Digital Marketing for Arborists: Acquiring Additional Clients Using a Multi-Channel Approach
As a professional who cares for trees, imagine this for your business:
- You have countless phone calls and email requests for quotes and consults
- Your waiting list of potential clients needing their trees cared for is growing
- Your repeat clients keep coming back for more
- Your healthy, beautiful trees adorning the photos of local influencer pages
- You can hire additional staff to keep up with demand
- You have total clarity on how your digital marketing performance is going
This may seem like a dream come true, and that’s because it is!
You grow the trees, we grow your business!
The Houston Digital Marketing Agency will help you understand the process we use to make your digital marketing campaign for your tree maintenance company a huge success.
We’re a Marketing Agency Specializing in Arborists
You love trees; we love digital marketing. Together, our experience in our respective industries will help grow your business bigger than you could imagine.
Reach out to us for a free, no-strings-attached consultation.
Strategies That Work for a High-Performing Digital Marketing Campaign for Arborists
We are proud to be a top-performing Houston Marketing Agency with clear processes and strategies that get clients results.
Our digital marketing journey focuses on three essential components:
- Set up data analytics, giving you the power to track campaign performance
- Drive inbound traffic to your website
- Convert that traffic into clients
This seems pretty simple, right?
As long as your results are trackable, you’ll set yourself up for success.
If you can answer these three questions, you’re ahead of the game, good to go, and can skip the rest of this page.
- What is the number of organic visitors your website received from Google last month?
- What is your website’s conversion rate?
- What is your cost per qualified lead from Google Ads?
If you read those questions and related to this guy, then keep reading.
If trying to answer these questions leaves you looking like this little girl, don’t fret. Our team is happy to walk you through our process, making sure that you know how everything works and what you should be doing to maximize results.
Keep reading to find out why digital marketing is important for an oil and gas company.
Phase 1: Build Robust Data Analytics
Trackable KPIs
Best practices in digital marketing for arborists rely on cold, hard data. If you aren’t tracking your data analytics and just using your intuition, you are doing yourself a great disservice.
As an arborist, there are several KPIs you should be tracking for your tree care business:
- Revenue per hour of labor
- Incoming leads
- Work backlog
- Safety incidents
- Service coverage expansion rate
- Client retention
There are also KPIs that are directly related to your digital marketing campaign that are just as necessary to track, including:
- Number of website visitors by channel
- Cost pers by channel:
- Cost per website visitor
- Cost per lead
- Cost per qualified lead
- Cost per conversion
Data Fidelity
Unfortunately, what we have seen when we’ve inherited campaigns from freelancers and even other agencies is a lack of data fidelity. Some of the main issues we’ve discovered are:
- Double counting conversions
- Missed tracking of every step of the funnel to understand conversion and drop-off rates
- Focus on tracking irrelevant conversions, such as using Google Maps to get a “direction request” to your office
The data you will receive and track from us will be completely accurate and relevant to your tree business’s digital marketing campaign.
Phase 2: Maximize Affordable Inbound Traffic
One thing you’ll notice in Houston almost everywhere you look is trees. Residential homes, commercial spaces, retail centers, and restaurants usually have at least a few trees on their property. Most people don’t have the time, knowledge, or tools to maintain the trees on their property and are quick to hire a company to do this work for them.
The tree maintenance industry is growing, and the competition is fierce. So, having a high-performing digital campaign can make or break your business.
Let’s look at a few ways people seek out arborists in the Houston area that we can capitalize on to increase traffic to your business.
These days, Google is more than just a search engine. The word “Google” has become synonymous with “look it up” and the go-to people use for finding answers to anything and everything…including arborists!
Looking at this alone, almost 62,000 people per month searched for arborists near them.
Here, we can see that in Houston, nearly 2,000 people searched for Houston arborists in one month alone! Imagine all of these searches leading straight to your business.
Another search that people tend to look up is based on the type of trees they have.
Just looking at these searches alone, it’s clear that performing well on Google can make or break your business. Since tree maintenance and care is a niche industry, it is important to have a digital marketing strategy specific to arborists.
If you’re not capitalizing on organic and paid traffic, you are missing out.
Organic
You have two options to rank organically on Google for keywords such as “arborists near me.”
First up is something called the Google Local Pack.
How can my tree maintenance business rank in the Google Local Pack?
Without getting into the complexities of SEO (since it’s a lot of technical talk and a lot of moving parts), the basic formula is this:
- Have an optimized and highly-reviewed Google Business Profile.
- Have enough localized content on your website.
Underneath the Google Local pack on the results page is where you’ll find the organic results.
What can you do to organically rank below the Google Local Pack?
Again, the SEO algorithm is complex, but there are things you can do to increase your organic ranking:
- Make sure your website is comprehensive and content-rich.
- Make sure your on-page SEO elements are correct: title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, etc.
Paid
Not all paid channels will output the same performance. Different factors like the size of the project, the needs of the project, and the types of trees may have an effect on performance.
