Social media can be a powerful way to grow your lawn care business, helping to establish and drive awareness of your brand, create an ongoing conversation with current customers and help attract new ones. But, generating a continuous flow of lawn care social media posts, coming up with lawn care hashtags and keeping it up can feel like an enormous task.
If you’re worried about how you’ll figure it out, don’t be. We’re here to help you choose social media platforms, create an effective lawn care media strategy, and engage with your customers in ways that benefit you both.
The Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Lawn Care Businesses
Before we dive into how to create lawn care social media posts, let’s talk about why advertising your lawn care business on social media is worth the time and effort.
First off, social media channels help you connect with millions of people you otherwise couldn’t reach. On average, people spend more than 2.5 hours per day on social media! It’s a popular place to be, making it an incredible tool for connecting with your targets.
Why is social media important for landscapers, specifically?
It’s a great way to share your work, offer helpful garden and lawn tips and share industry insights. It’s also a place for your customers to learn more about what you do and to interact with you and other customers.
Here are some of the most compelling benefits your landscaping business can reap from social media marketing:
Heightened brand awareness
Brand awareness has to do with how familiar people are with your company and how well they recognize it. It’s incredibly important because if they aren’t aware of your company, they won’t consider it when they’re looking for landscaping service.
Lawn care social media posts help increase your brand awareness by putting you in front of the people that matter to your business. The more people become familiar with your company and what it offers, the more likely they are to consider purchasing from you.
Customer engagement and interaction
A social media presence isn’t a one-way street. It’s a place for interactive conversation with your current customers and potential new ones. The exchange should be a win-win. For instance, you offer engaging content that meets a need—providing helpful info or even just entertainment—and in return, you get valuable feedback in the form of comments, reviews, referrals and even leads.
Leads and sales
Ultimately, finding leads and making sales is what matters most to your business success. The engagement generated through your lawn care social media posts is a powerful way to drive sales. Interestingly, research shows that the most effective purchase drivers on social media aren’t the actual posts, but the recommendations, comments and reviews they generate. We’ll talk more about how to create engaging content below.
Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms
You can’t be all places at all times. The good news is you don’t have to be. Instead of sprinkling lawn care media posts across any platform you can think of, consider where your customers are going and concentrate your energies on meeting them there.
Chances are, it’s Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, three of the most prominent social media platforms for businesses to reach consumers. Here’s a closer look at some interesting facts and features that make them ideal platforms for landscapers:
Instagram for Landscapers
Instagram is the 7th most visited website in the world with 1.22 billion people using it each month and 9 out of 10 users watching Instagram videos weekly.
Popular Instagram features for landscapers include Instagram stories for posting photos or video clips of your work, processes or people; Polls and Q&A for customer feedback; and Location Tags that allow you to give the exact location of a jobsite photo.
If you need more details on the how and why of Instagram business accounts, this post can help.
Facebook for Landscapers
With over 500 million people using Facebook, the odds are high that you’re already familiar with it and likely have a page. Make sure you have a business account and aren’t just promoting your business on your personal Facebook account. And, take full advantage of your business page by creating a full profile with images, videos and complete contact information so customers can easily find you.
If you need help setting up a profile on Facebook, check out this blog post for easy-to-follow instructions.
TikTok for Landscapers
This platform is all about videos, everything from funny clips of daily activities to landscaping fails. There happens to be a prominent landscaping audience on TikTok with 1.5 billion views through the #landscape hashtag, and 19.6 million views for people who search #landscapers. Learn more tips for promoting your business through TikTok here.
Building an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy
Now that we’ve talked about why social media is important for landscaping businesses and highlighted the platforms most frequented by your targets, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of creating a results-driven strategy. Here’s a three-step approach:
Set your lawn care social media marketing goals and objectives
Once you’ve determined where you need to be, consider what your lawn care business hopes to gain from an active social media presence.
Most landscaping businesses are looking to find new business leads and convert them into customers. In addition, they want to strengthen the relationships they have with existing clients by staying connected with them.
Also consider your social media goals, for instance, how often do you intend to post? How many clicks and likes are you hoping to gain on Facebook? How many reshares and comments? And, how much you’re going to spend if you choose to go the paid lawn care advertising route.
Consider what to say in your lawn care social media posts
What should you post? We’re glad you asked. Social media marketing is an ongoing endeavor so consistency is key, but quality is everything. Share what your targets care about and make it visually appealing.
Here are some landscaping social media post ideas to consider:
- Company news
- Behind-the-scenes photos of operations and employees
- Photos of successful jobs
- Reviews from your customers
- Garden care tips and tricks
- Specials or limited time-only services
- Landscaping industry news
- Videos of your land care services
- Interactive content, including polls and quizzes (Check out Facebook templates and tools)
Track and measure your social media efforts
Like any lawn care marketing effort, you can’t just throw it out there and hope for the best. It’s important to track your social media marketing so you know what works and what doesn’t.
Analytics and insights help you finetune your strategy so you’re spending time on posts that resonate with your audience.
Using business accounts will give you insights (social post analytics) and leveraging can help analyze which channels are working or not. Tools such as Hootsuite, a popular social media management and scheduling tool, can also help you track social media analytics, looking at likes, comments, shares and saves.
Tips for Engaging Your Lawn Care Followers on Social Media
You want your social media posts and your time and effort spent creating them to pay off and you don’t want to waste time on content that falls flat. Here are some helpful tips to create engaging content that customers actually care about and best practices to maximize its value:
Leverage visual content in your lawn care social media posts
Make a point to take lots of photos and videos, as visual content helps to give your brand a personality and it’s a necessity for posting on Instagram and TikTok. Think photos and videos of your work, trucks, equipment, and employees, as well as outstanding results you’ve achieved.
Let your customers speak for you
Customer testimonials and reviews are priceless. Make it a regular practice to ask happy customers for a review and promote them on your social media channels.
Use lawn care hashtags
Do hashtags really make for successful social media content? Seventy-two percent of marketers who responded to a LinkedIn survey said yes, they do. Hashtags are important to your landscaping business social media accounts because they can establish your company as a landscaping leader for your specific local service area or for a specific specialty, for instance green design/build. Using specific hashtags will help you attract the right crowd. Need some landscaping hashtag ideas? Check out this post.
Follow the 80/20 rule
It’s tempting to use social media platforms as an extension of your lawn care advertising, and while they are useful for getting your ads and promotions in front of customers, too much promotional content is a turn off. A good rule of thumb is to aim for 80 percent of your content to inform, entertain, educate or engage. The other 20 percent can be used for promotion.
Consider paying to play
While social media marketing can be totally free, many businesses are putting money behind their strategies in order to maximize the results, i.e., get more eyeballs on their ads. In fact, businesses surveyed by HubSpot said they are willing to spend nearly a fifth of their ad budgets on pay-to-play promotions.
Advertising lawn care on social media allows you to create, schedule and post highly targeted ads, aimed at specific demographics or geographies. They can get pricey, but some start at low as $1 per ad. Set a budget and use the tools offered by each platform to get the best bang for your buck.
Are you ready to grow your lawn care business with social media marketing?
Social media marketing can be an incredible tool to reach and engage with your customers, helping to strengthen and grow your landscaping business.
Like most things, consistency is key. Aim to post once per day to keep a consistent presence in your targets’ feeds. And, remember to ask your customers to follow your accounts to keep the lines of communication open.
LMN can help keep your social media marketing fresh. Our blog and our own social media channels are chock full of helpful tips, advice and industry insights for landscapers. Check us out on Instagram and Facebook.
