What are you doing right now to make the phone ring for your business?
what is your go to advertisements or sales tactics to get lead generation? We have been in business for over 17 years now servicing the Tampa bay area and this year has hit us the hardest. I am an isa certified arborist and I do engage in networking and community events but despite our best efforts we are still experiencing a lack of leads. I don't want to just throw money at the wall but we are running out of options. what are some things that are working for you?
Marketing for a Growing Landscaping Company (When You’re Still Wearing All the Hats)
For those running small-to-mid size landscaping companies (especially maintenance-heavy businesses), how are you handling marketing as you grow? I’ve been managing ours in-house due to my convenient design background, but between operations and crew management it’s becoming unsustainable—especially when it comes to SEO and lead generation for higher-value projects (which I have less experience with) Are you outsourcing to a freelancer/agency, or hiring in-house? And at what point did that investment start to make sense for you? Do you have any recommendations for Canadian companies?When Should You Fire Your SEO Agency?
We all want our websites to rank better, and to show up on maps. Once you have the budget, it CAN be a good idea to get a marketing agency to handle SEO for you. I made this move 7 months ago and just fired mine and I'll tell you why. First and foremost, I don't claim to be an SEO wizard. The Jobber podcast has had some amazing episodes on this over the last year, people giving hints on how to improve your rankings etc. I followed all their advice and was experiencing a steady level of traffic but I was ready to super charge my efforts. I hired a company that had a great reputation in another coaching group, and they seemed pretty legit. The promise - $1500/ month for 3 service pages, 5 back links, and meetings every month to go over progress. I thought it'd especially be important because we had just rebranded and I wanted to make sure our traffic stayed up. This was the result: From what I can tell, you have to give companies as least a few months to do their magic. Also, google took away the Call button which attributed to less phone calls. But although it made me feel secure to have someone "handling" our SEO, the results spoke for themselves. Much less traffic. From what I can tell, our high review traffic was doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Claude would analyze their work and the impact of the back links didn't seem to be there and we can make our own service pages with actual pictures vs the stock ones they were using. So we made the decision to move on and do the work ourselves with Claude. What have your experiences been with SEO companies? Have you had success with any? What were they doing?What are the extra things you do to sell a job that you don't charge for?
I had a client recently share with me that between me and another remodeler, I was the one willing to do the most without asking for anything in return before he booked the job, so that's why he went with me. I went and took measurements, got him a rendering of his new kitchen and a layout from the cabinet shop, met with him 2 other times, met them at the cabinet store. Really spent a lot of time developing report before I got the sale. I don't know how sustainable that is however my motto is just be as helpful as possible and the rest will come. What are the "extra's" you guys do to get that sale or create value with your customers?Are You Selling Your Service… or Selling the Experience?
Customers have more choices than ever. Sometimes the difference isn’t just the service you provide, but how you make people feel from the first interaction to the final follow-up. What are some ways your business creates an experience that keeps customers coming back?Should you pause ads when you’re short-staffed?
I don’t think the answer is always to shut everything off. But running ads like normal when your team is already stretched can create a mess fast. More leads don’t help much if response times slow down, quality slips, routes get overloaded, or the owner has to jump back into the field to save the schedule. When we’re tight on capacity, I’d rather adjust the ads than pretend nothing changed. That could mean lowering the budget, keeping branded search on, focusing only on dense route areas, pushing new jobs further out, or temporarily stopping low-margin one-time work. Marketing should match capacity. If the ads are bringing in work the team can’t serve well, the campaign might look good on paper while the customer experience gets worse. But the other side is maybe this is the perfect time to hire and be over capacity instead of scrambling. When you’re short-staffed, do you pause ads, reduce spend, or keep leads flowing?Are reviews more useful than a marketing agency?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. A good marketing agency can absolutely help a business. They can help with creative, targeting, campaigns, landing pages, reporting, and getting ads in front of the right people. But before you pay someone to write your message, it’s probably worth asking: Have you actually studied what your customers already said about you? Because your reviews may be one of the most useful marketing assets in your business. A lot of owners look at reviews as proof. 5 stars. Good testimonial. Nice thing to put on the website. That’s useful, but it’s only the surface. The better part is the language. Customers will tell you exactly why they hired you, what they were afraid of, what they noticed, what made them trust you, what almost stopped them from buying, and what made them stay. For us, reading through our reviews changed how I thought about our marketing. Customers kept repeating things like: “worth every penny” “one less thing to worry about” “like clockwork” “they text before they come” “they send a picture of the closed gate” “they take the waste with them” “I was embarrassed” “my last company left the gate open” “there aren’t enough hours in the day” That language is better than anything I could have guessed from sitting at my desk. It showed me the real buying triggers. Some people hired us because the yard got away from them over winter or they're busy families who didn’t have time. Others had health issues, pregnancy, injuries, or physical limitations. A small handful switched from cheaper competitors because they were tired of missed visits, poor communication, or gates being left open. Those details matter. If I only market the task, I sound like every other company. “We scoop dog poop.” That’s true, but it doesn’t explain why someone is willing to pay a premium. The reviews showed us what people actually valued: Communication. Reliability. Thoroughness. Gate safety. Waste hauled away. Professional scheduling. No judgment when the yard is bad. A clean yard without having to think about it. That becomes ad copy, website copy, quote follow-up language, sales training, social proof and also helps with pricing objections. When customers repeatedly say “worth every penny,” “more than fair,” or “I’d pay twice as much,” that tells me price is not the full story for the right buyer. It tells me I need to explain the value better, not panic and discount the service every time someone asks about price. A marketing agency can miss that if they don’t understand the business deeply enough. They may write clean copy, but clean copy doesn’t always match the customer’s internal conversation. Your reviews give you that conversation. They tell you what people were already thinking before they bought or what made them feel safe enough to hire you. They show you which parts of the experience matter more than you realized. For us, gate photos became a bigger marketing point because customers kept mentioning them. Hauling waste away became a bigger marketing point because customers kept comparing that to companies that leave it in their trash can. Communication became one of our strongest selling points because people brought it up over and over again. That’s the kind of information every business owner should be paying attention to. Before you rewrite your ads, rebuild your website or hire someone to "fix your marketing", read your reviews. Print them out. Tag the repeated phrases. Look for patterns. Group them by pain point, objection, trust factor, and reason they stayed. Then use the customer’s language in your marketing. Your best customers are often telling you exactly how to sell to more people like them. Have you ever gone through your reviews and pulled out the exact phrases customers keep repeating?