These are a couple of places you may consider investing your business’s budget to get paid traffic.
Google Ads
Google Ads is a paid service that helps your business rank at the top of the results page. If you’re having trouble getting your website to rank organically, this is a great option to move you up higher in the search results.
These paid ads are the ones you see at the top that are labeled as sponsored. When done correctly, these sponsored ads can be among the first your target audience sees, leading to increased client inquiries.
It’s worth noting that there are different types of Google Ads we can test to make sure your performance is as effective as can be. These types of ads are:
- Search
- Performance Max
- Display
- And more
YouTube Ads
Having a business that relies heavily on the aesthetic and visual qualities of your services lends itself to finding success with YouTube Ads.
When people are looking for arborists, it’s usually for specific reasons. They need someone to:
- Plant trees, shrubs, and wooded plant life
- Care for and maintain plant life
- Diagnose and treat woodland diseases
The goal of hiring an arborist is to ensure a person’s plants are healthy and trimmed and complement the space they are in.
Creating a YouTube Ad is the perfect way to showcase projects you’ve completed and visually capture your target audience.
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok Ads
Harnessing the power of social networking platforms is a genius way to get exposure and increase traffic to your business.
However, not all social networking platforms are the same. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok users tend to target specific demographics. There is some overlap, but knowing the demographics of each platform can help you make sure you are using your ad budget wisely and effectively.
- Facebook: preferred platform for GenX users
- Instagram: preferred platform for GenX and Millenials
- TikTok: preferred platform for Millenials and GenZ
Once you know your target audience, you can use the different social media platforms to your benefit.
For example, maybe you notice that not so many GenZ-ers own homes or businesses, so they don’t have to worry about tree maintenance. As such, a TikTok ad campaign may not be the most effective for you. On the other hand, targeting Facebook and even Instagram users who may be more likely to look for arborists themselves would be time and money better spent.
All of these social media platform ad campaigns can be beneficial; it’s just a matter of making sure your digital campaign targets each one most effectively.
Phase 3: Increase Conversion Rates
We’ve laid the foundation for driving users to your website. Now what?
Now, we have to do something with these potential clients to turn them into actual clients and even better, repeat clients.
It won’t do much for your business if you have a ton of users coming to your website but not converting into customers.
Use CRO Best Practices
Now, you may be wondering how to convert someone to a client. There are numerous things you can do, but here are just a few of the things that may optimize your conversion rate:
- Make sure your website is easy to navigate
- Offer a mobile-friendly option for your website
- Add real-life reviews and testimonials from past clients
- Ensure your images and videos are high-quality
We can’t get into the details of every single strategy available to you on this page, but here are some of the things you can do as an arborist to increase conversion rates.
Focus on Digging Deep During Certain Seasons
Having an ongoing digital campaign throughout the entire year is worthwhile, but just remember to keep in mind to focus your marketing budget for the peak seasons.
While Houston’s climate is warmer and more consistent than other parts of the country, tree maintenance trends toward certain seasons. Spring and autumn tend to be the two times of year when people start to think about caring for their trees and shrubs. So, ramping up your digital marketing campaign just before these peak seasons can be beneficial.
Split Test Landing Pages
Running split tests is the best way to find out if website design, copy, or other on-page elements are increasing conversion rates.
- Landing Page A – this is your control page.
- Landing Page B – this is your test page.
Take Landing Page A and change one component on it (example: “contact us” vs. “request a quote”).
Then, compare your test page conversion rate to your control page and see if this change made a difference. Consistently testing your pages can see an increase in conversions.
Clear CTAs
CTAs, otherwise known as Calls-to-Action, should be placed throughout your website several times.
For your tree business, these may look like:
- Schedule an appointment
- Request a quote
- Contact us today
- And more
Whichever CTA you decide to use, make sure it should be straightforward and clear.
Increase LTV on Autopilot
But wait, there’s more!
Converting someone into a client is great, but now you have to focus on increasing the LTV (lifetime value) of this conversion you worked so hard for.
The great thing about being in the business of trees, shrubs, and plant life is that they’re usually not a one-and-done service. Planting a tree is just the beginning. But this tree will continue to grow and need, at the very least, annual maintenance.
This is a great time to use email marketing to increase repeat services from clients. As much as we look at our trees each day, we may not always think to ourselves that we need to schedule their biannual pruning. Maybe we are reminded that we need to call our arborist when we are running out the door and see our tree looking sickly, but by the time we get home, we’ve forgotten all about it.
Automated reminder emails at the beginning of each season are a great way to stay in the minds of your clients and increase the potential for them to come back to you for services.
Digital Marketing for Arborists Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
This may seem like a ton of information, but don’t be overwhelmed. The Houston Digital Marketing Agency is here to help you grow your business.
We have experience helping brands locally and nationally increase leads and sales in all types of industries.
We would love to help your tree maintenance business increase enrollment with our digital marketing campaign. We are so confident in our work that we offer a 100% refund if we can’t improve your performance within three months.
Contact us today to get started.