Getting the Word Out About Your New Lawn Care Business

Advertising is a core component of any successful business. Even if you are setting up a lawn care business, you will need a plan for getting new business and that plan is usually considered to be your advertising or marketing plan. When we think of advertising, we tend to limit it to Super Bowl commercials and those obnoxious ads for Geiko Insurance or used cars that come at us nonstop on TV. But there is a lot more to advertising than that limited approach. In fact, the vast majority of businesses find ways to get new business and get the word out about their goods or services without ever advertising on television or on the radio.

Lawn care is not a "retail" operation in the sense that you don't have to have dozens or hundreds of customers patronize you each day to make money. You build relationships with long term customers so there really is no need to spend the large amount of money it takes to advertise on a large scale such as TV or radio spots. But any contractor business, which is what your lawn care enterprise is, must always be building the business. Customers come and go so you have to find new customers to keep your income stable. Moreover, if you want to grow your business, you have to find ways to bring new clients onto your roster so you can afford to expand the size, scope and profitability of your lawn care business.

The good news is that you should completely ignore any temptation to go into wide scale marketing. Lawn care is a local business and the one of the great things about working on lawns for your customers is you have a small group of loyal customers that to deal with directly on a weekly basis. You may from time to time do a "one time" project for a friend of a customer. But those are courtesy jobs done for customer relations and not the heart of how you will make your living.

The most elaborate kind of advertising you might consider that reaches out to a large segment of the community would include flyers, a yellow pages advertisement or taking out a small ad in the local newspaper. These marketing strategies are still focused very much on your local community. Of those three, flyers may be the best because you can isolate which neighborhoods you will advertise in and combine the flyers with word of mouth.

Another quite effective type of advertising for your lawn care business is as simple as it is powerful. By putting the name of your business on your truck and other vehicles, you get maximum exposure as you work in the neighborhoods where you have customers. People get to know the name of your business as you drive the streets locally and that advertising is highly focused because it is seen where you already are enjoying success.

But of all of the forms of advertising that will bring you the most business, word of mouth and networking is still the most potent. When someone needs a new lawn service, they will prefer the service being used by their neighbors based on watching you work and on the good opinion of people they know. This is why when you are working with a customer, maintaining a warm and responsive relationship with every customers is important.

Don't be afraid to do a few chores for free for each customer. If they have something unrelated to your work that needs to be done, do it for them. That good will is pure gold in marketing value. As you get more well known, your company gets well known and you add customers with little more effort at advertising than that.