Fearless Marketing

You need customers. And lately, they are scrutinizing their budgets and weeding out unnecessary expenses. Just like you, customers are getting back to the basics. What is your company doing to stay on their A-list?

“When the going gets tough, some businesses do their best marketing,” says Gene Fairbrother, a consultant and spokesman for the National Association for the Self-Employed. “It’s survival.”

Cutting out marketing in good times or bad is like putting up a closed-for-business sign, wiping your trucks clean of their neat logos and ditching the company uniform policy. Unthinkable.

“You can’t cut marketing – that’s an absolute death wish,” Fairbrother says. According to Ad-Ology research analyzing marketing and advertising trends in more than 370 industries, business owners recognize this fact. Sixty-seven percent of respondents will spend the same or more on marketing this year; more than half say now is an opportune time to gain market share.

But how? And, just as important, how much must a business spend on marketing efforts? There is no magic number, and no formula for the best way to go about the business of retaining and attracting customers. One company loves its direct marketing program; its competitor gets results from advertisements in a shelter magazine. Another business relies on customer referrals. The price tag on each initiative varies.

“You spend what you need to,” Fairbrother says. Two percent at a $5 million firm is a far bigger budget than the same percentage at a $150,000 startup. “You may need to increase your marketing budget and cut in other areas.” 

“Set benchmarks for your marketing program and determine what infrastructure will be necessary,” Fairbrother adds, noting that a goal to increase business by 20 percent, if realized, could pose a real problem without the manpower to support new customers. “In good times or bad, you must have the infrastructure to work along with your marketing plan.”

Another rule of thumb, Fairbrother reminds: Speed kills. “If you create business so fast that you do not have the ability to provide quality, you’ll lose those customers and end up right back where you were before.”

Marketing is an art that requires striking a balance between speculation – how much new business a campaign may bring in – and planning, in terms of preparing to service new customers and keep the old ones coming back for more.

Lawn & Landscape talked marketing with three landscape contractors who operate companies in different revenue categories. Here is how industry peers will budget for and execute promotions this year. 

The author is a freelance writer based in Bay Village, Ohio.

Range and Repetition
When Gro Lawn secured business from half of the people who responded to its direct mail campaign, Aaron Sheehan figured his cost per acquired customer was about $80. The next year, he ramped up his direct-mail efforts from 5,000 pieces to 65,000 promos, blanketing his Fort Worth community. His response rate was 75 percent lower and customer acquisition cost him twice as much. But the real problem was that Sheehan didn’t have the manpower to service all of these customers.

“I learned a lesson,” says Sheehan, who boosted staff and now employs three full-time workers and one to two seasonal workers. This year, he will mail 17,000 direct mail pieces, targeting neighborhoods where the Gro Lawn crew has collected property information. Customers who cancelled services or rejected estimates in the past will also get mail from Gro Lawn. “We always get a better response from those prospects from lists we create,” Sheehan says. And he’s still frustrated with the rising cost for customer acquisition: It has quadrupled in the last three years.

Sheehan has increased business by 15 to 20 percent every year since starting Gro Lawn in 2000. Then, he offered a full array of maintenance services, and his company was essentially a side-gig while he finished school. During that time, he decided to change his area of study to horticulture and grow the business. Now his customer list is 540 strong.

Three years ago, Sheehan dropped maintenance to focus on lawn care, expanding his client base by networking with landscapers who referred clients to Sheehan for the service. These valuable referrals have produced big account wins for Sheehan.

“I gave estimates the other day and the smallest property was 33,000 square feet,” Sheehan says of a typical afternoon. The accounts keep getting bigger. “I think that is because I built a network of relationships with people in mowing and landscaping, and they do some higher-end homes and recommend our service to their clients.”

Rather than relying on customer referrals, which Sheehan says are easier to acquire from new clients than long-timers, he prefers to see referrals from other contractors. That takes time.

“Networking is a slow process because you have to build landscapers’ confidence in you, but we have found that after a couple of years, some of them come to us and say, ‘I was treating these lawns and I’m tired of dealing with it,’” Sheehan relates. “We take over that job for them.”

Sheehan cultivates relationships with landscape maintenance companies by crafting special e-newsletters for this audience. “We send them notifications telling them what pests or conditions to look out for,” Sheehan says. This is Gro Lawn’s way of staying in front of its contractor “customers,” which feed Sheehan’s business.

Additionally, Gro Lawn diligently collects every customer’s e-mail address and updates this database regularly. “That requires constant management,” Sheehan remarks. These e-mails are especially helpful for marketing add-on services, such as fire ant control, aeration, tree and shrub care, and grub control, which Gro Lawn began offering last year. By adding grub control as an elective to its total lawn care package, Gro Lawn added $80,000 to its revenues, Sheehan says.

