Looking to Expand our customer base

[trademarklawns]

Our landscape company has been established since 1991 it has been a family owned business, this year I have took over ownership, I have added our website, gopher software, new equipment, we have well established customers but not to many about 20 they are highend and want the best, but we need to push our company to the next level and need more work like most, any suggesting on how to add to our customer base and to push our services will be appreciated www.trademarklawns.com

[Steve]

Lawn care business tips

Hi trademarklawns, Welcome to our forum! What type of marketing have you been doing or are you planning on doing this year for your business?

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[trademarklawns]

well in the pass we have done none! just word of mouth. now that I have took over I am trying to fighure out what we should do for marketing, I was thinking about radio or tv but not sure at the moment.

[Steve]

From what I have heard and please others feel free to jump in, radio and tv has been bad.

It doesn't target your ideal customer base.

Do you have a referral program set up at all to encourage your customers to tell their friends about you?

Let me see if I can pull in some of our forum experts to offer their input.

You say that you do high end residential customers. Have you thought about expanding into commercial customers or even middle class customers?

Hi. I agree with both and might suggest using the newpaper as a means of targeting your broad range of customers. As most of your customers will be reading the paper, you could do this with an ad or insert. Its just a personal belief but with radio you can only target the people that listen to that station, which can also apply to tv.

[Steve]

Another thing we have seen for getting high end customers was to get a mailing list of customers in your target area and then send a sales letter to them.

It seems a sales letter better targeted high end customers.

Also why not go back to the basics and hand out business cards. Get flyers or door hangers made and hand them out too.

Have you checked out our marketing ideas in our book here?

[trademarklawns]

I will go through that book, thank you guys for the replys.

[Steve]

Keep us posted on how you are doing. There are tons of suggestions in the book. Apply a few here and there may help you push further than ever before.

[trademarklawns]

One more thing, I know that many landscape companies have customers sign a yearly contract, now we have never required our customers to sign a contract, is that something that we should consider doing? And are there any benefits of doing it?