Tree Service Advertising and Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Profits

Joshua Tree Experts began as an independent tree service business. Today we are a franchise, and the difference in the corporate structure is tremendous when it comes to advertising and marketing. As an independent business, you fund marketing alone, whereas, with a franchise, you benefit from a group effort.

Having experienced both sides, there is a combination of ways to grow your profits in your tree care business, and one of those ways includes joining our franchise. In considering that option, here is our best advice as a $7 million business that started with two guys!

Know Your Best Customer

The lawn care and lawn maintenance industry is competitive. According to IBISWorld, there are over 150,000 tree-trimming service businesses in the U.S. as of 2023 – an increase of 5.9% from the previous year. Being able to carve out your niche in this market starts by knowing as much as you can about your best clients. What characteristics make up your best clients? Are they single-family homeowners, or commercial business owners, or are you mostly providing one-off services?

You want to get specific about who’s hiring you so you can build on that client base and target your tree service advertising ideas to the person most likely to become a potential client. When you zero in on your best client, your marketing focus becomes about how to reach them. For example, at Joshua Tree Experts, homeowners are one of our key client groups, so we attend home shows that put us face-to-face with that client demographic.

Know Your Competition

You should always be aware of what your competition is doing in terms of tree service marketing so you can carve out your own promotional space. For example, if a tree service company were advertising heavily on the radio station in one of our locations, we probably wouldn’t pursue advertising on that same station – it’s too hard to differentiate with an audio-only message.

However, if a home and garden magazine was being distributed in that same region, we might advertise there because, with visual work, we can differentiate ourselves from the competition more easily.

When you’re aware of where your competitors are promoting and how they’re doing it, you can make better decisions on how to capture market share in other ways.

Set Your Tree Service Advertising Budget

You need a healthy marketing budget to get the word out about your business. The size of your budget will depend on your financial situation, but when we were operating as an independent business, we would easily spend 20% of our projected revenues on tree service advertising. One of the great benefits of franchising is that we can cover more market share with less money per location than we could ever do as a single business.

Your tree service advertising plan needs to include the following:

Online Marketing

Online marketing includes your website and social media presence. For your website, you can either purchase ads to drive traffic or invest in organic marketing to build your brand’s expertise when people are searching for the services you provide. Either way, you need a strategy to capture the online search.

Network Building

Join networks in your community so others can learn about you and refer you to people who need the services you provide. Join business associations and horticultural groups, network with realtors and business owners, and get to know the government facilities maintenance people at local parks.

Offline Marketing

In addition to network building, you should also have tradeshow booth materials, invest in vehicle graphics for your trucks and vans, provide consistent uniforms for staff, and produce business cards and other materials you can put in someone’s hand. You can always leave a brochure with someone; you can never ensure they’ll go look for you on Facebook.

Tips for Producing Tree Service Ads

At Joshua Tree Experts, we provide franchisees with collaterial templates and marketing support. If you’re in charge of designing your ads or sourcing someone to do that for you, here are some tips from our Director of Marketing to help:

• Consistency: Have a similar look and feel to all your advertising. For instance, all of Joshua Tree Experts advertising materials carry our familiar green and yellow colors.

• Focused messages: Keep your messaging to a minimum so that a reader won’t be overwhelmed with everything you’re trying to say. The more succinctly you can say something, the better.

• Lead with professionalism: Make sure your ads are well-designed and professional because they will often be someone’s first impression. If the ad looks messy or amateurish, that’s the image they will have of your business.

If your budget won’t allow you to do everything you want to do, spend it doing fewer things but with high professional standards.

Joining the Joshua Tree Experts Franchise

As we mentioned earlier, the expansion of our tree service marketing and advertising has been significant since we started franchising. We can be so much more impactful with generating leads and reaching clients for far less spend than we ever could independently. Other benefits come with joining a franchise, and that’s an option for your tree care company as well. You could grow your business by becoming a Joshua Tree franchisee.

A Strategic Business

As a tree service franchise, our business model includes multiple revenue streams: tree trimming, lawn and plant care, and pest control services. Why did we add those two additional services? Consider this:

• Mordor Intelligence reports that the market size of the U.S. lawn care market is projected to be $58.69 billion in 2024 and $75.71 billion in 2029.

• The market value of the U.S. pest control industry in 2023 was $26.2 billion, according to Statista.

These are markets of opportunity that accompany the already in-demand tree care service.

The Team Support 

We have created a complete operating system that includes a strong marketing and advertising focus that drives leads to our franchise owners. Our franchise support team is incredible, and we have a dedicated Director of Marketing to investigate, test, and implement promotional opportunities so you don’t have to spend your time doing that.

Contact Joshua Tree Experts Today!

One of the things that matters to us is that we franchise with good people who are passionate about the work they do. If this sounds like a network you would be interested in joining, submit our franchise form, and let’s get connected.