You probably started working in this industry because you love trees. But once you’ve climbed the career ladder all the way to the owner’s seat, you’ll find yourself spending less time working on trees and more time marketing your services.
Finding yourself strapped to a computer instead of a climbing saddle can certainly be frustrating. You are a tree expert, not a professional marketer.
And because many of your competitors work with successful marketing agencies, you’re fighting battles on two fronts: You not only have to go up against other talented tree crews, but you must also stand toe-to-toe against marketing experts.
Don’t panic. There are a few things you can do to give yourself a puncher’s chance of keeping up with the pros. We’ll share a few of the most crucial ones below.
First Things First: Always Consider ROI When Devising a Marketing Plan
There are countless ways to market your tree-care services, and enterprising business owners devise new techniques and approaches all the time. But your time and marketing budget are both finite resources, which means you can’t employ every marketing approach ever envisioned.
For example, buying a lot of swag with your company name on it is going to cost you a fortune without generating many new leads. Your potential customers don’t really want a “Joe’s Tree Care” T-shirt or mousepad. Those things may work very well for some other industries, but they’re not very effective for winning over tree-care clients.
On the flip side, you’ll likely find that having an effective website and rolling out a PPC campaign — two things we’ll discuss below — will help attract customers and boost your bottom line.
Bottom line? You have to allocate your marketing budget to tactics and strategies that are likely to generate a high return on investment (ROI). After all, you don’t want to spend a dollar unless it gives you a good chance of earning two dollars in return.
To help, we’ve included average ROI figures for each tactic below. These aren’t guarantees, but they help show the ballpark returns you can expect when these strategies are implemented effectively.
The ORB Tree-Service Marketing Checklist for Tree-Company Owners
The following are some of the most important components of a polished tree-care marketing plan. You don’t necessarily have to implement them all — every situation and service area is unique. But you’ll certainly want to check off as many of these boxes as possible when trying to keep your calendar full and crews busy.
Professional Branding
If you want potential customers to take you seriously, you need to invest in professional branding. Basing a color scheme around your favorite shade of green and using a clip art image of a tree for a logo won’t cut it in the modern world.
Fortunately, this is a pretty straightforward item to check off your marketing to-do list. You’ll simply need to find an agency that provides professional branding services and cut a check. You’ll probably also have to jump on a call to provide the agency with some background information on your business and outline some of your unique selling propositions (USPs), but that shouldn’t take up much of your time.
Once you have your branding package, you’ll want to apply the assets to all of your other marketing efforts. In fact, that demonstrates the value branding offers: It’s a simple asset to obtain, yet it provides value across your entire business.
ROI Outlook: According to a 2022 report by Marq, 68% of surveyed brands found that implementing consistent branding increased revenue by 10% to 20% or more. Combine this with the fact that 50% of customers are more likely to buy from brands they recognize, and it’s easy to see why branding is so important.
A User-Friendly Website
Most modern businesses understand the importance of having a website. But unfortunately, many tree company owners end up settling for a bare-minimum website, rather than a professionally designed site featuring all of the functionality and conveniences modern shoppers expect (such as working flawlessly on smartphones).
That’s a serious mistake, which will not only limit your digital reach and visibility but may even cause you to lose sales. That’s why it’s important to treat your website as the powerful tool it is and invest accordingly.
More than just a digital business card, your website is a 24-hour virtual salesperson who never misspeaks, sleeps, or needs a day off. Most importantly, a high-quality website will not only generate sales at your current pricing level, but it will also provide you with the chance to charge more for the services you offer.
ROI Outlook: It’s difficult to characterize the ROI a new website typically earns for a business, given the myriad variables at play. However, PixelFish explains that user-friendly websites are especially valuable for small businesses, with 47% of those surveyed reporting increased sales after upgrading their site.
SEO Services
SEO stands for search engine optimization. There’s a lot to SEO, but its primary goal — ensuring that your website shows up when potential customers search for tree-care services — is quite simple. But while simple, SEO is incredibly important. Without it, you may as well not even have a website, because no one will ever find it.
