- Analyzing your current strategy
- Discovering where your leads are coming from and how to generate more
- Explore what marketing channels are working for you and which ones to cut
- How to define your audience and who you really want to speak to
Send us your questions, comments, feedback, praise! We can’t wait to hear from you!
Transcription:
Amanda Joyce:
What’s up, guys?
Devon Hayes:
Oh my gosh. I am happy to be here. I’ll tell you that.
Welcome to Trades Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.
Amanda Joyce:
This is for you if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.
Devon Hayes:
Learn from home services industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.
Amanda Joyce:
Let’s dive into today’s Trades Secret. So in full transparency, we’ve done a little bit of looking at our metrics. We’re kind of reworking a little bit of our format here. We want to make sure that we are bringing you guys enough value and we’re keeping it short and sweet and getting to the point that you guys feel compelled to watch to the very end, so you can get all of the nuggets that we share in each one of these episodes.
Devon Hayes:
I know. I know. I think we’re putting all the great action items in the nuggets at the end, so we’re going to try and speed that up and just realize that you’ve got stuff to do and onto the next. So anyway, with that, we thought, I mean, we’re recording this in August, but we’re starting to actually do our own marketing plan for 2024, and we’re like, “Actually, how many people are even thinking about this right now because it’s August?” But actually it’s time to start doing it. You don’t have to write the plan today, but there’s so much that goes into an effective marketing plan that we figured actually now’s the time to start looking at your current marketing, how it’s been working, do your analysis, and I think that’s the first place to start. Right?
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly. And I think when we talk to a lot of our clients about this too, even most of them, there’s an audible groan when we’re like, “Okay, let’s start talking about next year.” And they’re like, “Come on,” but it’s necessary. And I think it’s important to remind yourself too that just because you start planning it, you don’t have to answer all your questions today, but just like anything in your business, you have to start thinking about it and analyzing it. Before, it’s not all going to, “Rome wasn’t built in the day, but you got to start somewhere.” So we figured we kind of break this up into a few sections so we can kind of go over circling the wagons, doing the analysis, and then you’re going to have to tune in next week to hear about the next steps that we’re going to give you to take. But so we figured today would be really fun to talk about how to dig in and you’re kind of…
You eat an elephant one bite at a time. Sorry for all the analogies here, but what to do so you don’t feel like you’re just throwing darts at the wall. How to really take a really smart data-driven approach to it so that you feel really confident in the decisions that you’re going to be making for how you’re investing those marketing dollars next year.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah. I think in all spaces there’s always chatter around like, “Oh, you got to try this new tool or that new tool, or you should invest in SEO, or, “Oh, you got to do paid ads all day.” I think there’s a lot of noise, and some people just kind of pull the trigger. They’re like, yeah, “SEO makes sense. I should do SEO.” But actually sometimes, I mean, maybe depending, sure, but how much of an investment should you make and how much business hasn’t been driving? What kind of effort are you getting any ROIs? So as we kind talk through the analysis, that’s what we’re saying, “What’s been working? Where are your leads coming from this year and is it good data? How do you know where they’re coming from?” These are some good questions to start to ask.
Is it mostly from networking groups that your sales guys are in, or is it truly organic online leads that have been generated, or are they paid leads or is it social media? Is it from some direct mail postcards? Is it from just being in the community and sponsoring events for the schools and the churches and those kind of pillars of every community? Are you entrenched in those? These are things to start really looking at. Our SEO services, they’re not cheap, but they’re not always the answer for everybody either. If we have that great example, there’s a painting company in a very small town, I don’t think they need to be paying three grand a month for SEO. Their competition is low. People know them by name.
Amanda Joyce:
They have a great brick and mortar that’s right in the center of town that people drive by all the time. It’s mainly retirees that aren’t really online as much, so they are going to gravitate towards that physical location that they can see on the way through town to the grocery store. I think a really good thing to do if you are finding yourself in that position, when you’re going through and looking at where all your leads are coming from is if you do find that most of them currently aren’t digital, it doesn’t mean digital isn’t going to work for you, but maybe before you turn around and spend thousands of dollars on digital, how do you maybe ramp that up a little bit more?
To your point earlier, if the church marketing’s working, if being in those networking groups is working, can you just devote a little bit more time to those to get that additional 20% uptick in leads that you’re going to need for the next year? If you can, maybe that might be where your money’s best spent before you just turn around and find an agency and write a check and hope that it’s going to work.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, yeah, exactly, because well, not all leads are created equal, and not all marketing channels are the best fit for every market. And so taking this time right now to look at your numbers, look at your data, and to that same point though, if the most valuable leads you’ve gotten in terms of the bottom line and… What is that called? Not the return, but the… Yes, thank you. I’m like, what’s that business-y business term? It’s super business-y. When you look at that per project, where’s the value? Are those organic leads? Are they high quality versus maybe a lead you get from social media or vice versa? Maybe your most top quality leads are coming from social or maybe referrals, whatever that is. I think this is the part where you really, really need to look at that. And then, with your analysis, we encourage you to look at your competitors.
That’s a separate kind of Oprah when we talk about your competitive analysis. But before we get off track with that, we’ve been talking about leads and kind of where they’re coming from and looking at that data and hopefully it’s good clean data. But another thing that we’ve run into that I wanted to make sure we talked about, because I don’t know that this gets highlighted enough. Say you do have an SEO company or you’re getting a ton of organic leads when you do your SWOT analysis, your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, what does it look like internally at your company? Amanda, well, you have listened to you and a couple of our teams, yeah, hours of calls where the person answering the phone, the receptionist is literally a total bitch to people or completely is like, “No, no, we don’t want that lead.”
