The Hidden Risks of Word of Mouth for Landscaping Businesses

Word of mouth is important for every landscaping, garden design, or maintenance business. It makes you feel safe; it works well because you have built a business for a few years or more. But there are cracks in relying on word of mouth and how it can affect your business.

Word of mouth feels like the safest way to get new customers

Word of mouth leads are normally the warmest because there is less selling required. They know of you; they have heard of you either from a client or a friend of a friend. Referrals are great.

And when they keep coming, it is easy to think you do not really need to do anything else.

The problem with only getting work through recommendations

You do not know when the next one is coming. There is no predictability when it comes to getting more leads. You have no idea when the next one is coming or when someone is going to contact you. You might go weeks without hearing from someone; when it is not peak time, it can be very worrying.

You might have a fantastic reputation and still have an empty diary.

That is the problem. You can be good at what you do, have happy customers and have people recommending you, but you do not control when those recommendations turn into enquiries.

What happens when your best customers stop talking about you?

Having a few top customers (or even vendors) who stop recommending you can be devastating for any business. You might not even be aware of the situation at all.

If you rely heavily on a small number of people recommending you, you have very little control over when those referrals stop.

Maybe they move house. Maybe they stop talking to the people they used to recommend you to. Maybe they simply do not have the same conversations anymore.

Nothing has changed with your business, but suddenly the enquiries have slowed down.

Word of mouth does not build an asset you control

"Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. Show a man how to fish, and he can feed himself for a lifetime." is the best description of word of mouth.

You are being handed a fish by someone who you do not know; the individual who gets in touch might not tell you where they heard about you because it is someone at the pub, bar or club.

You have received the enquiry, but you have not built the system that created it.

That is an important difference.

Your reputation is valuable, but relying entirely on other people to talk about your business means you are waiting for somebody else to start the conversation.

Referrals can keep you busy without helping you grow

You are not creating active, ongoing marketing that will help attract a new audience or reach customers who might not know you.

You can have a full diary and still have very little control over where your next job is coming from.

That is not necessarily a problem when you are happy with the size of your business. But what happens when you want to grow?

What happens when you want better customers?

Let us say for a moment, the majority of your business is homeowners (domestic work). It is difficult to charge more to help grow the business and take on larger projects because the homeowners in your particular region might not have the budget, interest, or need.

With word of mouth, you have no control over who you attract, only the individual who has suggested your company name.

Maybe you want to start taking on larger landscaping projects. Maybe you want to work in a different area. Maybe you want more garden design work rather than maintenance.

How do you deliberately put your business in front of those people if you are waiting for someone else to recommend you?

That is where word of mouth starts to become a limitation.

You do not need to stop relying on word of mouth

Word of mouth is a fantastic way for leads to come into your business. That is not a real marketing effort because word of mouth is not marketing. It is the ability to serve enough people previously that you are trusted to be referred by someone else.

The point is not that you should stop relying on word of mouth. It is that you should not rely on it as your only way of generating new business.

You want word of mouth working alongside other ways of attracting customers.

That way, if the referrals slow down, you are not sitting there wondering where the next enquiry is coming from.

What happens if you get a bad review?

If you are a word-of-mouth-built business, let us say you have completed a project, install or something in between. The customer is not satisfied. We do our best to resolve the matter.

For whatever reason, which can sometimes be totally outside of our control, a customer decides to share their opinions on social media negatively about your services.

This is something that can have an impact on your future word of mouth because, depending on where it is posted and how many people see it, it can affect the number of word-of-mouth leads you receive. You have little control over it, and there is not much you can do to stop someone from sharing their experience.

The important point here is that when your business relies heavily on word of mouth, your reputation is doing a lot of the work for you. But that also means you have less control over what people hear about your business and where they hear it.

And that is really the hidden risk.

Word of mouth can be one of the best sources of work for a landscaping business. But if it is the only source of work, you are putting a huge amount of trust in something you do not control.