7 Steps To Marketing Your Lawn Care & Landscaping Business in 2020 | Low Cost NO Cost Advertising

7 Steps To Marketing Your Business Online without being an expert at marketing.

The cool thing is most of these are totally FREE.

Here are seven things to do in 2020 that will help you crush it on your service business.

What's up, this is Keith Kalfas, and I've been in business for seven years. I've done over a million dollars in business. I've made a ton of mistakes and I'm still on the journey.

Here are the seven most powerful things that are working in my business that you can try and at the end of the video and blog, I'll give you this list so you can download and have it. I'm going to tell you the 7 Steps real quick and then I'll go through the bullet points in more detail.

1. Set up your free Google my business listing
2. Start collecting positive reviews right away
3. Set up a Google AdWords account for your company
4. Image branding, logos, fonts, and colors. Everything all set up so it looks consistent across all platforms. 
5. Create profiles on every single social media platform
6. Claim local citations all over the Internet and post regularly.
7. Remarketing and retargeting existing clients as well as marketing to new clients.

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Number 1:

Set up your free Google My Business listing. You can go to Google My Business on your computer and you can also get the app on your phone. If you don't have this you should have get it right away.

Sometimes when I'm going to different Live Events and speaking, I ask who is on Google My Business, and it surprises me how many people actually aren't on Google my business.

Get on there and start collecting as many positive reviews as possible. To start, you have to send out for a postcard verification. This means you can use your house address for your office or virtual office. They'll send you a postcard within a week with your activation code. So now when people are Googling your business, that red bubble pops up showing you have an actual location for your business. This makes you look trustable and like a legit company and also gives people an idea of your location and service areas.

Number 2:

Start collecting positive reviews immediately. Collect positive reviews and try to develop a system along with it.  Like for example, you can ask your customer when collecting the final payment, send emails after the job is completed asking for a review, or face to face with your customers asking them in a polite way and explaining to them that you are trying to build a successful business and their review will help achieve that.

Set up these systems in your business so when you are asking for a review, it is just part of your communication process. The way that you communicate with your customers from marketing and advertising is so important.

Make sure the way that they can contact you and how you answer the phone, the intentions in your voice, and your vocabulary is always encouraging. This will make your customers lean towards your company over a company that does not have these qualities and systems in place.

So get your customers to leave you positive 5 Star reviews and go back to previous customers and ask them to leave you well written, honest reviews.

Trying to bribe people to give you positive reviews is against Google policy. So don't do that.

Get as many honest 5 Star reviews as possible. If you do just that, within a couple of months, you should probably start hitting 10, 15, 20, 25 five-star reviews. I know people that have 600. I have 96 of them right now in my city where I live and work and run my service business.

I've been able to hold the spot of #1 in my entire city just by doing that consistently, so jump on that. It's free and it's powerful because it creates social proof.  When people are going online and on their phones looking for you and the service that you provide, when they see your business and they call, they say they called your company specifically because they're looking for the company with the most positive reviews.

And they call because you have more positive reviews than anybody else. That dramatically increases the chances that they're going to call you versus your competition.

That's what social proof is. It means that other people say that you're doing a great job. So you want to constantly be putting online the good things that other people are saying about you.

If a customer ever says "Thank you"

Use that opportunity to say,

"You're welcome! And thank you for choosing our company. Would you mind leaving us a positive review so other customers can see it online too?"

Number 3:

Set up a Google AdWords account immediately. You can use Google Adwords Express. Once you start getting into Google Ads, it's way more complex than it seems on the surface. If you are super busy, then you can hire somebody to help you do this. I know it may seem expensive, so it's not the highest thing right away. But if you want to get a ton of work, you got to spend some money on marketing and advertising. So get into Google AdWords and set a budget. Let's just say you're going to spend $100.00 a month and that's your new budget. Just make sure you spend $100 a month consistently.

Paying for the ads will make you start paying attention to Google Ads and dialing it in so you're getting leads flowing. I can't go any further with that.

Number 4 :

Brand your company. Make sure your t-shirts, logos, hats, business cards, postcards, flyers, door hangers, websites, all of your online profiles, Facebook business page, and everything else all looks consistent and the same. Exactly the same. The same colors, same fonts, same shapes, and the same types of calls to action.

This means when it all looks the same, no matter where your customers and potential customers are, they're going to know that it's your company because it looks consistent. 

A quick rule of thumb is:

1 to 2 fonts, 2 fonts maximum.

2 colors preferably, 3 colors maximum.

Don't use a whole bunch of fonts and colors. It looks confusing to the eye of your customer. There is a little of physiology that goes into this. Simplicity wins. It's not about how fancy your marketing looks. It's more about how when your customers are looking at your website or online, it should make sense to them right away.

When a customer is looking at your branding, they should know who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you can serve them now. Brand yourself to get them to pick up the phone and call you over other companies. It's about is getting them to take action and to hire you. 

Number 5:

Price transparency.

