How to Choose the Best Advertising for LawnCare and Landscape Contractors

been meaning to get this video out here. You're starting out and you have no money to spend on advertising. You need to get the message out. You need to get business coming in, but you can't afford to waste a single penny on something that isn't proven. And I'm going to tell you what I've discovered the best ways to advertise are. I'm going to break it down for you on how much what I've done and how much each form of advertising has cost me and um that way hopefully the learning curve that I went through is something that you don't have to experience for yourself. So there is a difference in advertising for lawn care and for landscaping and I hopefully I'll be able to cover that and explain it to you as well. Um, let's go over what I've learned for general advertising. Okay, this spring we put out a $13,500 radio campaign. We advertised on three separate stations. We had over $400 commercials air over the last 90 days. That $13,500 radio campaign has netted me a grand total of job leads. That's right. Two two job leads. Now, I didn't that was an actual out-ofpocket expense. I actually did a big excavating job for the radio station. And so, I traded them excavating work for radio advertising. And I did that intentionally because I wanted to see how effective radio advertising actually is for guys like us. Avoid it like the plague. I don't care what station you're on. I don't care what they tell you. Don't flipping do it, okay? You're going to be wasting your dollars. Um I could afford to do it in this case, so I did. And lo and behold, it's not effective. Website, consider it advertising. I don't care who you are, if you're landscaper or lawn care. Your website is a form of advertising. It's also your brickandmortar store. It's also your online reputation. It's also worth every single penny you can invest in creating an absolutely amazing website. So, go out and do that. If you have a hokey website, don't expect it to bring you in anything. Invest. It's an investment. When I say invest, it really is not going to pay off right away. If you think your website after you get it built is going to get your phone to start ringing, you're about 18 months to 2 years early. It will literally take that long before your website can generate reoccurring traffic. Google takes time. It takes at least 6 months for Google to recognize it. Um, so it's not going to be an immediate thing, but you do need it. I'm going to tell you, you do need that. You've probably heard that. So, I'm not going to dive into websites too much. If you do want to hear more about websites, hit me up. Now, I'm going to go over other forms of advertising, but as you're listening to me, I need to know from you what works, what works for you guys. Um, another form of advertising that I do is networking. That's a great cheap form of advertising. usually cost you $200 $300 to to be involved in an organization, but that pays off every time you shake a person's hand. That's advertising. That works very well. Word of mouth is advertising. But we're talking about advertising when you're just starting out. How do you acquire new customers? You can't literally go out and knock on every single door. Okay? So, this is what I want to discuss with you. Um, another option of advertising is brochures. Now, this spring, I did a 10,000 flyer brochure drop. That means I printed up 10,000 flyers and I had these. I didn't just print out any flyers. I had Jonathan Patashnik, the lawn care millionaire, go over them with me. I had another designer go over them with me. So, I knew that my flyer design met their critique, and it wasn't very effective. Okay. A lot of flyer drops depend on timing as well as location, but the average that they say you should get is about a 2% return. So on a 10,000 flyer drop, I should have had about 200 calls and I had probably about 100. So I had about a 1% return, but I didn't land a 100 jobs from that. I just had my phone ring a 100 times. So how effective was it? I wouldn't say it was very effective. A 1% return is not effective. Don't fall for that trap. Okay. Um, let's talk about Craigslist. Effective for the price. They're locals. You're going to get locals. Here's a story. I had some guy literally, and please don't think I'm racist, but this next story might be a little spicy for some of you. I had some guy named Abdafa Latifah or something like that. Literally that was his name and he was sending me I think a joke email but it couldn't maybe it wasn't a joke email but after I put a ad up on Craigslist he sent me an email and it literally said needed lawn mow now and he had a picture of his yard and his yard didn't look like this yard. What his yard looked like was it looked like a dirt bike track. Like somebody had taken a car through his yard and just did Louis, spun out giant ruts and mud and it was just caked and there was little patches of grass all over. And so I sent him an email response to Abd Julaf Latifah, whatever his name was. He said, "Need lawn mower now." And I replied, "Haha, go get a goat." Cuz there was no way you were getting a lawnmower through that site whatsoever. So, I figured he was joking with me. I'm going to joke with him back. I hope he had a good sense of humor. Um, but how effective is Craigslist? Super effective. Cuz it's free and you get a call, two calls a day. It's free. Per dollar you spend on it is an amazing return. Even though it doesn't generate a ton, it's still you're not spending anything. And you need to automate the system. Keith Calfass has