Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Welcome to the Grow Show. Powered by Stihl. On the Grow show, we share ideas, tips, tactics and insights to help you grow your landscaping business. Based on our team's 40 years of experience running a landscaping company and working with other owners and their teams to do the same. New episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays. Filling in for Marty Grunder as host this week is me, Emily Lindley, content and events manager at the Grow Group and marketing manager at Grunder Landscaping Companies.
[00:00:26] So today I'm hopping on to talk a little bit about something that should be hopefully top of mind for many landscaping companies around the country right now, and that is your spring marketing campaigns. What are you doing to set the year up for success, to make sure that you're getting the leads you need now so that your schedule stays full through the summer and the rest of the year? We've heard from some of our peer group members that sales are tracking behind. We're seeing a little bit of a slower start ourselves at Grunder Landscaping this year as well. So you're not alone if that's what you're seeing out there. And one thing that I know a lot of landscaping companies, ours included, are doing is pivoting to digital for advertising options. There's a lot of benefits to using some of the digital tools out there. Specifically today I wanted to talk about social media ads because that's one of the one of the tools we're relying a little more heavily on this year.
[00:01:12] Social media, generally speaking, it's going to be more cost effective than a print and mail campaign. You're not going to pay postage. Generally, your price per per impression is going to be less than it would be for a postcard mailing. But we're still, you know, jury's still out on the effectiveness. Is it going to be just as effective as a print campaign? It may or may not be. Some companies are seeing success with it. We're kind of trying it out and allocating more of our budget year over year to these digital things with the plan to be to be even more digital as the years go on? This year we are running social media ads specifically. I've had ads running on Facebook and Instagram, the the meta properties since the beginning of February. Pretty early in February, promoting maintenance services. And we recently launched our design build campaign as well. What is involved in all of that? And I wanted to get on here. This episode was not part of our original content plan for the Grow show. But I'm seeing a common mistake myself out there and I want to get on here and Save you guys some money. It's rare that as the marketing person I can come to you with cost saving versus cost spending ideas. But this one is a cost savings if you are currently setting your ads up the wrong way and it is wrong. And let me get into what I'm seeing out there. So I over, I must have done something with my web traffic that all of a sudden Facebook and Instagram have decided I'm a great client for landscaping companies. In the last 48 hours I have gotten maybe 30 different ads on my feed and I, I like to see em because I like to see what everybody else is doing. But one thing that I'm seeing over and over again, the companies I'm getting ads for are not within my service area. They're not, they're not in the place I live, they do not service my location where I live. And they're not even actually cities that I've traveled to recently. So it's not that I'm just, you know, collateral damage because I visited the city lately. I'm getting ads for companies as far away as California, even though I'm based here in Ohio. Obviously those companies do not service this location. So what that tells me is that they are not restricting the geographic area that their ads appear within, which is super, super simple to do within Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. If you're running ads there and most of the digital platforms the same way, you would not send a postcard mailing nationwide. If you are not a nationwide company, you shouldn't be paying to boost your ads nationwide unless you are servicing all of those areas. So I know most of the people following us here are maybe in a handful. Maybe you have branches, maybe you're in a handful of cities. Maybe you're still just in one city. I want to talk you through, through a little bit of how to set up your ads the right way because it can be kind of confusing and it's, it's really easy, especially if you're just hitting that boost button at the bottom of your post. It's really easy to set them up a certain way. And then now you're spending money to promote your ad to people who are not even in your service area and are not, not going to be good clients for you because you can't service their property. So the first tip I'm going to share and this was all stuff that I shared during this past GROW Conference, GROW 2025 in Columbus, Ohio. I led a session about specifically social media ads and setting them up. So I'm pulling a little bit from what I taught at that event. If you wanted to see more stuff like this, highly encourage you to look for GROW 2026. We will be opening up registration for that event to the public soon. So to start, you should not be hitting the Boost button that you see at the bottom