Hiring a marketing agency versus doing it yourself, for landscapers
What marketing help costs a landscaping company, which parts to keep in house, the red flags in a sales pitch, and why a trial should come before a contract.
Landscaping owners get pitched more than almost any other trade, because the businesses are numerous, the seasons are predictable, and a lot of owners are easy to reach on a truck phone in February. Across 91,717 listings, 34.6% have no website and 55.6% have fewer than 10 reviews, which reads to a sales floor as a very long list of people with obvious problems.
Some of that help is worth paying for. Much of it is not. Here is how to tell before you sign anything.
Do this yourself, always
Some things nobody can do for you, and paying someone to do them badly is worse than not doing them.
- Asking for reviews. An agency can build the system, write the texts and track the tally. It cannot make a crew lead send the message from the truck. That is a management job. The reviews guide is the whole method and it costs nothing.
- Answering the phone. No vendor fixes an answer rate. Staffing does.
- Photos. Nobody else is standing in the yard before the crew unloads. Fifteen seconds per job produces the entire year of ad creative, and without it a paid campaign has nothing to run.
- Pricing. An outsider cannot set your prices, because they do not know your cost per crew hour or your route.
Worth paying for
- Google Ads management. Genuinely technical, expensive to learn on your own money, and easy to waste $3,000 on in a spring.
- Meta ads, once you have a photo library worth advertising.
- A website build. A five to seven page site done properly is $1,500 to $4,500 one-time, or $150 to $350 a month.
- Local SEO and profile management, if you will not do it monthly yourself.
- Bookkeeping. Not marketing, but it is the reason most owners cannot tell whether the marketing worked.
What a fair price looks like
For a residential company between $300,000 and $2M in revenue:
- Google Ads management: $400 to $1,200 a month, or 10% to 20% of ad spend, whichever is higher. Ad spend is separate and goes to Google.
- Meta ads management: $300 to $900 a month plus spend.
- Local SEO and Google profile: $300 to $800 a month.
- Everything bundled, small company: $800 to $2,500 a month total, plus spend.
- A one-off website: $1,500 to $4,500.
Above roughly $3,500 a month, you should be seeing a named person, a monthly call, and a report that shows booked jobs, not impressions. Below about $400 a month for management, nobody is doing real work, they are running a template and hoping.
Compare it to what the work is worth. If an account is worth $2,600 a year to you, a $1,000 monthly retainer needs to produce five new accounts a month to be obviously worth it. Do that arithmetic before the call, not after.
Red flags
"We guarantee page one." Nobody controls Google's ranking. What can be guaranteed is work performed, not position achieved.
A twelve-month contract with a startup fee, signed in February. The season is the leverage. You will be locked in through your entire busy period before you know whether it works.
They own your accounts. If the Google Ads account, the Business Profile, the domain, the phone number or the website is in their name, you are renting your own business. Everything must be in your name with you as owner and them as a user.
No call recordings and no lead log. If they cannot show you the actual calls their ads produced, they are showing you clicks.
A report that leads with impressions and reach. Those are the metrics you show when the booked jobs number is bad.
They pitch you in March. Anyone who understands this trade sells you in November, sets up in December and January, and is live before the rush.
No questions about route density or service area. An agency that does not ask which towns are profitable for you will run a 25-mile radius and hand you leads that lose you money.
They will not put the cancellation terms in writing in the same document as the price.
Freelancer, agency, or an in-house hire
- A freelancer at $500 to $1,500 a month is often the best value under $1M in revenue, if they specialize in home services. The risk is a single point of failure who disappears in July.
- An agency at $1,500 to $4,000 a month buys redundancy and more skills. The risk is being the smallest account and getting a junior.
- An in-house marketing person at $45,000 to $65,000 makes sense past roughly $3M in revenue or with several branches. Below that they are underused nine months a year.
Whatever you pick, ask one question on the first call: "Who has done this specifically for a landscaping or lawn care company, and can I talk to them." If the answer is a case study for a dentist, keep looking. The seasonality alone makes this trade different, and someone who does not know that April clicks cost double will spend your money in April.
Why a trial should come first
The order most of this industry uses is backwards. You sign, you pay a setup fee, you wait 90 days, and then you find out. In a business with a twelve-week selling season, 90 days to find out is a year lost.
A trial reverses the risk onto the vendor, which is where it belongs, and it tells you things a proposal never will: whether they answer messages, whether the work is competent, whether the reporting is honest. Two weeks of watching someone work tells you more than any pitch.
That is why every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial with no card. Pick the one that hurts most, we build it in your accounts, and after two weeks you keep it at a price quoted up front or you stop and keep what was built. See the free trial page for how it runs.
If you decide to do it yourself
Do it in this order, and give each one two weeks:
- Google Business Profile completed properly. Start with the profile guide.
- A review process running on every first visit and every completed install.
- Missed-call text-back turned on before March.
- A five-page website with before and after photos and price ranges.
- Door hangers behind every crew, every day, in the spring.
- Only then, paid ads.
Most companies in this trade never get past step three, which is why steps one to three are worth more than any retainer.
Frequently asked
Can I run ads myself with no experience? You can run Local Services Ads yourself. Standard search takes a few months to stop wasting money, and that tuition is usually more than a year of management fees. See the Google Ads guide.
How long before I judge a new vendor? Sixty to ninety days for search ads, two weeks for whether they communicate. Fire on communication early and on results later.
What should I have before I hire anyone? Real prices, a photo library, and someone who answers the phone. Marketing that arrives before those three is money spent making a leak bigger.
Text or call (385) 832-6175, or read the benchmark report first and decide for yourself where the gap is.