Somewhere between setting up your first ad campaign and watching the budget drain with nothing to show for it, a lot of landscaping business owners decide that social media ads don't work for them.
They do. We've seen it! But there's a process.
At Grunder Landscaping Co., I manage our paid social advertising, and the way we put campaigns together has changed a lot since we started. A few things have made a real difference in how our ads perform, and I want to share them with you.
Before I write a single word of copy, I go through our project photos and pick the strongest ones. Then I match those images to the services we want to prioritize right now. The headlines and captions come last. When you start with the copy, you end up writing generic ads. When you start with a photo of a design-build project that stopped you mid-scroll, the words follow naturally.
In landscaping, we have an advantage that a lot of other industries don't: our finished product is something people genuinely want to look at.
We run a combination of lookalike audiences and interest-based targeting, and what we've found is that they don't perform equally across every service. Our lookalike audiences have been more efficient for lawn care, while interest-based targeting has done better for design-build work. The difference shows up in cost per landing page view, which is the metric I watch most closely. If you're only running one audience type across everything, you may be leaving real performance on the table. It's worth taking the time to test both and see what the data tells you.
This one might seem obvious, but it's worth saying because it gets skipped more than you'd think. When you set up a paid social campaign, make sure you're defining the geographic area you actually serve. If you don't, you'll end up paying to reach people you could never do business with. It's one of the simplest settings to configure and one of the highest-impact ones: simply set your ads to run over the zip codes you service. I personally see a lot of ads from landscaping companies who don't work in my area, and it kills me that they're wasting their ad budget that way.
If you've tried paid social before and walked away frustrated, I'd encourage you to look at these three things before you give up on it. But also know that we aren't abandoning traditional media like postcards and door hangers just yet: each advertising tactic has a place in our plan as long as we're using it strategically.
If you want to go deeper on marketing and sales strategy, join us for our Virtual Sales Manager Bootcamp on July 8-9. We'll cover how to build a marketing plan that aligns with your sales goals, along with goal setting, forecasting, running effective sales meetings, and more. I hope to see you there!
We'll talk to you next week.
Emily Lindley
Content & Events Manager
The Grow Group & Grunder Landscaping Co.