The greater the bond you build with your clients, the better customer retention rates you will have and the more referrals you will find.

Following the points you made and these simple steps can really help a lawn care business grow.

http://blog.ourchurch.com/2009/05/07/church-marketing-case-study/

This form of marketing in combination with more traditional fliers etc. only solidifies the business in the local market.

Then there are multiple listings…the competition is on page two. I love video.

Paul Harvey(RIP) once said: “Selling is simple if preceded by trust.”

He still did the traditional marketing with fliers, and putting his business info on T-Shirts, Hats, and his work truck. But in the early stages, the web site brought those first few key clients while we were still waiting to get fliers printed.

He actually gets about half his business right now from his web site. People do look online for lawn care, odd jobs, and other related services. I know I do.

We implemented all of the strategies listed above for his business, and have seen an increase in web traffic and new clients as a result. Great post! I can tell you first hand that these techniques do work!

These are hardworking guys who started from scratch with a lawn mower and a weed eater and took on new business until they had to hire another person and so on.

They have no college education, poor grammar, MySpace-level Web skills at best, and even with an annual sales of $3-400k, they don’t spend money on anything except door hangers, flyers, and mailouts.

One of the hardest marketing sales is to a person who doesn’t think others use the Web very much because they themselves don’t. Example: I trade services with a landscaping company. Trading is all their willing to do. And since I charge way more per hour than they do, they only get a couple hours a month of work in trade.

As far as you using search to find a lawn service, that’s probably not all that relevant since all of us (online marketers) would use Google to find a lost dog if we could. For everyone else, it’s a chicken & egg thing. People will start using the SE’s to find services like this when more services get web sites, and the services will get websites when more people start using SE’s to find their services.

Again, I agree, these companies should have sites to take advantage of the void that exists in their industry now and to prepare themselves for the future when everyone uses search to find everything. And your tips are spot on with regard to developing an online presence with this type of business.

According to Google’s keyword research tool there is no shortage of folks looking for “lawn service” online in geographical locations. Lawn service austin, lawn service dallas, lawn service atlanta – these all show over 500 queries a month. That’s a lot of potential business for services in big cities. Small towns obviously won’t have that search volume, but it will still bring in some qualified leads. And I’d be willing to bet the number of folks using the net to find ALL services will increase over the next few years.

Additionally, if you’re a local company just outside Atlanta or a city with much larger online inquiry volume, you could expand your business to that larger city with the help of a website and some very minor promotion.

Of course, the point of this post was to show some more specifics – the mild competition and lower online marketing budget of lawn service companies made them a good example.

First, I used to work in the Lawn & Garden industry (on the distribution side) so I know the value of cross promotion with related businesses, community pride, and leveraging local affiliations. Those are integral parts of any geographically confined business.

Second, I have several friends that run lawn & landscape companies and none of them have websites. This is an industry on the tail end of the transition to online business as a result of the type of business they do. Don’t get me wrong, I think every business should have a website, but customers are much less likely to use the internet to find this type of business; they see trucks in their neighborhood or flyers on their door knob or the beautiful lawn next door and they use that information to make their decision.
The general lack of computer/internet skills on the part of the business owners in combination with the customer’s propensity for choosing a lawn company without resorting to the internet (yet), would make for an interesting case study for a new site in this market. A search for “lawn care Annapolis” showed a Google map where 9 out of the 10 listings were either chain lawn care companies or yellow pages listings for companies that don’t have a site.

So I just typed myself into an idea, thanks Rae!