some amazing videos how to post 12 Craigslist ads a day. I think that's excessive personally, but I post one a day. I do in the morning. H maybe I don't post one a day, but I probably post three a week, four a week, but it still generates quite a response. So, it's a great form of advertising. Um, what else have we got? We've got a lot of other things I want to talk to you about. So, let me let me think about this and get right back to you here. How could I forget? Craigslist is one of my favorites, but my second favorite is Home Advisor. Now, Home Advisor and Angie List are similar. Okay, now they're both membership sites, and I had to do some research because I've actually been with Home Advisor for so long that I'm actually grandfathered in. I don't have to pay a membership fee. When you've been with a company for 15, 20 years before they were Home Advisor, when they were Service Magic, they don't charge you membership fee. Okay? That stuff is just normal par for the course. But Home Advisor is a pay per lead. And how that works, and I want you to understand this because some of you got it, some of you don't. You're emailing me, you're asking me about it. Um, if you want Susie Armstrong's phone number and contact information, it's 15 bucks. She needs a lawn. She She goes to Home Advisor. She says, "I need my lawn mower. Susie Armstrong needs her lawn mower. Here's her name. Here's her phone number. You paid $15 for that. But now you paid $15. You know Susie Armstrong. You know where she lives. You know her phone number. You know she needs it. You didn't spend $100 or $1,000 creating flyers to hope Susie Armstrong will call you. You literally paid $15 to get her information. You know she needs a job. And the beauty about Home Advisor is is they're really good on their return policy. I'm going to give Home Advisor a pretty high rating in this case because I return a lot of leads. I don't like them. they're maybe they're outside of my service area or that I feel that the customer was just testing the system. You hit request re refund or something. I don't remember what the process is, but they I've never gotten too much flack from them about returning uh leads. Great company. I like them. I need to know what you guys think of Home Advisor. Some of you are using it. Put it in the comments below because if you're getting a if you're getting bad service, I need to know this. The guys watching these videos need to know this. It's just good for all of us. So, we know Angie's list. Angie's list is hit or miss. For landscaping, this is where we're going to separate it out a little bit. Okay. For landscaping, Angie's List is good because the jobs I get are 10, 12, $20,000 jobs. Okay. And yeah, I have a 5,000 pay. I c I spend I think I upped it up to $5,500 now this year. Um, but all I need is three, four of those jobs and Angie's List is more than paid for itself and I get at least that many phone calls a year from Angie's List. Okay, so that works out pretty well. Uh, if it was just for lawn care, no way. No way. Do you know how many jobs I'd have to sell? Because lawn care has a lower profit margin. The jobs themselves are, you know, less money. It wouldn't pay for itself. So, if you're into lawn maintenance, lawn care, you may not want to be a part of Angie's List. It may not work for you unless they give you quite a bargain. We have a video on how to how to um, you know, negotiate on Angie's List. And I'm actually in the process of attempting to interview one of the sales reps for Angie's List who contacted me, but he's a little nervous. He's nervous as a longtail cat in a room full of rocking chairs because what he said is he was one of the sales reps and he said they are a hunter gatherer sales model. Um the sales reps are trained to go for the jugular. They're trained because they're told that you can you can never raise the price on a person, but you can always drop the price. So they go for everything they got. But Angie's List, that's a different thing. Look for it in the podcast. Hopefully I'll be able to get this guy to come on. Um, but that's what I know about Angie's List. So, my two my top rated advertise means of advertising are Home Advisor, Payper Lead, Thumbtac is another good one. What is yours? What is yours? Please let us know. Please let me know. It's going to help all of us work together. Um, I do a lot of networking. That's a great one. Craigslist is actually good. It's not It doesn't have a high concentration of leads, but it's free. So, if you get one job out of it, doesn't cost you anything. Boom. you're in you're in like Flynn. Um so that is my experience with advertising. Please tell me yours. Love to hear from you guys. I hope this has helped. Um flyer design. Be careful with your flyer design. If you got a piss poor flyer design, it's not going to do you any good. And I'm actually going to go through and retweak my flyer design to make sure that it is absolutely at an optimum. Um but you do need to have that. You need to get the information out there. So, I don't want you spending a lot of dollars that you don't have when you're just getting started. I don't want you experimenting. Check the check out this video. Hopefully, it's helped you out. Check out other guys videos. A lot of these guys go into flyers and how they code them for different neighborhoods where if you have a pink tag on them, that's different than a green tag, which means one price. A lot of great information out there. Please share it. Let me know your thoughts on this. And uh God bless. Love you guys. Have a good one. Green side up.