Marketing in the green industry can look a little different — and can vary from company to company depending on such factors as size, location and services offered. However, a few industry marketing experts agree there are four initiatives that companies of all shapes and sizes can focus on to improve their marketing strategies.
Nevertheless, it’s important to keep in mind there is no silver bullet when it comes to marketing. What works for one company might not translate into sales for another. Dan Klemencic, marketing manager with David J. Frank Landscape Contracting, relies on the old adage “slow and steady wins the race.”
“My analogy has always been that you don’t try to hit a homerun all the time,” he says. “Marketing needs to always be continual and consistent. We try to string together singles by doing different things until those things add up and bring in the runs for you instead of always trying to swing for the fences. If you’re always trying for the home run, you’re going to swing and miss.”
So, with that in mind, here are four areas of focus when revamping a marketing strategy to run the bases.
1. Build a memorable brand
The cornerstone of any marketing strategy is branding since it’s your company — and therefore your brand — that’s being marketed to the masses.
For Kelly Smith, marketing director with Vande Hey Company, the company’s brand is now cemented in its own legacy — as they have been in business for three-fourths of a century.
“We’re very organic-based with our marketing strategy and part of that comes from the benefit of being in business for almost 75 years,” she says. “We put a lot of stock on education. Our primary goal is to lead with education.”
By labeling themselves as the experts, Smith says Vande Hey warrants more trust from its clientele — translating into more sales.
“Any time that you can build trust with your customer base is huge… we live in a world right now that is so fast and so visual that I think you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of building trust and telling your story,” she says. “There are differentiating factors that make you important and your customers should know what those are. Whether those are through testimonials or something else — that’s key.”
But you don’t have to have a longstanding legacy to have a great, well-known brand.
Joe Stark, director of marketing with Ground Works Land Design, says they’ve been focused on slow-drip branding since the company was founded in 2009. Slow-drip branding is defined as a strategy of slowly rolling out content over a prolonged period of time.
“Our marketing plan, as a whole, is ever-changing,” Stark says. “I approach the Ground Works marketing plan really as a slow-drip branding technique. We are so supported from a hyper-local standpoint…we aren’t allocating all our dollars just to get the next lead. We have a really nice book of business. We have a really nice, divided portfolio, and what we want to do is just be everywhere. We want to be a household name on a local basis.”
Stark adds that one component of their slow-drip strategy is not having many direct, or aggressive, calls to action in their marketing messaging.
“That can be difficult for some marketing people to wrap their heads around because it can be difficult to track ROI,” he says. “But given our year-over-year growth and given our share of the marketplace, we’ve been blessed to be able to market this way and be very creative.”
Stark says Ground Work’s marketing is more about creating brand awareness and recognition than anything else.
Something that can also help create buzz in your market and help boost your brand is great photography — Klemencic says it is essential.
“We are a premium brand,” he notes. “The goal has always been to protect and promote the brand. Being a premium brand, we focus on great photography. Our industry, and our product, is visual. Beauty needs to be seen. It’s hard to describe beauty, so we always want top-notch photos.”
Not only are those high-quality photos quite helpful when it comes to marketing materials — but David J. Frank is also using them as mobile billboards.
“We now wrap our trailers with some of that great photography of our projects,” Klemencic adds.
2. Balance between digital and traditional marketing methods
Once that branding is in place, the next step brings about the debate on digital versus traditional (often print) marketing. The consensus amongst green industry marketers shows there is a time and a place for both. Though, the debate doesn’t end with which medium to favor — but also which areas should be handled in-house and what can be farmed out to outside agencies.
Becca Presley, VP of marketing and communications for Senske Services, says it’s better to leave the ever-changing digital marketing to the experts, and keep creative, brand-driven content internal.
“Overall, our strategy is handled in-house with our team internally,” she says. “But we do use an agency for digital activity. My philosophy has always been for things like pay-per-clicks, social media paid ads, OTT (over-the-top media service) and that sort of stuff — it’s better to have a team of experts who can stay current on the most relevant algorithm and changes versus trying to keep an employee up-to-date internally.”
