5 Tips for Advertising Your Landscaping Business on Social Media

We all know the importance of a good marketing strategy - no matter how great the product or service, it doesn’t matter if nobody sees it. Likewise, you might be familiar with the frustrating feeling of not knowing what to do about it; “I’m a landscaper, not a marketer.” Well here’s the good news: there are a lot of ways to market your business, and you don’t need a business degree to implement many of them.

One great example of this is Social Media. In this blog post, I hope to lay out some simple tips you can use to advertise your landscaping business on Social Media. Here’s a list of what I’ll cover: 

1. Create and collect quality content
2. Set your goals (conversions, brand awareness, authority)
3. Choose your ad type
4. Set your target audience
5. Stay on top of organic content

Create and Collect Quality Content  

This might be an obvious step, but it’s incredibly important, and not just for Social Media. Creating and obtaining high quality visual content is one of the most important steps in every area of marketing. It is one of the most time consuming steps, but without quality content, you’re already behind everyone else.

Here’s the thing: when you post on social media, you’re not just competing with your next door neighbor, you’re also competing with that professional photographer on the other side of the country. Social media is not limited to a geographic area, so it’s important to realize that you need quality content to catch the attention of whoever is scrolling down their Instagram or Facebook feed. A blurry picture of the shrub you just planted isn’t going to cut it. 

The good news is that it isn’t too difficult to take some quality photos - especially in landscaping, where your content is by nature supposed to look beautiful. The cameras on our smartphones are continuously getting better, and there are tons of online tutorials giving tips and tricks on how to take decent photos and videos. 

Having quality visual content is crucial to giving your social media ads some authority and presence. And it will go a long way in every other aspect of marketing your business as well.

Set Your Goals

Social media - it’s free, everyone’s using it, and it gives you a platform to show off your work. You need to know what your goal is BEFORE you start spending hundreds of dollars on Facebook ads to drive people to your website. Are you looking to capture leads? What about raising brand awareness? Or, maybe you just want to establish yourself as a valid competitor to the other guy in town? These are all great goals, but there’s a different approach to each one.

You’ll also need to set a budget. On average, the cost-per-click (CPC) of Facebook advertising is $0.97, and the cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) is $7.19. It’s important to note that these numbers average across millions of dollars spent on Facebook advertising, so your ad might perform better or worse. However, it’s a good benchmark to keep in mind as you’re tracking how well the ads are doing.

Regardless of the approach you take with your social media ads, the CTA (call to action) should almost ALWAYS be a link to your website. That’s where you can really show off your business and convince people that you’re the best choice for their landscaping needs. Having a great website to send people to is incredibly important; if the goal of your advertising campaign is to drive sales, you'll need to send people to a place where they can easily see and select services you provide. You can always implement a software like BidClips to help you turn those website visitors into real leads and jobs.

Choose Your Ad Type

Once you’ve got some content you can confidently pull from, it’s time to figure out what type of ad is going to suit your purpose the best. If you’re using Facebook Business suite, they should have a short list of ad types, along with the purpose of each one. 

Here’s a list of the ad types Facebook currently uses:

1. Image Ads
2. Video Ads
3. Carousel Ads
4. Instant Experience Ads
5. Collection Ads

In most cases for your landscaping business, a simple image or video ad will probably meet most of your needs. The carousel ads might also be a good tool to show off multiple images or videos at once. 

If you have a quality video, I would recommend using a video ad, as it will capture attention the quickest, and if done right, can look the most professional. Otherwise, a photo ad is easy to set up, and can still grab attention if you’ve taken the time to collect quality pictures.

You can also promote or “boost” a post you’ve already made. If you post a picture or video and it receives attention from your organic followers, you know it might be good content to promote.   

Choose Your Target Audience

Let’s be real, nobody likes seeing ads. Unless the timing, message, and product/service is just right, we’re likely to scroll past as soon as we see that “sponsored” tag at the top. So if you’re trying to establish authority in your local area, running a bunch of ads to the wrong people may actually hurt the overall image you are trying to get. That’s why choosing the right target audience is incredibly important to the success of your advertising campaign.

This is one of my favorite parts of setting up a social media ad. You can narrow your audience down using interests, location, age, gender, education level, and more. So, for example, maybe you want to run an ad showing off your great patio work. You’ll want to target people with the type of income and housing that will want something like that, so you can probably safely assume you won’t be going after anyone under, say, 25 years old. You also might only target people with a college education, as statistically they have higher incomes than those without. 

These are just some examples of how you could set up your audience to give yourself the best chance of success with your ad campaign. The great part is, you can set a low budget to begin with, and use A/B testing to figure out what works best. Then, you can raise your budget, knowing that you’ve got the right information. Using ads is a lot of experimentation; there’s not a “one size fits all” approach for everyone, so you have to experiment with it and try different things. Have fun with it!

Stay on top of posting organic content

To really make the most out of your advertising campaign, you need to make sure you’re also keeping up with the regular, day-to-day updates on social media. I know it can sometimes feel like a tedious and meaningless task, but Facebook and Instagram algorithms thrive on regular posting to make sure your content is seen. 

Your paid advertising efforts should really be a supplement to what you’re already doing on social media. Promoting an organic post that already has traction with comments and “likes” will give an ad more credibility. Plus, keeping your followers engaged and up-to-date is a great way to show that you’re invested in your work and in taking care of your customers.

Conclusion

So there it is. Remember, a good advertising campaign always needs to start with quality content. From there, you can set your goals, choose an ad type, create your audience, and boost your post! By monitoring your results, you’ll be able to tell what’s working and what you’ll need to change. Finally, having a great landing page to send people to, with a great call-to-action, is absolutely essential. To actually get ROI from your advertising efforts, you’ll want people to reach out to you for a quote so you can close jobs. Using a software like BidClips can help you make the most of your landing pages, allowing your potential customers to send you photos, videos, and details of the project they need done so you can easily send an accurate quote. To find out more, schedule a demo with our team!