of posts on your Facebook or Instagram page for your company. I don't like this button. It's so confusing to me why it's even there because what happens is when you set that up, you're not unlocking the full potential and all the targeting and different setting options that are available through Meta to really optimize your ads. So instead of doing the Boost button, you want to set up your ads through Meta's Ad Manager. Now you set them up in Ad Manager and it will promote your pieces on both Facebook and Instagram. So it's one setup for both platforms. You can separate it out. If you only want to do ads on Instagram or only want to do it on Facebook, you have those setting options but just the options that are available to you. When you go through Ads Manager versus through the Boost button, it's just so much more robust. You have so many more targeting options. You can really control where your ad showing up and how it's looking in all the different placements that it is. It's a little bit more confusing to figure out, but I think it's well worth the time that it takes to set it up, to get it set up the right way so that you can reap all the benefits of these ads. If you're doing LinkedIn just as a sidebar, LinkedIn's a little less confusing if you hit the Boost button on those posts, it does take you to the Ad manager that they have set up through your account. So whether you hit the Boost button or navigate straight to the ad manager on LinkedIn, you're getting to the right place. That's not the case on Facebook and Instagram. So I'm going to stay focused on Facebook and Instagram in this episode just because I see that's where I'm seeing a lot more of these ads that are not geo targeted.
[00:06:01] And we'll talk through kind of what that looks like and what I recommend so you can get to the Ad Manager through your page. Since you're probably listening to this and not watching the video, I can't screen share and show you what that looks like, but I can have some screenshots pop in here. So if you are watching on YouTube, you'll see the screenshots taken from my personal management page of where you go to find the ads manager. If you're confused, you can also just Google Facebook Ads Manager and you should be able to find some help articles to help you out there. You might need to set up an account if you've never run an ad this way, it's not that hard. Just set it up that way. I recommend setting it up as a business page versus tying it to your personal account. That makes it a little easier if down the line. Even if you're the only one managing it right now. If down the line you want to ask somebody else on the team to help. It's a little easier to share the account if it's set up as a business and in the business group from the get go.
[00:06:51] Once you have that set up, you're going to want to start by creating a campaign. I like to organize my campaigns by the year and then the type of work that they're promoting. So for example, in my ad account right now for Grunder landscaping, we have 2025 design build and we have 2025 maintenance. Those are the two different campaigns that I am running. Within each campaign will be an ad set. You can have multiple sets per campaign. The ad sets are how you're going to control your audience. So if you want to send certain ads to certain audiences and you want to have multiple different audiences going, you can do all that through here. Which is the coolest part about all these ads, just the granularity you are able to get to when you're promoting your ads is so awesome. You'll use a unique ad set for those audiences. You also will need a unique ad set for different placements. So if you want a certain ad to only run on Instagram, you'll create a separate ad set for that versus an ad set that would run on both Facebook and and Instagram. It walks you through this. It's pretty intuitive. Once you're in the system, it walks you through with checkboxes for what to click and what not to click. So you can select the placements. I do want just a call out. Keep in mind that the Advantage plus options, if you stick to the recommended options from Facebook, it will have some of your ads appearing on their audience network which is on non meta owned channels. So that would be on like websites typically kind of as like those little sidebars. I typically disable that option when I'm setting them up. I like to, if I'm, if I'm paying meta to do the ads. I want those ads to be running on their owned platforms. I want it to stay on Facebook and Instagram. You can set up retargeting ads. I've done it. There are different services that allow you to do retargeting ads. I like to keep that separate versus having it involved in this ad set. And just keep. Keep those two things separate. Because to me, it's really a different strategy if you're trying to reach somebody for the first time or trying to retarget somebody who's maybe already visited your website.
[00:08:45] So when you get through creating the ad set, you're then going to get to the point where you create the actual ad itself. This is where you set up your creative and your captions. You can also set the objective for ads. I usually select traffic and try to get people onto my website to fill out the contact us form. That's generally what I want people to do when they see one of our ads.