There are some things you can do to help improve your site’s rankings and search performance on your own, like creating high-quality blogs, service pages, and other kinds of written content. There are some technical steps you’ll want to learn, such as the proper way to format and structure articles, but if you have the time and desire, you can start laying down a foundation.
Nevertheless, you’ll likely want to outsource your SEO efforts at some point. Not only will professional writers be able to craft more effective, better-performing content (especially when you select a copywriter who’s also an ISA-certified arborist), but you’re also going to need help with some of the technical aspects of SEO.
ROI Outlook: Investing in SEO services is one of the most productive uses of your marketing budget. The exact ROI you can expect will vary based on a variety of factors, but Sagapixel reports that effective SEO campaigns can generate a 748% ROI. Other authorities offer slightly tamer ROI projections, but they remain attractive. For example, Page Optimizer Pro reports that small businesses often see a 400% ROI over a two-year time frame.
A Complete Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is another critical component of your overall digital marketing efforts. It will contain a lot of the same information you’ll be posting on your website, but its value extends beyond these things.
For example, your GBP can help you to show up in the highly coveted local pack — the list of businesses that appears when someone searches for “tree care near me.” It is also where your Google reviews and star ratings live.
So, be sure that you’ve claimed your GBP, filled out all of the information you can (including the proper category and services for your business), uploaded your logo, and added several high-quality photographs. You’ll also want to publish posts on it regularly to ensure your business looks active.
You can do all of these things yourself, but it’s also important to make sure that your basic business information matches that which is found elsewhere on the web. This is important for ranking well in Google and appearing in AI-generated responses.
ROI Outlook: Teasing out the value of an optimized GBP in isolation is difficult (bordering on impossible), as it is not something that happens in isolation — most business owners who invest in their GBP also invest in their website, SEO efforts, social media, and other strategies. With that said, your GBP is critical for appearing in Google’s local pack, and Page Optimizer Pro reports that businesses appearing in the local pack enjoy a 40% higher click-through rate.
A Robust Social Media Footprint
Because of the high-stakes nature of tree-care work, potential customers are likely to dig into your business before picking up the phone. They want to feel comfortable that they can put their trees, property, and safety in your hands. This means they will probably check out your social media profiles before choosing you for the job (AI also does this when trying to decide which tree-care services to recommend).
This means that social media is no longer just a good idea; it’s a mandatory component of your overall marketing plan.
Now, there’s one important thing to understand: You do not have to go “viral” or start posting videos of you performing the trendy dance of the week. Instead, you simply need to share high-quality content that projects your professionalism, skill, and commitment to safety.
You can do all of this yourself, but because social media algorithms and best practices change so quickly, it’s often better to outsource these responsibilities to your marketing partner.
ROI Outlook: HubSpot reports that social media ads generate an average 1.5:1 return on investment (for every dollar you spend, you get $1.50 in return). But this doesn’t measure the “soft” value that brand awareness generates or the increased SEO performance you’ll typically enjoy by maintaining a significant presence on social media.
Pay-Per-Click Ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are essential for tree-care companies in the modern competitive landscape. Legacy tree companies may be able to survive without them, but for companies with a history measured in years rather than decades, they’re simply a cost of doing business.
The challenge with PPC ads is that they are quite complex. The management tasks you’ll need to complete will vary based on the platform (Google, Facebook, Instagram, and others) you set them up on, but you’ll usually have to do things like design and structure the ads, continually optimize your keyword list, and adjust your bid rate based on the results and data you collect.
So, most tree company owners decide to simply pay for professional PPC management. That’s generally a good decision, as professional guidance will typically result in better click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on your investment. Meanwhile, a self-guided approach often results in little more than wasted ad spend.
