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Posted 04/02/2020 in Tree Service Marketing

How to Improve Your Tree Service Business During COVID-19

How to Improve Your Tree Service Business During COVID-19

The fight to contain the coronavirus, small businesses in general especially tree service companies have more time on their hands. What tree service businesses do with that time is what matters most. While staying indoors it gives you time to stop, think, and improve upon your business in ways when you might not have had the time. 

There’s no doubt that for tree service companies it's a strange time to survive in. and your bottom line thrives in.  Tree services that have a great online presence, website, social media platforms in place, and a strong following will still be able to run their business and network with past customers and even potentially get new customers from being found online. If you are uncertain about what to do and how to continue to promote your business right now this is where the Arborists Near Me team is hoping to add some guidance.

Be on the lookout over the next couple weeks, we’ll be putting together resources designed for tree service companies to guide them during this time. With most of your customers sitting at home right now, business owners are at home, online search and mobile search, video marketing is vital. Most tree service companies are running tight on funds downgrading their marketing, cutting back. When everyone is cutting back it leaves a gap in the marketplace for strong tree service companies to step in and take some of the market shares. To get you started, we’ve gathered tips on how tree service companies can cheaply and easily improve their business in a few simple steps. Let’s get started. 

Focus on Your Tree Service Company Brand

It’s easy for most tree service owners to get focused just on their website, but building a business for the long haul means you need to think about your brand. You are a brand, your tree service is a brand, your employees are a reflection of your brand. All aspects of your business are part of your brand.

Compare your tree service business to those such as Bartlett and Davey. Do a Google search to see who is coming up on the front page see what their messaging says, scrolling the home pages of these multi-location tree service companies or local companies that do a bunch of business in your area, you probably know two or three of these companies by name because their brands are unmistakable. If you have a look at their website in most cases it’s clear what they believe in, the type of person they’re targeting, and what they’re offering. Is it as evident as your tree service business branding?

An easy way to think about your tree service brand is to imagine your company as a personality, your website, and company, what type of personality would it have if it were a human. Would they be fun and exciting, reliable and dependable, or helpful and informative? Use your website design, logo, social media presence, as unique selling points of your services to express what the brand of your tree service company is.

Branding can go a long way, not just your online brand but a personal brand, do you have logos on your trucks, do your employees have shirts with your logo, the invoices you give to customers, business cards, etc. Take some time to look over your business. 

Improve Your Tree Service Social Media Channels

Right now, if you are tight on cash, don’t worry. Growing your social media presence is something that doesn’t require money, but it can surely generate a bunch of it. Tree service companies during this time can work on their social media like their Facebook page. If you have a lame Facebook page how does that blend with your brand credibility? Your Facebook page and other social media platforms are a reflection of your brand as well. 

If you haven’t been posting in days or weeks, we’ve seen some tree service Facebook pages with no posts for months. If your follower count could use a little blooming since you have time right now, things are settled down, owners can take time to share their knowledge on different topics. Plan ahead, you can forecast your posting days and weeks ahead of time, if you post once a week you could do 52 weeks of Facebook posts and they will auto-post every single week for an entire year straight. Think about what your network would want to know, share your knowledge, ask questions with a poll, run a giveaway, do a contest for referrals, give your posts some personality, 

If you’re not sure where to start, the same thing here, check out your competitor's look at their social media platforms see what customers are engaging with, get ideas and inspiration from them. Ask yourself why they are doing it and you’re not?  Take the good, but also figure out where your competitors are falling flat and bridge the gap to make your situation better.. 

Growing your social media naturally will take time, it doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye. Working on your brand takes time and consistency, it's why some tree service companies pay third party companies to handle just their social media presence. Doing it the right way yourself, however, can lead to sales, referrals, and repeat business for years to come all it takes is a little time, dedicating an hour a week just to social media. 