“Our customer value is double that of many competitors,” Sheehan says. “We upsell clients as much as we can without putting pressure on them.”

Monthly e-mails give customers watering recommendations and announce disease alerts. The customer education is free, and it keeps Gro Lawn top of mind with existing clients. Sheehan also makes sure every client receives a phone call from Gro Lawn the day before service. Technicians inquire about customers’ special concerns for the property, and they follow the service with another call.

Keeping in contact with clients has helped Gro Lawn maintain customers over the years. By early February, the company’s renewal rate was only off 5 to 10 percent compared to last year.

Sheehan also makes sure that Gro Lawn is easy to find, and since more people use Google for phone numbers today, he wants his Web site to be on the top of the search engine’s results list. It’s usually in the top five. Essentially, Gro Lawn invested in SEO (search engine optimization) by hiring a company to design its Web site with searchability in mind. “The Internet has been a really good way to generate business,” Sheehan says. Gro Lawn acquires 25 to 60 customers annually that way.

This year, Sheehan will continue his direct mail campaign, targeting those with the highest probability of responding – canceled customers and those who have rejected Gro Lawn estimates in the past. He will stake 300 to 500 real estate-like signs at neighborhood entrances to advertise service. (He knows the city will remove some of them.) He will continue e-mail newsletters and networking with contractors – now there are 10 companies that Sheehan “partners” with to gain referrals.

“The economy is challenging us,” Sheehan says, “but our fingers are crossed for our marketing campaign in 2009.”

The Specialist
Homeowners at the Minneapolis home and garden show were stumped and intrigued by the Spear’s Landscape exhibit. The artificial turf looked real and the plant material looked fake. Showgoers asked if Jeffrey Spear’s homegrown company was a national firm.

Looks are everything – at least for ushering customers in the door. But solid reputations are built by backing up perceived value with quality and service. A job well done gets talked about. And word of mouth is exactly how Spear, president of Spear’s Landscape, garnered some of the company’s most innovative design/build projects.

Aside from customer referrals as the main marketing engine, Spear’s Landscape advertised lightly in local newspapers before. This year, he ramped up his overall marketing campaign, set aside 8 to 10 percent of his budget and jumped into the trade show circuit – his company will display its booth at eight shows. With a full-time designer on staff now, a robust Web site, a promising niche service in artificial turf and a full-throttle marketing plan, Spear is prepared to invest in earning business this year.

“We know in this market we are going to do anything and everything to stay busy and successful,” Spear says. “If that means we need to spend more money to get that work, then we’ll do it. The investment will pay off with more brand awareness and more exposure.”

Spear says presentation is the company’s No. 1 marketing tool. Back-to-the-basics qualities like honesty, timeliness and cleanliness separate Spear’s Landscape from competitors, he says.

“We are a high-end company and those qualities are important in this day and age,” notes Spear, adding that clients who have been burned approach landscapers with an appetite for class. “We have really tailored our company’s image as very professional.”

Because Spear focuses on high-end design/installation, selling one solid job from a marketing lead is a worthwhile return on investment. Spear invests in Internet pay-per-click advertising with Google and Yahoo, spending about $1,000 a month during the high season. He says the unbranded advertisement – content that provides tips and ideas – is most successful. “The little articles draw people to our Web site,” he says. Spear will continue advertising this way, educating the public for free, and paying for every click.

Additionally, he’ll focus on getting every job the company bids. “We are trying to cater to people and their needs, so if a job makes sense, we’ll be flexible,” he says, noting that “holding out” in this market could be problematic. “Cover your costs and move forward,” he says.

The initial investment in trade show presence can be significant; Spear spent in the neighborhood of $10,000 for his booth. But the Minneapolis home and garden show produced promising leads for the company’s artificial turf offering, which Spear expects will be the company’s sleeper service. He has not marketed it at all until this year.

For artificial turf, Spear is mainly targeting homeowners with small properties, people with swimming pools, golfers who want their own putting greens, families with play systems where underlying turf takes a beating. “Our product has a head fall rating of 10 to 12 feet,” Spear adds. He’ll be marketing this safety factor. “It’s good for children.

“Artificial turf has come a long way from your basic indoor/outdoor carpet, so to speak,” Spear continues. In fact, he has given crewmembers instructions to meet him at the house with the artificial turf. They drive right by it without stopping; they can’t tell the difference from a distance.

“It’s a specialized niche service and not every landscape company can install it,” Spear adds. He plans to launch a direct marketing campaign, and send out mass e-mails to his client list and area landscapers who might refer their clients to Spear for the service. Golf events will also provide opportunity to promote the product.

