The 2024 Guide to Free Social Media Marketing For Your Lawn Care Business Part 1

How To Use Social Media To Grow Your Lawn Care Business Organically

Social media is one of those things that we all know we should be doing, but posting consistently can be overwhelming and often gets put on the back burner. I am hoping to make your life easier and help give you a simple and actionable plan that can get your lawn care business out there and hopefully bring in more leads.

This guide is about free social media marketing, or what is sometimes called organic social media marketing. Yes, you can spend money to boost posts or run ads, but first, it is crucial to implement a solid organic social marketing effort. Leverage your low-cost or free marketing tools before jumping into paid advertising. Also, make sure you’ve implemented the physical marketing strategy we mentioned HERE before paying for ads.

Part One is a general guide to organic marketing on social media platform. Part Two is a guide to use the most popular specific social marketing platforms.

We made a podcast episode of this article. Listen instead:

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Watch the video podcast instead of reading

Why Social Media Marketing?

The most critical part of marketing strategy is figuring out who your ideal client is and where they put their attention. Wherever their attention is, that is where your lawn care business needs to be. In 2024, most of America is using some form of social media. One study showed that American adults spend about 2-3 hours looking at social media every day. That’s a lot of time. It makes sense then that you need to figure out how to have your lawn care business in the mix of social media.

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Also, when potential customers are researching your yard care business, they will most likely check your social media profile. Active and engaging profiles are much more attractive to potential customers than a profile with only a couple of posts every month.

How to Use Social Media For Marketing

General Best Practices For Social Media Marketing

We break down how to use specific platforms in Part 2, but before we do that, let's talk about some best practices that will help you be successful in your marketing efforts.

Create separate business accounts. This way, you can keep your personal life off your business account. More specifically, your customers don’t want to see the stuff your crazy uncle posts on your personal page.
Engage and connect with your existing lawn care clients on social media. Ask them to follow your business profile.
Post your content regularly, at minimum once per day. Your clients are flooded with posts and ads all day. If you want to stand a chance of showing up in their media feed, you need to be posting often. Set a goal and stick to it.
Post content on a platform that your customers and their friends use regularly. You might like to consume media on a specific platform, but that may not be where your customers consume media. Ask some existing customers what platforms they use regularly.
Once you have identified a platform, focus on that one in particular. You don’t need to be on every platform.
Not every post should be an advertisement. Use the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your content should be to inform, entertain, educate or engage your audience. Twenty percent can promote your lawn care business.
Include a picture or video, even if the central part of the content is text. You’ll get more attention this way.
Show yourself on camera every once and a while. It will bring a personality to your content and help your customers connect with you.
Post high-quality content. Take the time to use correct spelling and grammar and take good pictures and videos. If your phone is less than two years old, the images will be great. Watch some Youtube videos on taking great pictures with your phone camera. It will help your photos stand out from the crowd.

What Kind of Content Should I Post?

There is no single correct answer to the question, “What kind of content should I post?” However, I wanted to list a few ideas of things you can post because coming up with great content can be difficult. As I stated above, there are four categories of content: inform, entertain, educate and engage. Here are a few ideas:

Inform

Use the seasons to remind your audience that it is “time” to do certain things around the yard. For example, when in your region is the best time to aerate, fertilize, prune roses, dethatch, overseed, etc. Do some research, and post regularly, which can help sell additional services.
Demonstrate your expertise and experience to earn trust. For example, talk about the benefits of cutting in different directions, keeping a particular species of grass at a specific height, or why aeration is excellent for the health of their lawns. However, you are not teaching them how to do something. You are teaching them what and why certain things need to be done. Don’t give away your secrets or experience.
Show yards that need serious help and talk about what you would do to make them more beautiful (remember, don’t tell them how to do it, though). Also, don’t talk poorly about your current clients' yards. Instead, you can use random yards you find on your route.

Entertain

Show off your work. Get pictures and videos of your crisp edges and smooth lines in the grass.
Use the slo-mo and time-lapse feature on your phone camera to take videos of you working. These are fun to watch and will be entertaining for your customers. In addition, most social media platforms let you edit and add music within their apps. Try to keep these videos short, around 10-20 seconds only. Otherwise, you’ll lose their attention.
Make your own memes. Even retired folks are sharing memes on social media right now. So jump in the mix and make your own.

Hijinks and goofiness can get views on some social media platforms, but be wary of this type of entertainment as your clients might perceive it as unprofessional.

Educate

I see informing and educating as very similar, but the difference is essential. From my perspective, the point of education is to teach your audience to do something independently. If you’re teaching people how to do lawn maintenance, you will probably not get the right people watching or looking at your posts. People who purchase lawn maintenance services aren’t necessarily interested in how to do it.
Instead, ask yourself, what topic could you teach people that is helpful but isn’t cutting into your services. For example, if you don’t work on or with irrigation, you could do some educational videos on that subject. It’s helpful and educational, your audience will appreciate it, and most importantly, in this example, you’re not trying to sell irrigation services.

Engage

Engagement is where you can have some fun interacting with your audience.
You could post a group of pictures of some lawns that you cut and have your audience vote on which one they like the best. The prize could be that whoever wins gets a free cut. To encourage engagement, you would then ask them to share the post with all of their family and friends to get them to vote.
If you have connected online with your clients, you can “tag” them on any pictures you share of their property. Your post will show up on their social media feed and potentially on their friends' feeds.
Come up with an online contest where customers can share their pictures and “tag” your business profile. The photo with the most shares or likes would win some sort of prize that you choose.
The whole point of engagement posts is to get your clients to share your lawn care social media profile with their family and friends, and in turn, you will get more exposure and leads.

Wrapping Up, Part One

Hopefully, you can see the power of social media in building awareness of your brand with the family and friends of your current clients. My final advice is to stick with it! Social media is a long-term strategy that will pay off over time in the long run. You might get some quick wins but keep at it even if you don’t see results immediately. None of us decided to cut grass for a living because we thought it would be easy. You got this!

Want Ideas of what to post. Download our 28 Day Social Media Posting Schedule at the top of this page.