This was first brought to my attention by my friend, Ryan Kettering from Prolific Prints. He went on my website and he's like,

"Kalfas, what's going on? Why don't you have your prices all over the place?"

I'm like,

"Well, I don't want the customers to see the prices. They'll leave if I show the prices."

He's like,

"No, it doesn't work that way. Go look at all of the big box companies, stores and everybody in the biggest of companies, they all have their prices showing."

You have to have prices on your website because what it does is, let's say you have something that's $99, Right? And that's your base level package. All of the customers who were going to call you thinking they were going to pay like maybe $50 or $60, they won't even call you now because they know that your pricing is $99 for that service. That's a good thing that they're going to bounce and leave because they weren't going to hire you anyway.

They're looking for the cheapest guy. And if you're not the cheapest guy, then you're actually saving all that time that you or somebody you're paying to pick up the phone and talk to the customers qualifying all these people, just to find out that they weren't a good fit for you anyway.

So when you have price transparency and you display your pricing, this qualifies or negatively qualifies them to pick up the phone and call you for your services. And sometimes, actually, a lot of times if your price is a little bit higher to where it almost makes you nervous, that's a good thing because people perceive quality in alignment with pricing.

So if your price is a little bit higher, well, then you must be a quality company. I mean look how much you're charging. It's a little bit more than the average Joe or the average guy in a truck. That means you have confidence in your business. It means you are a legitimate business. This means that you are going to do a great job.

Have you ever heard the saying, 

"You get what you pay for?"

Most customers are very aware of this. And if they are going to spend money, most of the time they will spend more to have the peace of mind that the job is going to be done right and that they are not going to get ripped off. Raising your prices will actually help you.

It's a win-win. 

Number 6:

Retargeting your existing clients first is the most powerful thing that you could do in marketing your business. It is part of our marketing. Go back to all of the customers and clients that you've already served.

1. Current clients
2. Past clients
3. New clients

You should be doing all of the above. Always have customers coming into your funnel, and selling more work to your existing clients that you've already paid your time your money and your attention to acquiring them. They already know you, like you, and trust you. Just sell more work to your existing client base. That's the most powerful thing that you can do is to go through all your clients and offer them more services. Stay in contact with them more often and get them on a perpetual continuity plan. 

Then go spend money, time, and energy to get new customers.

Number 7:

Create free social media accounts on every platform that you can.  The most effective platforms for a service business are:

• Facebook Likes page
• Instagram (Make the Instagram page into a business account)
• LinkedIn
• YouTube

Posting consistently on your social media platforms will bump you up in Google's algorithm.  The more you are visible online, the more Google will promote you. Your social media platforms will pop up on Google when they are searching for your company and/or services.  This will make you stand out above all of the rest of the companies because you are showing off your services with pictures and video proof. Now your customers and potential customers have a chance to get to know you even before they hire you.

And if you are not comfortable in front of the camera, then just take video clips of the job itself. Clips of before the project, the process, and after what the job looks like when completed.

This is a free way to market your business and one of the most powerful things that you can utilize.  This is 2020 and it is vital for your business to have this.

Instagram and Facebook are the same when it comes to ownership, so you can link your posts together when posting pictures and videos. Using #hashtags of your city and services that you are showing off will also help when people are searching on the platforms.

Keep addresses, license plates, street signs, and anything that is personal information out of your videos and pictures.  

We have a media release form that our customers sign that gives us permission to either tape or take pictures on their property. Always get your customer's permission before you film or take any pictures.

I recommend posting the same content but separately on LinkedIn and YouTube. 

For example:

If you make a video and post to your YouTube channel, instead of sharing the video from your channel directly to Facebook, download the video and upload the downloaded onto Facebook. 

Platforms want people to stay on their platforms, so you will possibly demote yourself if you try and link out to different platforms.

And always put a link to another one of your YouTube videos in your description on your channel.  That way YouTube will promote you because you are sharing links that will keep people on their platform. 

If you make simple videos or take pictures and post even as little as once a week, then again your work and your business is showing your customers what you are capable of. You now have proof that your work is amazing and that you are the company they need to hire.

Customers and people in general love to watch videos and see pictures. That is why posting on different platforms will give you the ability to reach people that may like to use Facebook more than Instagram. Some people are just on Instagram. And some people just watch YouTube. So depending on what platform their preference is, you are making it available to a wider reach of people when they are on Google. All of these options of platforms will pop up under your business. 

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Final Thoughts

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and watch this video.  These steps have helped my business get that next level.  These are all of the things that are crucial in my service businesses.  Social media platforms are free, so if you are looking to market your business and you do not have any money to throw at marketing as of yet, then follow these steps and utilize the internet. This information has come from years and years of trial and error, and also years of educating myself by listening to and reading books from the top people in our industries who have built successful businesses with these tools.

To get the PDF Download of the 7 Steps TEXT the word 👉 UNTRAPPED to 31996

or click this link here 👉  www.keithkalfas.com/7steps

And don't forget to check me out at:

Or if you are interested in a personal online consulting call with me, click the link below:

keithkalfas.com/call