As the landscaping season winds to a close in many regions, contractors are looking to pack the schedule to maximize profits for the year.

Time marches from autumn to winter with amazing predictability, but there are always opportunities for filling gaps with the right work.

Current customers that know, like and trust you should always be your top priority. They don’t need to be sold on you, only the work. The right incentive is enough to get them to take action.

If you are looking for new business and know who to target, then Google Ads are the way to go.

It’s important to know that Google Ads work because they are driven by buying intent. Understanding that, you only need to acknowledge that intent with your ad copy.

Whenever the subject of advertising arises, Facebook ads become part of the conversation.

The reason they are not the best option for this scenario is that Facebook ads drive discovery-based actions. The people that click these ads are still shopping and their timeframe may not align with yours.

If you already have email campaign funnels in place that you can quickly deploy, it might make sense to move some of your budget here. This frees up your sales team from qualifying those leads so they can focus on closing others.

There’s one more lead source with immediacy and that’s an email newsletter, provided you have been nurturing your list.

Buying incentives work best when the audience has been preconditioned to respond to them. My experience reveals most landscaping companies are not doing this.

Email marketing can have one of the highest response rates, but only if you prime the pump throughout the year with useful information and interesting conversation.

What I hope you are beginning to see is that all of your marketing activities should be used for the roles that they do best. Better yet is having a plan where they work together and support each other.

Building or refining that plan is a job for the off-season, one that will prepare you for what follows, whether that’s an overabundant spring or a slow summer.

Start from the beginning to target buying intent. Get your team together to discuss what every buyer is thinking, seeing, feeling and doing throughout their journey with your company.

Each will have a slightly different journey, a slightly different path to acquiring one of your services. Group them as best you can for each of those services.

This alone will give you a better handle on how to manage sales and marketing resources to grow your business.

I’ll share more about this in my next Marketing Mojo column in the upcoming print issue of Landscape Management.

I’ll show you how to build a repeatable path to consistent growth by understanding the sales and marketing milestones and touchpoints in every proven growth system, and the difference between them.