Join us in this three-part series as David Merriman, owner of ArborScape Services shares his experiences in marketing his tree care business. Missed the previous stages? Click here to read stage one or here to read stage two.
Third stage
The third stage of your tree service marketing, which is where I find myself now, circa 2014, is a fundamentally different approach for a lot of great and positive reasons. It got better! You won’t be as tired in this stage. You will be spending more time in the office which, between you and me, can kind of be a drag.
Why is this a great stage? First, remember all those return customers that never showed up during year two and year three of your business? Well they’re baaaack! If you are one of the 15% of tree businesses still open after its first three years, you have a lot to look forward to because you know more about your marketing and estimating, you know your closing ratio and your work is liked well enough for people to come back for their next trimming cycle.
When this starts to happen, your close ratio begins to increase, almost without knowing it. We realized that our percentage was more like 30%, almost by accident, since return customers are nearly certain to have you do some work again.
At this stage our image became more of a focus. We did some pretty long web design and logo meetings!
We started to get serious about our long-term goal of finding our lead-to-customer ratio. Using a CRM tool called Hubspot, we started an inbound marketing program that would collect more information about customers and give us a clearer view of who was coming back and who was new, where they were coming from on the internet, and what pages they liked on the website.
At this stage, I felt like I finally had the information to make the hard, but good decisions of eliminating marketing programs that didn’t generate many leads and re-balance the budget so more money went to the ones that generated customers. Total lead volume was important but other factors were also brought to the table at this point in the business. The best way to experience this is a brief story.
As you recall in the second stage of my business, lead volume is paramount. At the time, the biggest lead generator was search engine marketing, both natural search rankings and using Google Adwords.
Email marketing and referral sites like Yelp, Angie’s List and Craigslist were way behind in terms of lead volume. We thought we had it all figured out until we invested in and started getting more data about our customers.
My perception began to change. First, new customers didn’t follow a straight line. Secondly, neither did past customers! In fact, I discovered a secret about the internet; something the consultants really don’t talk about that much. Internet marketing is not nearly as trackable as you would think. We started noticing current customers would use generic search terms and “find” us again. In other words, they may not have remembered we did their tree trimming three or four years ago, which is understandable.
We implemented call tracking on certain parts of our website. When we listened to calls, the way that our web traffic reports told us they found the site didn’t always match with how they said they found us. The report might say “Organic Search” but they would actually tell us they found us on Yelp. Or people would visit our site directly but mention they got our most recent email newsletter. It wasn’t always a straight line. That’s when we started adjusting our perception based on what leads actually became customers.
Let me warn you that this is nearly impossible to get this 100 percent accurate. You need to be able to accept some ambiguous results.
But it was clear that certain marketing channels might not generate as many leads but had a higher percentage of leads to customers.
As we dug deeper, we started to find out even more interesting stuff. Our largest customers seemed to sign up for our email news. It makes sense if your are spending $5,000 a year on tree care that you’d be more interested in tree care news but we really didn’t make the connection until we had the right software with the right information.
Although Google Adwords was a great lead driver, it wasn’t quite as good at turning into paying customers. In fact we noticed that Adwords leads were less likely to close than organic search, they showed less detail in their responses to us and seemed to care less overall about the specifics. This gave us the confidence to let up on paid search and trust that sales would climb even as we got fewer leads.
I mean, what’s the point of running ads if they are less likely to close. That is exactly what happened!
Finally another good news aspect of the third stage, especially if you are running five or six crews at this point, is the sheer amount of people searching for you by name or brand. That means you’ve developed a brand on some level. While logo design and other things are important, it’s the condition of your vehicles and your response time that becomes more important. This is where I started adding new Vermeer chippers and really started thinking about how every vendor helps me both as a business and as a marketing organization. Yes, newer machines are faster and usually more reliable. But I liked how they looked and though hard to measure, clients agree.
Your close ratio on leads like that is outstanding because they are either referred or a past customer. Repeat business is especially good with plant health care. The one caveat about repeat trimming business is that the total bill drops compared to the first time. There is usually less work to do that second time around so we like to make sure that we are strategically courting new business as well since they typically have a ton of trimming work initially.
The long and short of it is by the end of this third stage you are spending less on leads, and you have what you thought you’d have when you started the business.
If there is one thing I want you to take away from this is not to take your second and third year for granted. A tree service that relies only on word-of-mouth in the beginning is very vulnerable to cash flow collapse and failure in year two and three.
That is when you’re going to fall off the beam if you’re not proactively attracting new customers. By the time you get to your fifth year, you will have created the very referral machine you wanted initially based on your good work, your good reputation and your good standing in the search engines and on review sites.
As I look ahead I see a fourth stage of a tree business; one in which we haven’t entered but I have learned one thing about. The challenge for a Davy or Bartlett switches from marketing for good customers to marketing to and retaining good employees. I’ll report back as I move through that level.
Content in this series of articles are those of ArborScape Services, and not those of Vermeer Corporation.