ROI Outlook: As mentioned, PPC ads are more or less necessary at this point. They’re the only way to even get a seat at the table in competitive markets. But they still offer excellent value for your marketing dollar. According to SmallBizGenius, this kind of paid advertising usually results in a 2:1 ROI; for every buck you spend, you earn two.
Google Local Service Ads
Local service ads (LSAs) are similar in many ways to PPC ads, but they also differ in pretty significant ways. For example, PPC ads cost you money every time someone clicks on your ad. But you only pay fees for LSAs when you get leads — calls or messages sent by a potential client from within Google’s own platform.
LSAs are also simpler to set up and maintain than PPC ads. Google handles a lot of the heavy lifting for you, including things like placement (when and where the ads appear). This means that you don’t have to worry about keyword management, as you would with PPC ads.
With all that said, professional management is still a good idea for most tree-care companies. By letting a management partner handle your LSAs, you don’t have to worry about disputing bad leads or collecting analytic data, and you’ll likely achieve much better results than you would on your own.
ROI Outlook: Because of the way they’re structured, LSAs are very attractive from a business owner’s POV — you are only paying for customer calls or messages. And this means their ROAS (a metric that’s similar to ROI and stands for return on advertising spend) is very attractive. CPASiteSolutions even identifies a 3:1 ratio as being the benchmark for acceptable performance.
Video Content
A lot of tree company owners sleep on the incredible value video content provides.
From virtual sales letters (VSLs) posted on your company website to informational YouTube videos, video content helps give your online marketing a human touch. But even more importantly, it allows you to start forging a connection with potential customers before they’ve even picked up the phone.
Best of all, because YouTube is a Google property, videos you post on the platform will help you rank better on Google.
To start, you’ll want a nice VSL of you (or another company representative) speaking right to the camera. This will give you the chance to introduce your company to the customer, start building trust, and outline your USPs. You’ll also want a few videos demonstrating your work (before-and-after videos are really well-suited for the tree-care industry), as well as some interviews or testimonials featuring happy customers.
You can start collecting video footage right now with little more than your smartphone. However, if you have the budget to work with professional videographers, you’ll undoubtedly reap bigger rewards.
ROI Outlook: Video content’s reputation among professional marketers is pretty stellar — more than 90% of marketers who responded to one survey found that video content yields a high ROI, when measured across a variety of metrics. But one of the best ways to measure the value of video content is by comparing conversion rates of site visitors. According to Webfx.com, sites featuring video content enjoy a conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who purchase services) of 4.8% — more than twice as high (2.9%) as the conversion rate of sites without video content.
Printed Brochures
If you simply follow the dollars, digital marketing is clearly more important than traditional marketing channels in the modern world. According to Emarketer.com, more than 77% of ad dollars spent in 2024 were allocated to digital channels. But there are still places to invest in traditional, print marketing materials — especially for tree-care companies.
Brochures, for example, can be powerful tools in your sales staff’s arsenal. A sharp-looking booklet can not only help potential customers envision your crew working in their own yard, but it also helps subtly demonstrate your professionalism and skill without your sales staff having to utter a word.
Just be sure that you work with professionals for printed materials. Potential customers will be able to tell whether you took your printed materials (and by extension, the rest of your work) seriously, or if you fired up Canva and churned out something in an hour.
ROI Outlook: Despite being less important than digital marketing in the modern marketplace, printed marketing materials remain effective. For example, Kirkwood reports that printed marketing campaigns often enjoy a 9% response rate, whereas comparable digital campaigns only earn a 1% response rate.
Let ORB Tree Service Marketing Take Care of Everything for You
Promoting your business can feel like an overwhelming challenge, especially if you don’t have a background in the marketing industry. And given the way technology changes so quickly, it can be extremely difficult to keep up, let alone master everything. In fact, many tree company owners make marketing mistakes that ultimately lead them to throw in the towel.
However, a small number do master tree-service marketing and go on to enjoy great success — and you can too! You just have to put in the time to learn about modern digital marketing and start leveraging all of the checklist items we shared above.
