Marketing Plan for a Landscaping or Gardening Business: A One-Page, Month-by-Month Template

Search for a landscaping or gardening business marketing plan and most of what comes back is written for a company with a sales manager, an ad budget and a county of several hundred thousand people. A small outfit with two trucks needs something different: a page that says what to do each month, written before the season makes thinking impossible.

This is that page. Copy it, change the towns and the prices to yours, and put it somewhere you will see it.

If you want the reasoning behind each step (why density matters more than reach, why the trailer is the best ad you own), it is in our longer piece on lawn care marketing for a small-town business. This guide is the plan itself.

The plan on one page

A marketing plan for a small landscaping, lawn care or gardening business needs four parts and nothing else. (If your work is mostly beds, planting and garden maintenance, the section for gardening businesses further down shows what shifts.)

1. The goal, stated as the work you want. Not "grow the business". Something you can check, such as: "Add twelve weekly lawns on the streets we already drive, and two commercial accounts, by the end of May."

2. Who buys from you. Usually three groups:

• Homeowners on your existing routes, who are the cheapest to add because you are already there.
• Last year's customers, who are not yours again until they say yes this year.
• Commercial and institutional properties: churches, banks, offices, the municipal building, cemeteries, apartment owners. Few in number, decided by one person or a committee, usually before spring.

3. The calendar. What you do each month, below.

4. One number. Stops per hour of driving, checked monthly. If it is rising, the plan is working. If customer count is rising and that number is falling, you are getting busier without getting better off.

The month-by-month calendar

### December: write the plan

• Write the goal and the one number at the top of the page.
• List last year's customers with their address, their service and what they paid.
• List every commercial property within your route area and who decides on it, if you know.
• Set this season's prices so the renewal letters can go out with a real number on them. If you have never worked them out from your own costs, here is how to price lawn care jobs.

### January: renewals and commercial asks

• Contact every past customer with this season's price and a simple way to say yes. A letter, a text or a call, whichever they used last year.
• Approach commercial properties before their budgets are set. Bring a one-page season price, not an hourly rate, because the person deciding needs a number for a budget line. Who to ask and what the proposal holds is in how to win commercial lawn care contracts.
• Update your Google Business Profile: hours for the coming season, the towns you cover, each service listed separately.

### February: get findable before people look

• Check your website answers three questions in the first screen: what you do, which towns, and how to get on the schedule. If it does not, fix that now. Our guide to what a lawn care website should do covers the pages.
• Add a few photographs of real local jobs to the profile and the site, with the customer's permission.
• Follow up the renewals that have not answered. Most people mean to and forget.
• Plan the spring push: yard signs, truck lettering and door hangers on the streets you already mow. Lawn care advertising in the order that pays ranks what to spend on first.

### March: the first warm weekend

• This is when people look at a brown yard and decide. Put the spring cleanup offer out where your town already is: the town group, your own feed, a short post on your Google Business Profile.
• Make sure the trailer and truck lettering are clean and readable from across the road.
• Answer every enquiry the same day. In this month speed wins more work than price.

### April and May: turn every job into the next one

• Make the edges and the blown-off walks the product. The finished lawn is the advert to every car that passes.
• Put a small sign out on cut day at customers who agreed to it when they signed up.
• Ask each customer on a dense street for their neighbours, with the real reason: "We are already on your road on Thursdays."
• Ask for a review after the first visit that looks noticeably better than what was there before.

### June and July: hold the route, do not chase it

• Say no, or price properly, to single lawns far off the route. They cost more than they look like they cost.
• Keep showing up. Commercial accounts change hands mainly because somebody stopped coming in the second half of the season, and the plan for next year is being written by your reliability now.
• Take before and after photos of anything visibly fixed (a drainage corner, a bed that was overgrown) for posting later.

### August: the second window

• Put out the fall offer before the leaves drop: cleanups, aeration and overseeding, and snow work if you do it (here is how to get snow plowing contracts before the first storm).
• Ask current customers first. They are the easiest yes and they are already on the route.

### September and October: fall work and fall photos

• Post the fall jobs where local people already are, with two plain sentences on what was wrong and what you did.
• Note which commercial properties look neglected. Those are next January's conversations.

### November: score the season

• Check the one number against last year.
• Write down where each new customer came from. Whatever produced the most is where next year's effort goes.
• Start December's list.

The budget line

Most of the plan above costs nothing but time: a renewal letter, a lettered trailer you already own, a profile, a few photographs, the neighbour ask. Do all of that first.

If you then decide to pay for something (a mailer to one street, a paid listing, a lead service), write three things in the plan before spending anything:

• The limit. The most you will spend on it this season.
• The measure. Booked jobs on your route, not enquiries and not clicks.
• The stop date. When you will look at the result and decide whether to continue.

Shared leads deserve particular care, because the same request is usually sold to several companies. Our guide on how much contractor leads cost walks through the arithmetic.

If you run a gardening business

Garden maintenance, bed planting, pruning and small landscape gardening jobs fit the same one-page plan. The four parts do not change. A few things on the calendar do.

• Book the beds before the lawns. People decide on spring planting and mulch earlier than they decide on mowing, often in the first mild week of February or March. Move the renewal and spring offer a few weeks earlier than the lawn calendar above.
• Sell a season, not a tidy. A one-off cleanup is a job. Regular visits through the season (weeding, deadheading, edging, feeding) are a route. Price and describe the garden maintenance as a season on the renewal letter so the customer is saying yes once, not every month.
• Photograph close up. A mown lawn sells itself from the road. A well kept border is seen from the front path. Ask permission and take photos at the height a visitor sees them, then use them on your Google Business Profile and website.
• Lead with what you know. In a small town the gardener who can say which shrubs will survive that particular slope, or why the roses by the downspout keep failing, is remembered. A short note left after each visit does more than an ad.
• Your second window is fall and winter. Cutbacks, bulb planting and bed preparation in the fall, then design and planting conversations for next spring over the winter, when people have time to think about the garden instead of just looking at it.
• The one number. Stops per hour still works if you run a route. If most of your work is longer garden visits, track booked visit days per week through the season instead, and watch whether it holds in July.

Everything else on the plan, including the budget line below and the list of things to leave out, applies as written.

What to leave out of the plan

A small landscaping plan gets better by being shorter. Things that usually do not belong on it in a town of a few thousand people:

• County-wide advertising. It buys lawns that are off your route.
• A business page nobody follows. Post where neighbours already are instead.
• A long list of channels. Three things done every month beat ten things done in March and forgotten.

The honest summary

Decide in December, act in January to March, turn every job into the next one through the summer, ask again in August, and score it in November. Keep the plan to one page and one number. A small outfit that does those things every year tends to grow on the streets it already drives, which is the only growth in this trade that reliably makes more money rather than more miles.

If your crew also takes down trees, that side of the business sells differently, on proof of insurance more than on price, and tree service marketing for a small-town company covers it.

If you want to see what your current website and Google listing are missing before February arrives, our free site check reads your page and lists the gaps.