Lawn Care Flyers, Do They Work?

Lawn care flyers are usually the first thought many individuals think of when they first think of marketing their lawn care business. Big Mistake! Lawn care flyers seem attractive due to the perceived low cost in relation to other landscape marketing methods. Is this really the case?

Are they really inexpensive advertising? How do you gauge the cost of your lawn business marketing campaign? The first measure you need to use is return on investment (ROI). Your “investment “is the money and, just as important, the time expenditure of your advertising. In this regard, flyers fall short due to “targeting.”

The most effective advertising places your message in front of people already looking for your service or product. These people are your “target”. Lawn care flyers are highly un-targeted as you are placing your message in front of consumers that are not looking for your service. Standard returns on direct mail (of which category a flyer falls under) are between 1-2 %. This means that your marketing is at least 98% ineffective. This relates to lawn care door hangers as well.

Now let us take a look at your ROI. Say you spend $25.00 to print 500 flyers (lawn care door hangers are more). 500 x .01 return would be five calls (your return). For example we will say it took two hours to design and print the flyer. Now let’s say you walked around a neighborhood putting these lawn care flyers on people’s doors and it took you eight hours. At this point we have to put a numerical value on your time. If you average $50.00 in your mowing business, that would be ten hours total time invested or $500.00 plus the $25.00 for printing, for a grand total expenditure of $525.00 for a ROI of five phone calls.

That is, drum roll please; a cost of $105.00 dollars per call. If you close 20% of all your sales call (average) you will get two jobs. Each job will have cost you $262.50 in advertising alone.

Does that seem like a wise business decision to you? I hope not. If it does so you won’t be in business for long.

So what is the alternative? The yellow pages? Although the yellow pages are highly targeted, there are two problems with using them. The first is cost. Even though your ROI will be far higher using the yellow book, your initial investment will be high as well. And here is the second problem: nobody reads them anymore.

In their 2008 report on consumer advertising, Neilson Media (the advertising rating company) found that 80% of all customers looking for a local service used internet search engines first. What this means to you is that if you are not “findable” on the internet when some types into Google “lawn care Your City State”, you will not even get the chance to bid on 8 out of 10 jobs available.

This however is good news for you! If you know the simple tricks and tips for getting listed highly in the search engines, even a brand new company with limited funds can compete against the largest well financed competitors and win!

So leave the lawn care flyers at the printers, and get your company on the first page of Google. That is the best ROI of all.