMO), and the owners who get burned are almost always the ones who outsourced the compounding stuff and kept the project work. You're set up to do it the right way round.