Editorial: One Must Have Ingredient To Successful Lawn Care Business Marketing
By Daniel Pepper
""Better three hours too soon, than one minute too late."
— William Shakespeare
Effective lawn care business marketing has core ingredients that need to be there to work. There is no way around this. There is no way to skip this. There is no way to avoid this.
Since the beginning of time, one of those ingredients to effective marketing comes down to persuasion.
To cause an action to take place that would not have taken place in the absence of your marketing.
Your job as a lawn care business marketing mastermind is to impel your readers or listeners to think and act differently as a result of your words and actions. It has to motivate them to call or to place an order.
The bad news is not everyone does this. The good news is that it's a learnable skill.
There are 3 elements to persuasion in your lawn care business marketing.
1. Words
This is where everything you say or write like a chain, works together to create the same outcome. You must organize your marketing in such a way that all your words in an ad point in the same direction, each building upon the other to form a persuasive marketing piece.
For example, if you are marketing an aeration service, make sure everything stays along this train of thought. Don't clutter a marketing piece by talking about aeration, irrigation, retaining walls, garden beds etc. Stay focused as you don't have a lot of time to get your point across to people nowadays. The more centered your marketing, the more persuasive and effective.
2. Credibility
If your marketing isn't believable, you're hooped. The second ingredient that needs to be there for effective persuasion is that your readers or listeners believe what you say is true.
For example, don't say you've mowed one million lawns. Unless you've actually done it or can prove it without a shadow of a doubt, don't say or write something in your marketing that seems unbelievable and can't be backed up.
3. Connection
The third part of this trilogy is by far the most important. Persuasion of a person is driven home when your marketing connects with them. This is the emotional content of your ad. You must connect with a person at a fundamental level before you can motivate them to change and take a desired action -- calling your lawn business or ordering your services.
For example, a lot of effective lawn business marketers use a question in their ad headline. "Do you want a green lawn your neighbors will be jealous of?".
They do this to try to connect. Anyone who does want this will be persuaded to continue reading picturing in their minds having the best lawn on the block and if the marketing piece has all the right elements, will place a request for a quote or make an order.
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AN EXTRA PIECE OF MARKETING ADVICE...
How To Increase The Size Of Lawn Care Service Orders PART II
One time after posting a video online about coupons, within days I got an email from a disgruntled guy who said coupons equal cheap customers.
I laughed. Really. ROTFL.
I laughed because this is what 90% of your competition might be feeling. It may even be how you feel when I mention coupons and you may even be bothered that this is another tip regarding, you guessed it, coupons.
Well listen up.
In many lawn care businesses, some of the top elements that determine their customer value and a their profitability include "frequency of purchase" and "size of average order." That is where this seemingly insignificant but highly effective marketing weapon is designed to push up the average order size and frequency of purchase.
As I told you, you can do this with progressive discounting, as I've done, or with gifts-with-purchase (see last issue).
So let me ask you something...what have you done about getting coupons into your marketing mix? If you haven't done a thing, sooner or later your competitors will and you'll be spinning your wheels to catch up.
Until next time...
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