Lawn Care Owners: Do You Know Your Target Market?

When you want to sell more work, these are the two most important questions you can ask yourself:

• "Who is my ideal client?"
• "Where is my ideal client?"

You need to answer these questions before you start marketing your lawn care business.

Let's talk about that in this week's Business Advice feature:

Who is Your Target Client?

The world is filled with bad advertisements.

Let's say you walk outside in the morning, and you an ad hanging on your door. It looks like someone is selling Japanese dresses, or Japanese art, or something like that. It's hard to tell, because the ad is covered in writing you can't read, and pictures you don't understand.

That door hanger clearly wasn't meant for you. How many door hangers like this one have you thrown away?

How many of your ads have other people thrown away?

For all of your marketing purposes, you need to know who your perfect clients are. You need to have a mental image of what they look like, what they want, maybe even what kind of lifestyle they have (maybe they are grandparents who no longer want to mow their own yards? Maybe they're Powerball Lottery winners who have too much cash lying around and not enough time?).

You want to write your advertisements as if the only person that matters is this one perfect client. Once you have a solid image of your ideal person in mind, you can write ads that get to the point faster, look cleaner, and sell more work.

If you're struggling to write to your ideal person, here's an old writer's trick: Draw or print out a picture of what you think your ideal client looks like. Write down the answers to these questions on the front:

• How do your services benefit your client?
• What pains are you helping them get rid of?
• What makes them want to buy from YOU?

Keep this paper in plain view while you're writing your ads. Focus all of your marketing efforts on this one person. Act as if you are writing to them directly. It can help you humanize your advertisements, which

Where is Your Target Market?

Yes, we love talking about route density on this blog. That because it's very important when it comes to marketing your company - you always want to sell more work where you're already working.

But this is about more than route density. This is about expanding into new areas, into neighborhoods you've always wanted to work in, or maybe even the commercial sector.

Pull out a map, and find the neighborhoods you most want to work in. What makes them different? What makes them desirable?

• Are they higher income?
• Do they have more trees and softscaping, or larger lawns?
• What kind of competition are you looking at in this neighborhood? What can you do that the competition doesn't do?
• How can you make this neighborhood look better?

The answers to these questions will also help you figure out which areas you want to AVOID. Some neighborhoods are filled with problem clients, or might require a higher pricing for your services because of how the land is laid out.

I have to be honest: answering all of these questions thoroughly could take you a long time. You can't learn everything about your potential clients and their properties overnight. But by the end of this busy season, you should have a much better understanding of who you want to sell work to.

What you do with these questions will help you expand your lawn care business. You'll be able to make hotter leads, upsell better to existing clients because you know them so well, and expand your business into new areas.

Related: Lawn Care Owners: 8 Changes for a Richer 2017