Free Ways to Market Your Pressure Washing, Lawn Care, or Snow Removal Service

So you’re a snow-clearing hero, a lawn-mowing savant, or a pressure-cleaning champion.

You’re good at it. So good, in fact, that you’ve started your own business. But now that you’ve started it, how do you let more people know about it?

As different as these businesses are, they share key similarities that present certain obstacles when it comes to marketing. In fact, you’re probably facing a few specific challenges when it comes to marketing your pressure washing, snow removal, or lawn care business.

• You don’t operate year-round, which makes it trickier to stay top of mind for your customers.
• You’re a small business or do this as a side hustle and lack the manpower or budget to launch massive marketing campaigns.
• You operate only within a certain geographic area, limiting your number of potential clients.

However, you can overcome those roadblocks.

These tips can be used year-round, don’t cost money (unless you want them to), and don’t require you to have fans all over the world to be effective.

Grab a cup of coffee for some fortitude and buckle in.

1. Establish an active social media presence

Aside from increasing your visibility, social media can provide other benefits for your business, like facilitating customer service, collecting or sharing reviews, or showing off the full impact of your services to convince others that you’re the real deal.

Do a bit of digging into your customers’ demographics and behaviors and see if you can find a few platforms that seem especially suited to your business.

Social media content suggestions

Once you’ve created an account, what do you fill it with? Here are some suggestions we think would work especially well for your type of business.

Before & after photos or videos

This is a great way to show off your talent and prove your legitimacy. Your work naturally has a significant visual component, so take advantage of it. Let others see the tangible impact of your services.

Whether it features a formerly-grimy-but-now-sparkling patio or a previously-impassable-but-now-clear driveway, people love a good before & after—they’re so satisfying!

Employee spotlights

It’s easier to connect to a person than it is to a faceless corporation, so don’t be shy about showing your human side.

This can also be a great way to show your employees you appreciate them by highlighting their talents and contributions.

If you work alone, no worries—you can still demonstrate the human side of your business in other ways (like yes, posting the occasional selfie when appropriate).

Helpful company news and day-to-day activities

Taking President’s Day off? Make a post about it so people aren’t wondering why their calls go to voicemail.

Just finished the last client of a hectic day? Snap a photo to celebrate a job well done and show your followers that you’ve been busy (the implication being that you’re popular and a hard worker).

Tips and tricks related to your business

Once you’ve found your niche, don’t hesitate to share your wisdom. By helping your followers out (even if doing so doesn’t help you financially), you’ll demonstrate that you care about them, and that will help you build trust in the long run.

Other social media tips

There’s a lot more that could be said about social media marketing, but here are a few more quick tips:

• Engage with your followers when they react to your content.
• Work to make every post interesting and valuable.
• Experiment with trends.
• Don’t be too serious.
• Provide clear calls to action on your posts, such as “Call today to schedule a consultation!”
• Plan and schedule content ahead of time to be automatically posted.
  • Some platforms allow you to do this natively, but there are also third-party services you can use to accomplish this.
• Try to post at least a couple of times a week.

2. Add social proof to your marketing material

Social proof is all about building trust with potential customers by leveraging your current customers’ experiences. You’re basically making an implicit promise to future clients: other people have found value in my services, so you will too.

Plus, when you think about it, your work doing snow removal, lawn care, or pressure washing can be fairly high-stakes from the client's point of view. You're coming into their space, and with that comes the risk of damage to their property.

You want to assure them that you know what you're doing: that their landscaping will look better, not worse; their patio will be sparkling clean without damaging the finish; and that they can drive safely up and down their driveway without getting stuck or having their vision blocked by piles of snow.

If you need to, you can reach out directly to past customers and ask if they’re willing to provide a testimonial about their experience with you.

You could offer an incentive (such as a discount on future services), but make sure to specify that you want their honest opinion. That said, if you’re doing quality work and have been building positive relationships with your customers, they might not need much prompting from you.

Be sure to thank those customers who help you out in this way! You don't want to take people's time or goodwill for granted.

3. Participate in groups/forums

This can fit under the umbrella of social media, but it can also stand on its own.

Find groups relevant to your business and join them.

The point here isn’t to spam the group with mentions of your business’s name or endlessly self-promote. Yes, perhaps you’d technically be marketing your snow removal/pressure washing/lawn care service because you're getting your name out there. However, those kinds of actions can easily get you kicked out of the group and damage your reputation among the other group members.

Rather, your goal is to build trust by establishing yourself as a credible source of knowledge. When the time is right, you can guide people to your business—or they might reach out to you on their own.

Forum examples

• Lawn care: LawnSite
  • What they say about themselves: “A forum community dedicated to lawn care and landscaping professionals and enthusiasts. Come join the discussion about performance, modifications, classifieds, troubleshooting, maintenance, and more!”
• Pressure washing: Cleaning Talk
  • What they say about themselves: “A forum community dedicated to professional cleaning and restoration specialists. Come join the discussion about upholstery, displays, residential, styles, scales, reviews, accessories, classifieds, and more!”
  • If you’re interested only in pressure washer-related topics, there’s a sub-forum for that.
• Snow removal: PlowSite
  • What they say about themselves: “A forum community dedicated to ice and snow management professionals and enthusiasts. Come join the discussion about equipment, weather, snow management, classifieds, troubleshooting, maintenance, and more!”