Alternatively, you can just partner with ORB Tree Service Marketing. We specialize in providing marketing services for tree-care company owners just like you.
Schedule a call now to learn how we can take the marketing duties off your plate, help you scale your business, and allow you to spend more time working on trees.
Sources & References
- Marq – The ROI of Brand Consistency
Marq’s Brand Consistency Report found that 68% of companies saw revenue growth of 10–20% after implementing consistent branding across all channels, highlighting the measurable value of professional visual identity.
https://info.marq.com/brand-consistency-thank-you - WiserNotify – Branding Statistics
WiserNotify compiles global data showing that consistent branding can increase revenue by up to 23%, and that 50% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands they recognize—reinforcing the importance of visual trust in marketing.
https://wisernotify.com/blog/branding-stats/ - PixelFish – The ROI of a Well-Designed Website
PixelFish reports that 47% of small business owners experienced increased sales after improving their website design, underscoring how a well-built, user-friendly website directly impacts conversion rates and overall business performance.
https://www.pixelfish.com.au/blog/boosting-business-success-the-roi-of-a-well-designed-website-why-its-worth-the-investment/ - Sagapixel – SEO ROI Statistics
Sagapixel’s analysis shows that high-performing SEO campaigns generate average returns of approximately 748%, making search engine optimization one of the highest-ROI digital marketing investments available.
https://sagapixel.com/seo/seo-roi-statistics/ - Page Optimizer Pro – Small Business SEO Statistics
Page Optimizer Pro reports that small businesses commonly achieve 400% ROI from SEO within two years, and that local SEO campaigns can deliver 500% or better returns, demonstrating SEO’s long-term compounding value.
https://www.pageoptimizer.pro/blog/small-business-seo-statistics-insights-to-grow-your-business-in-2025 - HubSpot – Social Media Channel ROI
HubSpot’s marketing benchmarks show that social media advertising averages a 1.5:1 ROI, while also boosting brand awareness and engagement—two factors that improve organic performance across other digital channels.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-channel-roi - SmallBizGenius – PPC Statistics
SmallBizGenius reports that pay-per-click advertising produces an average 2:1 ROI across industries, making PPC one of the most reliable channels for short-term lead generation in competitive local markets.
https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/ppc-stats/ - CPA Site Solutions – Google Local Service Ad Metrics
CPA Site Solutions identifies a 3:1 Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) as the benchmark for well-optimized Google Local Service Ads, confirming that LSAs can outperform traditional PPC campaigns in lead quality and cost control.
https://www.cpasitesolutions.com/cpa-websites/2024/07/google-local-service-ad-metrics/ - Vidico – Video Marketing Statistics
Vidico’s 2024 video marketing report found that 90% of marketers say video delivers a strong ROI, and 87% report that it has directly increased sales, validating the value of incorporating video and VSLs into service-business websites.
https://vidico.com/news/video-marketing-statistics/ - WebFX – Video Marketing Statistics
WebFX found that websites with embedded video achieve an average conversion rate of 4.8%, compared to 2.9% for non-video sites—proof that video content more than doubles conversion potential for small businesses.
https://www.webfx.com/blog/marketing/video-marketing-statistics/ - eMarketer – Digital vs. Traditional Ad Spend
eMarketer’s U.S. advertising forecast shows that 77.7% of all ad spending in 2024 went to digital channels, while traditional media fell below $90 billion, illustrating the continued dominance and efficiency of digital marketing.
https://www.emarketer.com/content/digital-dominates-advertising-traditional-channels - Kirkwood – Measuring the ROI of Print Marketing
Kirkwood reports that print marketing campaigns achieve an average 9% response rate, compared to roughly 1% for comparable digital campaigns—demonstrating that print can still play a valuable supporting role in a modern marketing mix.
https://kirkwoodus.com/master-the-metrics-of-print-how-to-measure-the-roi-of-print-marketing/
