Marketing Your Service Industry Business

Lots of service industry businesses rely on outbound marketing to drive their growth. We often see it used by asphalt sealing and striping contractors, as well as full-service landscapers, but more than just about anyone, we see lawncare application companies relying on outbound marketing. And it’s not hard to see why.

Lawncare As An Example

If you run a lawncare operation, marketing your business is a crucial part of your success. After all, your whole business model is built on servicing hundreds or thousands of customers at tens of dollars per visit and hundreds of dollars per customer per season.

This leaves you with many customer relationships up for renewal each season. And although it’s possible that you’ll pick up new clients that find you via your online presence or advertising, it’s also possible that you’ll lose existing ones. And the only reliable way to grow is to bring in more new clients.

If you rely only upon inbound techniques, you can spend lots of time, money and effort making yourself visible with signs, ads and a website. But until that customer calls you and asks for a quote, there’s only so much you can do. That changes when you start outbound marketing.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing helps you get in front of potential customers before they need service. A few proven techniques many companies use include direct mail and direct email campaigns. Companies have also been known to get out in neighborhoods and literally canvass up and down streets. Some will even do aggressive telemarketing. But whatever tactics, you might be considering, time to start outbound marketing is EARLY… long before the season starts.

Not Just For the Big Guys

If you’re a small provider, you may think about powerful mass marketing as the domain of big companies that can afford to spend thousands on promotions and advertising. But this doesn’t have to be the case.

At Go iLawn / Go iPave, we don’t think the power of mass marketing should be reserved for the big guys and companies with deep pockets. In fact, using our software, one guy can market his business to a thousand residential customers for about $200 and an investment of his own time.

Getting It Done

There are guys out there right now doing this with our software. I’ve talked to them. It is labor-intensive, but it’s the offseason. You can do it too… Here’s how:

1. Pick a targeted service area. Ideally, you’ll want a dense customer location like a planned neighborhood for residential providers or an extensive office park for commercial providers.
2. Buy 25 searches on Go iLawn or Go iPave for $150. Start by searching ONE property in your target area as a starting point. (We suggest starting with a corner lot or a recognizable address number).
3. Measure this property, then move on to the next one. Do this for tens, dozens or even a hundred properties from a single search Using This Method we talked about last year.
4. Move on to the next neighborhood with a new property search when you run out properties within your first Geofence.
5. Save your photos and property measurements for each address to a folder, then integrate them into a single sheet proposal with the address, a photo, and a quote proposing an annual service.
6. Print these out using a color printer (B&W works too, but it won’t look as good)
7. Take them out to the neighborhood and start knocking on doors, handing them out to property occupants. Or you could drop them in the mail for the additional price of an envelope and a stamp.

Using this method, you can literally canvass entire subdivisions and provide custom quotes to each property.

Ready to try it? Let us know how it goes.

Good Luck ~ The Go iLawn / Go iPave team