Spear figures the artificial turf will balloon into bigger projects. “If we can turn someone’s back yard into a personal amusement park or venue with a pool, putting green, maybe a basketball court…” he muses. “In this type of economy, it’s tough to go to the cabin on vacation. People are looking to spend their money at home.”

Spear is counting on it, and he is well aware that even the economy for spending at home is tight. But he’s optimistic – headstrong, even. Considering the total landscape industry in Minnesota, he figures his $1.4 million projected “market share” for 2009 is not a terribly large piece of pie. He can taste it already.

If anything, the marketing money Spear spends this year will earn him business once homeowners loosen their purse strings.

“We’re showing customers we’re here for the long haul,” he says of increased exposure through marketing. “We are a company that’s growing in hard times, and if we can get through this and move forward, we’ll only be stronger when the economy gets better.”

Partners for Life
Mariani Landscapes gave two run-of-the-mill marketing strategies a high-class spin in order to appeal to a sophisticated client base. Direct mail and customer referral bonuses have never been part of Mariani’s repertoire – until this year.

“Basically, we answered the phone for years and years, and we were successful,” says Frank Mariani, president of the Lake Bluff, Ill.-based firm. Mariani, in a sense, is the godfather of landscaping in his region. He’s a mentor to national companies that look toward his business as an example of setting high standards, changing with the times and establishing a rock solid reputation.

But a tough economy can break even the strong ones, Mariani knows. He has been through recessions and, in his 36 years, made mistakes.

“I the past, I took work just to take work, and I basically matched people’s price,” Mariani says – this was years back and before the Mariani name carried the same weight as one like Rolls Royce. The company had always been one people trusted and associated with quality. “I could have diminished the brand,” he says. “We won’t play that game now.”

Mariani has a different strategy. Back to those two marketing methods: He designed a neighbor program that rewards clients with a $250 bonus for referring a customer who signs a contract with Mariani. To be honest, he wasn’t convinced that a cash incentive would excite his clients. And, in the end, he suspects the success of this program – the company has added a couple dozen customers to its list – is because his loyal clients enjoyed serving as pseudo-scouts.

“I think people appreciated being recognized and becoming part of our team,” Mariani says. “It turned into a fun project for clients to recommend us and some of them donated the reward by buying flower pots for the school or a holiday display for their church or synagogue. A lot of goodwill happened then and is happening now because of that program.”

Referrals are critical in this business, Mariani says. “When you are working with la crème de la crème, chances are, it’s not going to be through Yellow Pages, it’s going to be at a cocktail party or a social event where people are talking about landscaping,” he relates. “In our case, someone may drive past a project where our trucks stand out and they see a great job. That is what we depend on.”

Meanwhile, the direct marketing campaign Mariani launched this year will focus on specific addresses identified by the Mariani salespeople as fitting prospects for the company, as “our type of business, rather than blanketing an entire city.” Focus is key, and so is the design of the piece. It must reflect the look and the feel of Mariani. Branding in this way, over time, secures and sustains business.

And holding on to valuable clients in times like this was never more important, Mariani points out. His company will continue efforts to communicate with clients regularly, meet with them face-to-face, entertain their feedback on projects and simply be visible. “The easiest piece of business is the business you already have,” Mariani says, simply. “You work so hard to get new business, and in the meantime you lose existing clients.”

This year, Mariani began mining its existing book of business much earlier, in October, to ensure clients were signed up for services in 2009. “We are running three or four times ahead of our pace with the renewals,” Mariani reports.

The Web continues to be an increasingly important venue for marketing services, and Mariani says e-mail communications are convenient for clients and “green.” (He reminds customers of this, too.) One promotion announced in Mariani’s e-newsletter encouraged clients to ask neighbors to sign up for service because Mariani could service them the same day, reduce travel time and, therefore, carbon emissions and fuel. What’s more, booking several neighbors’ service the same day reduces overall mower and blower noise  in a neighborhood by confining it to one day. The cherry on top: the e-mail announcement didn’t waste paper or postage.

“Those kinds of promotions that spread the word about what you are doing are green and, quite frankly, the pennies do add up these days,” he says. And the infectious message to get all the neighbors involved means add-on clients for Mariani.

Ultimately, the key is to be creative, be visible and stay true to your brand, Mariani emphasizes. “We are choosing not to participate in this recession,” he says, simply. “It doesn’t have to be a bad year. We are not afraid to tell people we are looking for business, and we appreciate our customers for being a part of our team.”

The author is a freelance writer based in Bay Village, Ohio.