Guide
Landscaping marketing: the calendar does more of the work than the budget
A landscaping company's year is decided in about ten weeks. The calls start when the ground thaws, the calendar fills through spring, and whoever was visible in March mows until November. This guide is a plan built around that clock: what winter is for, what has to be live before the first warm weekend, how a finished yard sells its own street, and where video fits between crew days.
- When the spring push has to be live
- Feb
- Weekly time the plan asks for in season
- ~1 hr
- Finished 30 second videos a month on Lite
- ~11
Work backwards from the first warm weekend
Demand for landscaping is not steady. It arrives in a wall, in the first two weeks of real spring, and the companies that win those weeks are the ones a homeowner had already seen.
That makes winter the production season. December to February is when the Google profile gets fixed, last season's footage gets posted, and the review backlog gets asked for.
Timing beats polish. A rough video published in February outworks a beautiful one published in May, because by May the calendar it was supposed to fill is already full or already lost.
- December to January: fix the profile, gather last season's photos and clips, ask every past client for a review
- February: start posting weekly, book spring consults
- March to April: post what the crews are building, while they build it
- May onward: coast on rhythm, one video a week from live jobs
The Google profile is the storefront, and it is seasonal too
Landscaping near me and lawn care near me are map searches. The map shows profiles: photos, review count, response time. Your website is the second click, not the first.
Load the profile with finished work, not equipment. Thirty photos is a floor, organized by project type, refreshed each season so the top of the grid is never two years old.
Reviews decide the tie. Ask on the handover walkthrough, when the client is standing in the finished yard. A review that names the neighborhood and the job type does double work, because it reads like the searcher's own situation.
Reply to every review. The reply is read by the next homeowner, not the reviewer.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
A finished yard sells the street it sits on
Your next client is disproportionately the neighbor of your last one. They watched the trucks for a week and they see the result every day. The marketing job is to make acting on that easy.
A yard sign during the build and for a week after costs a few dollars and answers the only question the street has, which is who did that.
Ten door hangers on the same street, dropped while the trailer is being loaded, land on people who already saw the proof.
Ask the client on handover day whether they would say one sentence on camera. Most are proud of the yard and agree, and one sentence from a neighbor carries more weight on that street than anything you could write.
Video, for a trade whose product is visual
Most trades have to explain their work. A landscaper can show a yard changing shape in fifteen seconds, and that is the rare footage strangers watch voluntarily.
Three formats carry the feed. The job story, where you talk over the before, the time-lapse and the after. The price answer, where you say what a patio or a full re-sod actually runs in your area. The season one, where you tell people when to book and why.
The talking layer is what separates a company from a compilation. A homeowner hiring a five-figure install wants to hear the person who will stand in their garden, and that is as true in Ohio as in Surrey.
Film the talk once a week, one minute, in the truck or on site. The crew footage does the rest.
The weekly routine, in season
Under an hour a week, most of it on jobs you were already standing on.
- Film one talking take10 min
- Grab before and after clips on jobs10 min
- Post and answer comments20 min
- The edit, once software does it~5 min
Where the money goes, if any money goes anywhere
This plan runs on time before it runs on budget. The profile, the reviews, the signs and the videos cost hours and a little print money.
Paid ads come last, and only behind proof. Boost the job story that already did well, to a radius around the neighborhoods you want more of. An ad is an amplifier, and amplifying silence costs the same as amplifying proof.
The one recurring software cost this page proposes is the edit. Cutroom turns the weekly talking take into the finished video: upload it, highlight the phrase where you describe the build, and your time-lapse lands on those words. Captions burn in, and a 9:16 MP4 comes back in about a minute.
A batch is 100 credits and export adds 20 credits per finished minute, so a 30 second video is about 110 credits. The first 3 finished videos are free in your first 7 days, with 600 credits and no card, and carry a Cutroom mark. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 of them, takes the mark off, and cancels in one click.
The credit math for one video
Batch plus export. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits.
- Batch: transcript, director pass, b-roll100 credits
- Export, per finished minute20 credits
- A finished 30 second video~110 credits
Questions people ask
- When should a landscaping company start marketing for spring?
- In winter. The profile fix, the review push and the first weekly videos should be live by February, because the calls arrive with the first warm weekend and the shortlist is built before that.
- How much should a landscaping company spend on marketing?
- Start near zero and spend time instead. Signs and door hangers cost print money. Put real budget into ads only after the organic plan runs weekly, and only behind a video that already performed.
- What if the owner does not want to be on camera?
- A foreman who can explain a build works just as well, and the camera spends most of its time on the yard anyway. What matters is a real voice saying what happened, not a face reading a script.
- Is a website still necessary?
- Yes, but it closes rather than attracts. The Google profile and the feed do the finding. The site needs the service list, the service area, real photos and a form that gets answered within a day.
- What does the video editing step cost?
- With Cutroom, about 110 credits for a finished 30 second video, the 100 credit batch plus 20 credits per finished minute to export. The first 3 are free in your first 7 days, no card. After that Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, cancel in one click. A phone editor costs nothing and an evening; this costs a minute per video, and nothing at all until the free three are used.
- Does this work for lawn care routes, not just installs?
- Yes, with one change: the proof is consistency rather than transformation. Film the stripe lines, the edge work, the same lawn across a season. The season video and the price answer work identically.
Fix the profile in winter, be visible by February, sign every yard, and talk over the footage the crew already shot. The season does the amplification, and the edit takes about a minute instead of an evening.