This article is aimed at single artisan and micro businesses working in the world of gardening – garden maintenance firms, design practices and landscapers – in the private domestic sector.
Even those who have been established for some years often find themselves unable to adequately promote their services to their chosen marketplace, or be able to find enough good quality work all year round. It is always difficult to find work, carry out the work, manage the necessary bookkeeping and try and find more work for the future all at the same time. A constant merry-go-round of worry, work, worry, more work and more worries, trying to pay your way through life, save for the future and have a full order book all at the same time may be considered the lot of the self -employed!
Why not take a step back, and look at yourself as others see you. Conduct a mental audit of your business. What attributes can you offer potential customers? What are you doing now that seems to appeal to clients? What skills do you have, work you really enjoy doing and things you are especially good at?
Are any of these attributes ‘campaignable’? (I know there is no such word in the dictionary, although we all know what it means) Are you clever at topiary? Looking after glass houses and conservatories? Rose gardens? Aquatic and pool gardens, vegetables, top fruit, orchards, wild flower meadows, sustainable gardens – any one (or more) of a host of special skills are all potential marketable attributes.
What personal constraints are you obliged to follow? Family pressures? Not enough hours in the day to run the home and go to work?
Are you constrained by lack of money to buy mechanised equipment should you need it?
You need to recognise that all of these factors, and potentially many more, may restrict your plans, and work within those constraints, as to fight against them will cause personal friction and despondency, both of which are negatives.
Write down every asset you think you have, in both skills, talent, tools and equipment, including vehicle capacity and potential uses. Produce a balance sheet, with every positive on one column, with a second showing those matters that may restrict your freedom of choice in how you proceed with selling yourself.
Include in the asset section anything positive about yourself. Your name may be evocative and alluring. Anything striking and memorable about your personality. It is often held that we make presumptions and decisions about someone in the first three seconds of meeting them, fairly or unfairly. Make sure that is a positive occasion.
The same comment may be made about your company presentation. An appropriate and memorable name, either personal or business, will register and remain with someone for a much longer time than a non-descript title.
For this reason, it is important to match your name and public persona with your chosen work offer. Even the style and colour of your livery – uniform, business cards, email address, website and vehicle colour will all help to create an image surrounding your firm.
We can all recollect seeing certain individual firms with a memorable composite image – a small 4 x 4 in bright red, with the name of the firm on the spare wheel cover, either a garden maintenance or specialist contractor offering pruning and topiary service. Perhaps a logo in the shape of a pair of shears to reinforce the message……or even the real thing bolted to the rear doors as a visual statement.
Or the car covered in artificial grass belonging to a turf company – although that is an expensive option, definitely not shoestring!
It is essential, and not expensive, to create an image for your business, the name of which is equally important as any livery or image. Take time to check out your local company names. There are many called Evergreen, All Seasons, Graduate Gardens/Landscapes, Lawns and Hedges and variations on these common names, so try and be suitably and appropriately different.
Matching the company name, colour scheme, style of services offered thereby assembling a complete package – creating an image is not an expensive operation, especially if decided upon at the outset. It is just as expensive to buy the wrong things as the right! Ask family and friends for their opinion.
Be wary of building up an image you cannot match or maintain. Calling yourself Sussex Garden Contractors if you are working alone will not attract suitable clients, as they will be expecting a larger firm. As a garden designer, using a title with the word Practice in it will evoke images of a multidisciplined studio with several designers, which may frighten off prospective customers.
Always stop and think about the image you want to present, otherwise you may attract work you are unable or unwilling to carry out.
These fundamental matters may be considered as establishing features, acting as a public foundation for your business, no matter what discipline you work in. A single targeted image that pre-announces your chosen line of gardening work, correctly managed, is not costly. It is certainly not wasted money.
Such positive imaging is good for your confidence when dealing with customers – especially prospective clients. They feel they know you before you arrive, based on your public persona. You will not be ‘going in cold’ even on the initial visit.
Seeking new customers without advertising is problematic. A well laid out and presented website may cement relations by confirming your professionalism, but how do you get webs site visitors in the first place? How do you climb Google ratings?
