How Large Is Your Landscape, Snow Or Paving Marketing Budget?

“I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted … I just don’t know which half.”

– John Wanamaker

The Marketing Mystery: What Should You Spend & Where Should it Go?

How do you decide how much to allocate for marketing? And what marketing outlets should you devote your marketing dollars to?

At Go iBrands, we generally divide our marketing budget between three primary areas: print advertising, online advertising and trade shows. But as we round out our third year marketing for the Go iLawn brand (second with Go iPave), we’re still refining our formula.

Trial and error, tracking mechanisms and good data is what we use to guide our decisions. (I will let you know in a few months if we made good ones!) But what about a contracting business? Is there a general rule of thumb? Are some marketing efforts generally better than others?

Contractors Share their Budgets in Recent Lawn and Landscape Article

Three Green industry business owners were recently featured in a Lawn and Landscape article “To Market”.

Small Marketing Budget?
Taylor Millilken of Elite Landscape company does $1.2 million in annual revenue and allocates 1-1.5% of total revenue to his marketing budget. He steers his efforts towards five primary categories: email outreach to existing customers, direct mail, referral rewards, online marketing and community awareness.

Large Marketing Budget?
David Livingston of Green Earth Services does $3.5 million in annual revenue and spends up to 5% of annual revenue on marketing. Largely, he uses radio and television to get his message out.

Your Opinion?
So what do you think? Is there a formula to creating a marketing budget at a landscape, paving or snow removal company?