Presley says the relationship between digital and traditional is symbiotic.
“Historically, what everyone will see and go to is digital,” she says. “Digital is the most cost effective and you get the greatest return. However, it is a last point attribution. It’s what we’re driving the customers to through our traditional media — so our TV, print, mailers and newspaper marketing — all of those materials are driving the customer to our digital resources.”
Tricia Williams, VP of sales and marketing with New Castle Lawn & Landscape, says the most success she’s seen is when they’re done in unison.
“Have your branding and messaging fine-tuned and consistent and then use that across all the platforms,” she says. “That’s how you maximize your ROI. When you’re doing both, that’s when you will best saturate your local market and get the best brand recognition.”
Presley says her preference sways toward digital marketing.
“One of the reasons I really like digital is it’s more agile,” she says. “You’re able to quickly pivot and make changes, where with traditional media, you have to build it out so far in advance. There really isn’t time to make changes. Because our industry is so weather focused — there could be a drought, or a storm, or a bug infestation — you need to quickly pivot, and you can’t do that when you have a mail plan that’s built out six months in advance.”
Stark says another benefit of digital marketing is its trackability and the data it collects.
“A majority of our efforts and where we are is digital,” he says. “It allows us to track and be a little more creative with some of our offerings. We can do embedded codes or customized HTMLs that we can put in certain ads. It typically leads to an easier customer journey.
“Traditional has its strengths but traditional is more of a branding play and has difficult trackability,” Stark adds. “With digital you can do anything and it’s really the ‘Wild, Wild, West’ in terms of who you can target and where you can gain information from.”
While digital is a great way to reach the masses, Williams notes that when marketing, you have to keep the demographics of your customer base (and their preferences) in mind.
“You do absolutely have to be spending something on digital advertising, though I don’t think that you can’t forget about traditional advertising either,” she says. “Generationally, you have different demographics that aren’t glued to their phones like other generations.”
Stark shares a similar mindset and says determining demographics is critical.
“Although the demographic is getting a little bit younger…a lot of who we work with our still the Boomers and the retired,” he says.
Klemencic says that’s why David J. Frank keeps an emphasis on print marketing.
“Because we’re going after an affluent market, we pay a little more attention to print than digital,” he says. “The publications we’re in are the ones appealing to our affluent customers.”
Klemencic says the company targets ideal neighborhoods to work in and that helps decide where to spend their advertising dollars.
“In our area, there are a lot of glossy, neighborhood publications for some of the major subdivisions,” he says. “These are areas we have customers in, and we want to remain in those areas, so we want to be visible there and advertise in those as well.”
Klemencic adds with marketing, it’s important to keep up relationships with local media outlets as well.
“Public relations is a big part of our job, too,” he says. “We try to maintain relationships with the local media and the national landscaping press. It helps us promote our brand. I have a couple connections in the TV world, so when they’ll looking to do a story on something landscape related… they will come to us.”
Smith says that at Vande Hey, they market each service they provide differently — as some tend to benefit more from digital advertising and others from more traditional methods.
“We do some digital work and there’s aspects for us that it works well for,” she says. “We do them for our tree service, because it’s the type of service where you’re seeing something in your yard and you’re looking it up and you click on our ad. I think there are services that it works for and others that perform much better if we are using a more traditional approach.”
For something like a pool installation or a design/build patio project, Smith says traditional marketing is more effective. She adds that home shows, and similar networking opportunities, are great places to market those services.
3. Capitalize on social media
Coinciding with digital marketing is social media, which has continued to surge in popularity.
Klemencic says David J. Frank has prioritized social media and made it a mainstay in their marketing strategy.
“We’ve probably quadrupled our social media efforts,” he says compared to five years ago. “We’re always putting stuff out there to get people’s attention.
“We try to follow trends,” he adds. “You have to stay on top of things — those things switch so quickly.”
Klemencic says it’s important to keep your ego in check on social and recommends using the platforms as educational outreach tools for potential customers.