Fix Your Website Photos

Got website photos that you know aren’t doing you justice. If your website photos are blurry, have fingers in them, stock images that are pointless, you know aren’t convincing anyone to hire you? Now is the time to fix your website photos. It could mean updating your photo gallery, changing the images on your services page, taking this time to polish up your website. First, check out some of your local competitors then look at other metro area city tree service companies that show up on the front page as well,  see how their services are laid out, look at their photo gallery, see what you admire and what they are doing.  

Remember, when it comes to branding you want consistency with everything you do around your business, your pictures, logo, trucks, business cards, everything should be in line and talk to each other in a sense.  When you think of branding think of Apple or Coca Cola, those are identifiable brands. 

Get Automated Emails Sequenced

Email marketing for tree service companies might seem a bit old school, but it’s been around this long for a reason. It works. While you might think emails aren’t a big deal, you're wrong. People check their email on average 20 times per day. Now would be the time to get a newsletter set up on auto-send so every month your email base gets something from you. Go back several years, if you collect email addresses on your invoices, estimates, or statements you should have hundreds if not thousands of emails ready to go. If you don’t then the entire time you have been running your business you have been missing out. Your email list is a gold mine. It’s your own data of customers that were interested at one point or another in tree service. Imagine having thousands of emails from people in your area you could reach out to whenever you want. 

Start by looking at your website, how does your website ask for people to subscribe to your email list, do you have a lead magnet on your website? Is there a small box at the bottom of your tree service website, or a pop up that offers a nice discount code if they schedule an appointment for tree service? These are just a couple of tactics that can help you gain more subscribers without even talking to customers. Think about yourself, when you might have signed up for newsletters in the past do that but for your own website. 

Once you set that up, you should start exploring more elaborate email sequences. These are a series of emails sent automatically to a customer that adds themselves to your newsletter or that get sent to potential customers after a particular action on your website is taken. You might want to take time now to research different email software like MailChimp.

With automated emails, you could have a sequence for people who sign up for your tree service newsletter and a completely different one for people who download your ebook and another for people who entered their email to get your discount code for first-time customers. All of these customers are at different stages of the tree service marketing sales funnel, so each potential customer needs a different sales approach to convert them into sales. 

Optimize Your Pages

You should know by now what tree service SEO can do for your business.  Then you know that if your tree service website is optimized, you can get customers to your site for free and it will be an around the clock salesperson for your business. 

You can spend on advertising, paying a company to optimize your website is an excellent way to start getting more traffic, build up your visitor numbers, and gather data. You can also spend money on ads, but with SEO it's going to take time, usually three to six months before you start seeing results.  Since you have time now, work on your website pages and optimize your content now to start the process yourself. If the budget allows running Facebook ads is cheap some campaigns could be $100 a month to put your business in front of over 100,000 people in your local area, doing it now when your competitors are constricting could have big payouts

Let’s discuss the free ways you can do it yourself. You optimize your pages through working in relevant keywords into the text with local cities you want to show up for. Look at your homepage and services page. To do this, you can use free seo tools like Ubersuggest to help you find local keywords and get content ideas. Keywords don’t have to be one word. Usually, long tail keywords can convert better, less searches but better conversion rates. Look at the search volumes of each keyword, some might have a few dozen some could have several hundred searches in your local area. If you're new to seo, start by targeting keywords that have lower search volumes because they will be much easier to rank for.  

Once your homepage and service pages are optimized, does your tree service website have a blog, if not start a tree service blog. This is where you can really start getting your website ranking, because Google likes content your website is a knowledge base for great information and it makes you look more credible. With each blog post, answer a question or share your knowledge, it doesn't have to be long, the goal is consistency publishing once a week if you can write a simple article. In a few months or within the year you will see more traffic which in the long run will pay off tremendously. 

Conclusion

With COVID-19 happening right now, tree service companies are much slower pushed to stay inside during these times, what you do with your time is what matters. Hopefully you take this time to work on your business brand. Tree service branding is so important in 2020 and moving into the future.  You are in the right place to start to improve your business. 

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