We’re at the end of our Best Practices Series and we’re finally tackling one of the most difficult aspects of the landscape lighting business: marketing!
Lindsey Rodericks of Southern Landscape Lighting Systems is joining us once more to share her best practices to market and grow your company based on over 15 years of landscape lighting experience!
Grow Your Marketing With Your Business
For beginners who don’t have a lot of cash on hand, Lindsey has a few marketing suggestions to get started:
Vehicle Wrapping (“Very important,” Lindsey says.)
Yard Signs
Home Shows
Door-to-Door Knocking in Promising Neighborhoods
Self-Promotion on Social Media, including Nextdoor, Facebook, and Instagram
For established businesses, Lindsey recommends the previous suggestions, but to consider investing in more expensive marketing campaigns such as:
Direct Mailers using Target Audience Databases
Social Media Advertising
“It’s all pretty symbiotic,” Lindsey says. “You can’t just pick one thing and hope it’s the silver bullet. You have to have a lot of things working together.”
Not sure how much you should be spending? When figuring out your marketing budget, Lindsey suggests spending around 8% of your gross revenue.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your target audience is important, whether you’re doing all your marketing in-house or hiring it out to a 3rd party. “You’ve got to know the demographics you’re going after,” Lindsey says. Age, income level, and home values are three key aspects of your target audience.
Track Your Marketing
Marketing is most effective when you’re tracking the performance of each campaign. Make good use of landing pages, call trackers, and taking note of what customers say when you ask them how they heard about your business. Lindsey tracks all these numbers on a monthly spreadsheet to see how each campaign is performing. “It’s a constant analysis,” Lindsey says. “We’ve added and dumped [marketing campaigns] because we haven’t gotten a return on their investment.”
Thank you again to Lindsey Rodericks with Southern Landscape Lighting Systems! We hope you enjoyed our best practices series on designing, installing, and marketing for landscape lighting pros. We’ll see you next month with more information on an exciting new contest we have in the works!