If you are looking for new customers for your gardening business, do not miss our advice. Here are some tips for planning an effective online marketing campaign.
You have finally started your business as a gardener. It’s great and you’re thrilled to have turned your passion into a full-time job, but now you are faced with a fundamental question: How to find customers for your business ? Making yourself known in a sector where there is a lot of competition is essential, and making yourself visible is absolutely vital to making your project profitable. Even if your business was not a fledgling company, the need to find constant flows of new customers remains a primary need to grow and prosper.
The first step to achieve the results you want is obviously to make your own all the tools and skills necessary to offer excellent quality work: any promotion strategy would be useless without this crucial factor.
So let’s see some targeted communication tactics to aim straight for success: ready to grow your new business as a gardener?
Identify your target and industry opportunities
One of the first steps to take when you want to promote your business and find new customers if you are a gardener, is to analyze what exactly are the services you can offer and which customers you want to turn to. Having clear your reference niche will help you to better orient your communication strategies and will also allow you to better train yourself on the specific services you want to offer.
You could target private customers and offer green maintenance, indoor gardening or design of green areas of villas or second homes. You can also direct your services to condominiums, companies, schools and shopping centres, and specialize in the management of large green areas, aiming for ongoing maintenance partnerships . Or again, you could direct your services to sports centers or the care of municipal green areas.
Build your online presence
Any activity, even the most manual and traditionally carried out online, nowadays needs a solid presence on the net. In fact, it is precisely on the web that those who need the intervention of a gardener will go to look for the best available and being found, when a user needs your services, is clearly essential. Ask for the help of an expert to create a website that, albeit simple, tells who you are, what you do, what services you offer, where you operate and how you can contact you.
Make it easier and more intuitive to call or send you a message, or request a quote for the desired jobs directly online . To incentivize potential customers to get in touch with you, you could opt to offer them a small free service, such as a no-cost site visit, or a short consultation for their lack of green thumb problems.
Do not forget to include in the site the best photographs of the work you have done , or even better of the professional videos of the gardens you have created or of your most successful projects. Ask every new customer you win to leave you a review for the work you have done and upload it to your website, to create the right social proof: often reading positive experiences from other customers is the decisive push that convinces those who would like to contact you to do it confidence.
Use your website to communicate what sets you apart from the competition and the gardening services in which you specialize: having a particular strength will allow you to compete on the market for the quality you offer and avoid harmful price wars with competitors who they offer generic and not very specialized services.
Communicate what you know
The means offered by digital today make your life easy when your goal is to communicate to as many people as possible what you know and what you can do. If you feel inclined to talk on video, you could for example open a Youtube channel , where you can tell about your work, give advice on how to do the simplest gardening work, suggest how to take care of a specific species of plant and help identify the best time of year to plant a rather fruit tree.
If you don’t feel like making video content, you could pour your knowledge on your company blog or on the pages of your social profiles: posts, stories on Instagram and microblogging through captions, give you ample space to demonstrate your experience . Your target user can only be impressed by your preparation, perceive you as authoritative and call you the next time they need a professional gardener.
Google My Business and Local SEO
When you do your business as a gardener you often find yourself operating in a certain geographical area. How to find customers in the area ? One of the first steps to intercept new leads is to clearly define your area of expertise and focus on building your local online presence.
Have you already created your company profile on essential platforms such as Google My Business or Yellow Pages? Being available on these directories is essential to appear in user searches whenever they wish to find the best gardener in their city or province. Local SEO, i.e. optimization for local search engine results, is essential when you deal with a business closely linked to a specific geographical location. Enter all your data and contact details online, let yourself be found and keep all information relating to your company constantly updated.
Offline promotion: flyers, coupons and partnerships
To get new customers in the gardening industry you will need to promote yourself, both online and offline. The power of flyers and paper postcards has never really gone out of fashion: despite the overwhelming power of digital media, a well-made flyer can still strike the right chords and get noticed in the crowd of advertising stimuli.
Create captivating flyers, take care of the graphics, the correctness of the data and the ability to convince people to get in touch with you as soon as possible. How can you encourage this first contact? Offer a discount reserved for owners of the flyer valid only for a few days or weeks, or offer a little extra included in the first service .
You could make traditional flyers with your flyers, or ask garden stores to host your flyers or business cards in their store. Or again, at the end of your gardening works, you could leave your customers a discount voucher to use for a subsequent intervention , or to give to a neighbor, a friend or a relative: you will have excellent chances of winning a new customer. . The effectiveness of word of mouth is never to be underestimated, especially in a business like yours, where the results of a job are tangible, immediate and immediately shareable.
Online promotion: Google Ads or social advertising
To promote a gardening service, an excellent way is also to count on the help of the most modern promotional tools, such as Google Ads . Positioning yourself for the main keywords related to your services will allow you to appear in the first places of the Google SERP when a user enters a query related to keywords such as “gardening” or similar searches.
Do not underestimate the effectiveness of tools such as Facebook Ads , to propose you to the most targeted users in the Facebook feed, in that of Instagram or in IG Stories. If you create strong campaigns , your target customer will not be able to ignore them and will have your name already in mind when choosing their next trusted gardener.
Platforms and forums to find customers
There are also numerous platforms on the net to find clients reserved for professionals who like you want to offer their services and gain credibility and visibility online. There are also many websites that allow you to insert free job advertisements , such as Subito.it, Bakeka or Kijiji. Incredibly powerful means of finding work as a freelancer are also places like FB groups or forums of gardening enthusiasts . there that supply and demand often meet, and that experts and just curious start interesting discussions.
Participating in these virtual squares will allow you to make yourself known, make your professionalism understood and find your always new customers for your gardener business.