“We’re not just saying, ‘Look how good we are’ but we want to promote ourselves as the landscape experts,” he says. “So, we’ll put tips out there on how to maintain your landscapes, what plants to consider, how to water those plants and more to keep people engaged and keep us top of mind.”
Stark says that no matter how great your marketing is, there’s no way to “win” at social media — so it’s more about exposure than anything else.
“Social media is probably our number one component,” he says. “It’s huge. We just try to be everywhere. We’re not trying to master any one medium or claim to be a subject matter expert in the new social media game — but we just want to be present on all of those.
“We’re on TikTok and we’re paying attention to some of those other social media tools and platforms that are out there — just to make sure we stay current,” Stark adds. “We want to be where our future customers are going to be.”
Presley says Senske Services is not on TikTok and has made a conscious choice to stay off the app until the time is right.
“What we aren’t doing, but everyone wants us to do, is TikTok,” she says. “There have been several players in the industry who have seen success with TikTok. But what I don’t want to do is just do it halfway. To legitimately have a platform, it takes a lot of work to create the content and manage the content.
“It’s not that we don’t want to do it — we just haven’t had the bandwidth,” Presley adds. “We plan to eventually. It is in our roadmap.”
For Senske it’s going to take a dedicated staff member, responsible for regular posting, to make the transition to TikTok.
“You can’t just post twice a month and expect to automatically have this great return,” she says. “It takes a lot of work, a real strategy and a full-time gig to do something like TikTok right. We do have it in our plans to have a bigger social media presence and strategy with a person that will manage that, but currently we don’t. I don’t want to just dip my toe. I want to be able to go all in and have enough content that the page is relevant and active.”
Hiring someone to work solely on creating content has been a gamechanger for New Castle, Williams says.
“Back in 2020 when I came on, they had a social media presence, but the problem was the team was spread so thin, they didn’t have anyone to take ownership of it. There wasn’t a lot of consistency to it,” she recalls. “Fast-forward to now and it’s a huge focus. We were able to hire a full-time content producer to do videos for us, social media content, he gets jobsite photos and all that. It’s been a huge driver of our growth.”
Williams says the company has found some success across all channels, but lately one has been performing very well.
“We do static posts with high-quality photos but short-form videos, like Reels, have been huge,” she says. “We just had a Reel go viral with more than 2.6 million views. That was pretty fun!”
Stark adds the visual nature of the green industry truly lends itself well to social media. It’s also an inexpensive way to make an impact.
“Any type of digital real estate you can have for free — you’d be foolish not to utilize,” he says.
4. Create a scene in your community
Having an online presence that brings attention (and sales) to your company is great, but so is having a more meaningful impact on the community your business is a part of.
That’s why Williams says a good portion of New Castle’s marketing efforts are community based.
She adds this was never more relevant than during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
“We made the decision as a team that we were going to try and help the community as much as we could,” she says. “Instead of the traditional marketing of services, we began helping out at the local food banks. A lot of them didn’t have enough drivers to get the food out, so a couple of our people were driving the CDL trucks during that time. We had also done food drive parades where we drove around for like five hours and put food out on the curbs.
“Our marketing during that time looked very different,” Williams adds. “We couldn’t control the pandemic, but we could control our response.”
Vande Hey makes a similar commitment to the community through charitable efforts and other fun outings, Smith says.
“We’re heavily involved in the community as well, so that plays a part in our marketing strategy,” Smith says. “I am always eager to get our team members out in the community and out in front of people. Whether that’s sponsoring various golf outings throughout the year and being there as hole sponsors, or any community giveback we do, we’re involved with a lot of local organizations.
“Being here in the community for a long time, we feel it’s very important to give back and be an asset to our community and the people who live here,” she adds.
Williams adds it’s something any company can do to better themselves and their marketing strategy.
“Get as involved as you can within your community,” she says. “It takes very little money to do this. It’s a huge win/win because you’re allowing people to get to know you outside of the services you provide. You’re not focused on the sale. Team morale is going to benefit from these opportunities and the community is going to benefit. It’s one of the easiest ways to market your business.”
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