[00:09:06] Maybe your objective would be different. The one thing I always like to say is, you know, we want to get them onto our own owned platforms as fast as we can. Right. There might be a reason you could make a good case for having engagement ads or ads where you're trying to increase the number of followers on your Instagram or Facebook page. You definitely could have a good reason for running those ads. Typically, I prefer to do traffic, get them to our website where we can get their contact information for our sales team. We can kind of get them involved in our. In our system at that point and make sure that they're getting all the other nurturing that we do.
[00:09:39] So creating your audience is the next step. This is the important one, people. This is where it's really important to match up with who you actually want to be targeting. You have all these options available to you, and it's just. It's just a waste of money to not take advantage of them, frankly. So your options are you can do pixel targeting, where you have the. The snippet of code inserted on your website and then it tracks website visitors. You can retarget people who've been to your website. What's really powerful about pixels? And then another type of targeting you can do uploading lists is that you can create lookalike audiences. Now, what this does is it takes your. The list that you tell it to, whether that's through the pixel, or by uploading a list of your clients, which you can also do. And it will take people, it'll match that with their users, with their Facebook users, and then it will Create a lookalike audience so the people who have similar web traffic and interactions on their platforms to that list, that initial list of people. It's a great way to. If you already know that the people on your list, the people visiting your website are your ideal client, this is a great way to very easily expand your audience to hit more people like them. I think it's really powerful. That's where we see the best results is with that that form of marketing versus interest targeting which is pretty simple to set up that something you could probably get done today without having to do much extra work. You just select what interests you think maybe that your ideal client has maybe they you think that they like to follow beauty and luxury car brands. You can select those things. That's just going to be more of a guessing game as far as if they're your, your ideal client or not. You can also target interaction. So people who've interacted with any of your other content on Facebook or Instagram, that's your other option.
[00:11:19] Once you've decided kind of which of those buckets you want to fall to, then that's the next spot is you're going to choose geography. Now this is where it gets tricky because the default is always going to be for the entire US you don't want to do that unless you are one of the national landscapers in the industry. Then maybe they want to do that. But even them, I would bet most of them have certain priority areas and they're doing more of a geo target like this, a radius around certain cities where they have branches they're trying to grow. That's what I recommend you do.
[00:11:51] Your radius might, you can set it for your office and do everything within a 10, 15, 50 mile radius of your office or you can upload zip codes. You can also say you know what I want to target specifically people in the 454-584-5459 and 45249 zip codes. And I don't want to target anybody else outside of those zip codes even though they are within our service area. That's really powerful if you know you want to do something super, super targeted. If you're really working on route density, that can be a great option. Or if you just know that know certain neighborhoods, you have an easier time selling. And why hunt sales that are harder for your sales team to close than they have to be. Let's stick to the neighborhoods we know we can have success in. So that's what I do. We typically either do a radius or zip codes it just depends on the strategy for the ad that we're running. But we're always going to be targeting specifically geographically, the areas that we know we want more work in. And that typically does not line up with our total service area, because we might service some of these areas, but maybe they're a little farther than we'd ideally like to travel for work. So we 100% will travel for the right job or the right property. But if we can build route density closer to our office, that's always going to be the priority for us because we're going to be able to be more profitable with that work. As you're setting up your Instagram, Your Facebook, your LinkedIn, any of your social media ads, just please, please, please do me a favor. Save yourself some money, make sure you geo target them, and then also just be smart with your objectives and setting them up. I hope I've helped you this week. Stay tuned. We'll have more episodes of the Grow show focused on marketing throughout the year, and I hope to see you again soon.
[00:13:29] Thank you for listening to this episode of the Grow Show. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode and head to growgroupinc.com for more information and resources to grow your landscaping business. A special thanks to the folks at Stihl, whose support makes this podcast possible and whose reliable handheld power equipment makes our jobs easier daily. We'll talk to you next week.