You can also join similar groups on sites like Facebook or Reddit. And since you’re a local company, don’t forget about those groups centered in a particular location, even if they’re not specific to your business’s focus. There could still be ways you can participate and grow your network.

Plus, don't discount what you could learn from these groups. There's always room to improve your technique or your list of services.

4. Start a blog

Do you have a unique perspective when it comes to your business? Are there questions you get frequently from your customers? Do you enjoy sharing your wisdom with others?

If so, you should consider blogging.

Writing blogs can bring a lot more people to your business’s website. For example, HubSpot found that for their customers, those who blogged had 55% more website visitors.

And more eyes on your website means more potential leads.

However, you don’t just want to type something up on a whim and publish it. Good blogging takes time, knowledge, and effort.

Here’s some advice to get you started:

• Read blogs from your competitors and consider how you could build on or refute their ideas, giving credit as needed.
• Ask your customers what topics they’d like to know more about and let their feedback inspire you.
• Emphasize your unique voice, approach, and experiences in the business so that you’re adding value to the topic instead of just repeating what everyone else is saying.
• Focus on quality over quantity.
• Learn about SEO (search engine optimization) and implement best practices to help grow your blog’s traffic.
• Once you publish your blogs, share them on your social channels to help people find them.

If your budget allows, you could also hire a writer to create the blogs for you. However, be sure to give them some guidelines so that the writing is in line with your brand’s voice and style.

5. Send out newsletters

The benefit of a newsletter is similar to that of social media: it allows you to connect with your customers in a non-intrusive way. This way, you’ll stay top-of-mind and can continue to develop your relationship with them.

Where newsletters have an advantage over social media platforms, however, is that you have more control. You’re not at the whims of the algorithm to get noticed. As long as you're doing it right, an email that you send will wind up somewhere in their inbox. And if you create compelling, readable emails, people will open them!

But how do you start building a newsletter list? (And yes, you should build it, not buy it. Not only will it help you comply with anti-spam laws, but those who do sign up will be better leads for your business since they went to the effort of joining your audience themselves.)

You can try the following tactics:

• If your business has a website, add a sign-up form for your newsletter to it.
• Include newsletter info (including how to sign up) on your company’s communications, like flyers, mailers, and brochures.
• Promote your newsletter on your social media accounts.
• Ask current subscribers to forward the email to a friend.
• Include social sharing options within the email itself so recipients can easily share the newest issue to their Facebook or Twitter profile.

You’ll probably want to take advantage of email marketing software, such as Mailchimp, Brevo, or HubSpot, to help you build your audience. Such software will also help you create, organize, and send emails efficiently while providing analytics so you can monitor the results of your efforts. Many of these platforms offer free plans to get you started.

There are plenty of other options out there besides the three we mentioned, so you can find one that makes sense with your business.

Once again, providing real value to your audience is key. If your emails don’t stand out, people won’t have a reason to open and read them.

6. Get your NAP in order

Not to be confused with taking a nap (which you might feel like doing at this point), NAP stands for Name, Address & Phone number.

Basically, anywhere your business appears across the web (social media, your Google Business profile, your website, etc.) should have a consistent name, address, and phone number listed.

The components of NAP help your business to show up in local search results—when people type “pressure washing service near me” into their search bar, for example.

Since your business relies on local customers, making sure you can show up in these kinds of location-based searches is crucial.

Wrapping up

All the information we’ve presented might seem like a lot to you. The good news is you don’t have to try to implement all of those ideas at once.

Pick one of the above tips and work at it for a while. Measure the results. Then move on to the next and the next until you become a master at marketing your business.

Additionally, even though we've laid out six different tactics, you might find that some make more sense to pursue for your business than others. Always consider what is going to make the most sense for your unique situation so that you don't spend valuable time on strategies that aren't as helpful. Measuring results like we mention above will also help you figure out what's working and what you could stand to cut out.

Trust the process, and keep doing excellent work.

Interested in learning more?

Covering all the possible nuances and angles of each of the topics we’ve been through would make this blog even longer than it already is. You probably don’t want that if you’re just looking for a springboard to get started on marketing your business.

However, when you’re ready to dive deeper into any of the above topics, here are some resources you might find valuable:

• Social media marketing
  • Social Media Marketing for Local Businesses
  • Social Media Best Practices
• Social proof
  • Using Social Proof
• Groups and forums
  • Using Forums for Small Businesses
• Blogging
  • How to Write a Blog Post
  • Blog Writing Tips
• Newsletters
  • Email Marketing Tips
• NAP
  • NAP and Local SEO

Good luck on your marketing journey! We’re rooting for you. And if you need replacement parts for your business’s equipment, you know we’ve got your back.

Ready to dive into a different topic? Learn about bidding snow removal jobs, pressure washer troubleshooting, midsummer mower maintenance, and a whole lot more with Rugged U.