How to Cut Your Landscape Business Expenses by Cutting Bad Leads

There’s nothing worse than wasting time cultivating leads for your landscaping business, only to find they’re dead ends. It misdirects energy away from real leads and your current customers when a lead doesn’t pan out.

So, how can you tell a bad lead from a good lead?

At Arborgold, we design customizable business software for landscapers and other field-based businesses across North America. We work with companies of all shapes and sizes, providing support for marketing, sales, customer engagement, invoicing, and much more.

Here, we’ll talk a bit about lead generation and how to tell a potential lead from a potential waste of time.

Don’t Go After Every Potential Lead You Find

In business, there’s a misconception that every potential lead is a good lead to follow up on. Even if you’re simply including multiple addresses in an email blast, you are wasting time and energy following up on dead ends.

How can you tell which leads are actually leading you somewhere? Being purposeful.

As a business, there are many avenues you can use to find new leads. When a potential lead presents itself, check them out before reaching out. So many people are on social media these days, it’s easy to find a LinkedIn account online, especially if you primarily service commercial properties with your landscaping.

A quick online search can tell you whether you’ve been given real contact information, if the “lead” already has a landscaping service, and whether they’re even in your service area.

Be Specific in Your Wording

When you create ads and other marketing content to attract new customers, be sure to use clear and concise language. The modern consumer is educated, but they’re also impatient. People don’t want to run around searching for words they find in your flyer because they don’t understand what your services are offering.

You’ll find more genuine leads if your marketing content specifies what you do, how you do it, and who you serve.

Another way you can be more specific in your wording is by using search engine optimization methods like keyword and key phrase placement. Keywords are placed throughout your website, blog, landing pages, even social media content. These are the words or phrases consumers use when searching for businesses like yours. If you use keywords within your content, you’re more likely to have visitors to your site looking specifically for landscaping in your area.

Listing yourself with Google My Business is another step in this direction, ensuring your business listing doesn’t appear in the searches of consumers outside of your service area.

Arborgold has plenty of tools and templates to help you design, upload, and schedule automated blog, social media, and web content posts.

Target the Right Demographic 

This is especially true in social media marketing, where you can choose the demographic which sees your ads and content. If you’re sending out information to people outside of your target demographic you’re wasting your time.

For landscapers, you’re probably looking for businesses and homeowners somewhere between 30-60 years of age. You also want to target locals, as landscaping services aren’t normally a service that spans states or provinces.

When you target the right audience, you’re more likely to get leads from your target demographic which has a higher chance of ROI.

Arborgold business software can help you find your demographic by compiling data reports through your CRM. The more you use your Arborgold software, the more precise your analytics data is.

Incentivize the Follow Up

Cut out bad leads by incentivizing your follow-up with the leads you cultivate. Customer referrals are the bread and butter of landscaping companies because they lead to growth within your community.

Getting your current customers to refer you to other locals is great, but it doesn’t always lead to a sale. How do you guarantee you’ll close?

When you design a referral program, incentivize the follow-up, not the introduction. In other words, rather than rewarding customers for having a friend request a quote, reward customers who refer a friend who purchases a service.

Arborgold business software helps you track current customers, referrals, rewards, and even offers a collection of templates for emails and content specifically for landscapers.

Make Current Customers Return Customers

Not all leads are strangers to your business. In landscaping, there are many services that result in a one-time visit without recurring services. These are a great example of a good lead because you know they have needed landscaping in the past, and that means they’ll likely need it again at some point in the future.

Sometimes, all it takes to bring back a one-time customer is to follow up with them. Follow-up emails are a simple, unaggressive way to reconnect with previous customers who may be able to use your service again.

Consider using some form of exclusive offer to entice recurring services on lawn care, tree care, gardening, water feature installation, pool maintenance and other landscaping services offered by your business.

Arborgold can help you create, schedule, and send your follow-up emails. In fact, you can automate the entire procedure so you aren’t spending hours pouring over old schedules and invoices to see who you have serviced in the past that never called again. By scheduling a follow-up for every customer without recurring services, you guarantee they are thinking about your brand the next time they go looking for lawn care or landscaping.

Contact Arborgold Today

Arborgold landscaping business software understands that no two businesses are different. It’s important to us to fill the gaps that general business software doesn’t fill. Field businesses deal with multiple unique services and products which don’t apply to a lot of other industries. Having a platform you can access from any mobile device at the touch of a screen, which caters to your business model can make all the difference.

Interested in learning more about Arborgold and our field-based business software? We invite you to take a tour today!

Arborgold in 60 Seconds

Know the type of customer you’re going after.

As we’ve mentioned before, it may be tempting to take every job that comes your way. But, having the discipline to say no to leads who aren’t your ideal customer will save you time and energy in the long run, and will cut your landscape business expenses at the same time.

Any good landscape business management software will provide the ability to identify which of your leads are good and which ones aren’t. In fact, this is where the real savings come into play because you can dispatch your employees based on who is more likely to be a better customer.