It used to be that Google looked for buzz words. Including a lot of specific words into a site domain used to ensure that the algorithms picked up on your site. This has changed, and today, Google look for informative or ‘helpful content’, especially when answering a question posed by the viewer. ‘How can I find someone to look after my topiary? Where do I find a conservatory expert? How do I design a rose garden? Are you looking for a pond specialist?’
Avoid obvious leading advertising phrases such as ‘Are you looking for a Gardener?’ As these will not be considered helpful content.
If you have a statement in your profile stating that you offer an answer to a question by posing it in your title text, with a simple short essay on the topic, you will receive many more enquiries at no extra cost over and above your site fees, as Google will push you up the ratings.
A simple statement ‘How to prune a wisteria’ or ‘How to clean a pond’ will ensure Google attention, and a one or two hundred word answer, written as a short essay will keep them happy.
Defining your area of sensible, practical potential enquiries should be considered if you are thinking about creating an advertising campaign.
If you had the money to advertise across the whole back page of the Sunday Times, you would attract hundreds of enquiries, only a few of which you could possibly manage to contact, leaving hundreds of disgruntled people.
This podcast is all about marketing on a shoestring, and the nearest recommendation to spending any money at all would be to start an advertising campaign across your immediate area.
Make a list of all villages and small towns with a number of the type of properties you are seeking. Perhaps new builds as a landscaper or garden designer, or old detached cottages if you are seeking maintenance projects or pruning and hedge-cutting. Research, and more research, making clear notes of potential clients or areas.
Try and collect as many parish magazines as you can in your chosen area, and check out the names and number of others making similar offers to your proposals. Check out the opposition in other words!
Parish magazines are far more than just a local rag. Many people rely on and only use regular advertisers found in ‘their’ village magazine, as if by some magical status you are deemed to be reliable by virtue of being seen as part of their local directory. These adverts are usually quarter page, paid annually at a very reasonable rate.
Consider joining Village Facebook groups, which may be held in similar esteem as Parish magazines, where service providers will find themselves being recommended by those who have engaged them for work.
At the same time, and in the same villages or town areas, place postcard sized colour adverts in the local general store windows. These are usually monthly adverts, so time each one with the season, or before i.e. box hedging pruning in May, rose garden maintenance in September, Pool cleaning in either Spring or Autumn (New season start-up or Winter maintenance). Make a note in your diary reference monies paid, list of outlets and periods of duration so you can renew them if required.
Create each mini campaign to suit the season, ensuring you get in early whilst potential customers are thinking about how they are going to get work done. Don’t wait until seasons are upon you and you have no time to plan your diary effectively, especially if you are taking pre-bookings. Follow up any preliminary dates to see if they are still needing your services.
Do you have a large proportion of your potential clientele who are house-bound or disabled? Or have family members who are? Consider those people sitting indoors, unable or unwilling to get out into the garden. Why not bring the garden to them, by use of planted containers, filled with seasonal colour and form, moving them around on a monthly basis, changing planting schemes by shifting things pots.
Similarly, offer container grown herbs, including larger plants such as bay and fennel as background growth with a most of selected herbs ready for the kitchen. Any form of container gardening should provide you with regular monthly business, and is highly campaignable. Make sure you either use the customers existing containers, or purchase new ones exclusively for their use to avoid having to transport them.
Any such enterprise may be of interest to the local parish magazine, as they are always looking for copy to print in their pages, and welcome your input. This maintains the cycle of symbiotic publicity without costing any more money than the annual advertising fee, whist providing you with an opportunity to publicise your services at no cost.
Marketing is such a wide subject, with lots of mystique surrounding the art, with creative names such as Saatchi and Saatchi leading the field, yet all they are doing is looking at a product – which includes any type of physical or theoretical subject – and bringing it to the attention of the paying or needful public. Perhaps that should be needful and willing to pay for it public.
Identify and define your market. Develop your skills to meet that market. Refine your methods of attracting the right kind of attention from needful people and you will succeed.