Amanda Joyce:
Couldn’t give a flying F. And you’re like, “How much money did we just spend to drive that call?” And I would hang up as the consumer and just call the next guy. In some cases, I’m even listening to it knowing like, “If that was me, I might go ahead and finish giving them my contact information, because they promised me a call back, but the second I hang up the phone, the next person I call if they’re nicer to me, that’s who I’m going with before I’m going to…” I mean, if you’re letting them make changes to your property, whether they’re redoing your kitchen or replacing your roof or whatever it is, you need to have a good warm fuzzy from start to finish. And so it’s so funny that sometimes we do talk to these companies that they’re not even looking at what’s broken internally, but this is a great thing to look at right now of while you’re analyzing what’s working and what isn’t, also what’s working and what isn’t in your customer experience because that’s going to impact your bottom line just as much as lead quality.
Because if you’re not keeping them happy all the way through the funnel, they’re not going to refer you to the next guy. They’re not going to give you that great review. I think that’s a really great point, Devon, that you’ve got to really look internally as well. And I think another thing to remind yourself of too, if you are that person that as a business owner you get analysis paralysis, you’ve got so much other stuff going on and you’re like, “I just don’t know what to do,” if you can kind of relax during this part of the process and really look at it, it’s not time to make a decision right now. It’s just time to learn and look. It might make you feel less overwhelmed if this is just like right now you get to do the analysis paralysis. This is when you get to write it all down, think it all through, whether you work in a spreadsheet or you like to type things out, get it all right where you can look at it.
So then another week or two down the road when it’s time to actually start circling the wagons and making those decisions, you can breathe easy and feel like you really did take a good hard look. And I think the other thing to do too when you’re looking at these channels is what isn’t working? What if you have been running Facebook ads all year or Google Ads that are only getting more expensive year over year, month over month? Yeah, maybe on paper it looks good, you’ve had all these phone calls or all these form fills. Are they good, because you can also… This is where you might even as a business owner get to be like, “I just freed up a few thousand dollars a month.” I can say unequivocally, it’s not working. Sure, it’s driving calls, or maybe, it’s not driving calls at all, but this is where you can enjoy putting some money back in your pocket before the next phase that we’ll cover in the next one where it’s time to start deciding what you’re willing to put out in terms of spend for your marketing in 2024.
Devon Hayes:
And part of this analysis too is really defining your audience. And Amanda, I mean, to your point kind of with Google Ads, if they’re not working, is it that it’s… Maybe, the intended audience isn’t even seeing those ads. Who knows? But an easy example again is just going back to a small town versus a major city. We have different strategies for those two different things because the audiences are completely different. The consumer behavior is completely different, and we’ve talked to companies, they’re like, “We like to go after people that are 60-plus because they have their homeowners. They have a stable income and they do their research and they want the project done. Great.”
Knowing your target audience and knowing where they’re at is going to help you decide how to better allocate your marketing budget versus being like, “Well, all the chatter about contractor marketing is that I need to do SEO and I need to do paid social media ads and I need to pay for some sort of review sourcing vendor.” You might hear all that, and to some extent, it might be true, but you really, really need to look at your target audience. And if you don’t have that defined, no problem, this is what that analysis is for. If you’re looking at it and you’re like, “Well, shoot, 80% of my business this year has been within this ZIP code,” then that’s starting to help you kind of define that. Hopefully, you’re using a CRM and you can look at that data, but you’re like, I do most of my business in this area and most of these leads came from, I don’t know, it could have been online. It could have been a referral. It could have been wherever they come from.
Hopefully, you have that data and you can start to figure out who define that buyer based on some commonalities that you’re seeing through your data, and that should kind of give you an idea of the direction that you want to allocate those marketing dollars and really kind of focus there instead of just kind of throwing paint on a wall or listening to the latest buzz talk on what marketing trend you need to follow. It’s like you don’t want to just make decisions without really looking at your data.
We have a client who’s like, “Well, I know that my sales goal is like 10 million a year, so for me, I’ve done the math. That means I need to get 56 leads a week,” but what’s the value of each of those leads? So you need to look at the quality, not just the quantity, because if you’re getting 56 leads, but half of them are… I am sure there’s probably some math in terms of what’s actually can converting, but can you look at your sales team of those 56 leads? How many of them are they converting? How many of them are getting met with a receptionist who says, “We don’t work in that area? I don’t know if we do that service. I’m not really sure,” and hangs up on them. So again, analysis what’s going on internally, define your audience. Feel like I’m being redundant, but trying to drive the point home.
Amanda Joyce:
No, exactly. No, I think… And kind of what we’re talking about earlier too, the audience analysis could also be happening as you’re going through and doing the lead scoring and stuff. Maybe, you haven’t thought about it before and then you’re like, “Huh, if you do have lead, if you have call tracking in place and you can listen to them, great.” Or maybe you’re just going through your form fills or looking through your CRM, maybe you find that, “Wow, it never occurred to me that 75% of the people that reach out to us fit this profile.
Maybe it’s typically the wife that’s the one that’s making the decision. She’s the one I’m connecting with. Sure. Maybe the check comes from the husband at the end of the day, or the partner, whatever it may be, but maybe you’d never even realized before that, “Wow, maybe, my marketing needs to speak more to the housewife,” or maybe that’s not who it is, but you can, I mean, talk about a great way to just literally… You can score the quality of those leads that have come in and the audience is right there in front of you on paper. You just kind of have to be willing to dig in a little bit and start making some generalizations and put some people in boxes and kind of figure out where that overlay is. This is the time that it’s okay to kind of profile people.
Devon Hayes:
Yeah, a little bit because you’re working with your own data. So some places to check, we have a great podcast on Google’s tool shed, and that lists out a ton of free tools from them, and that includes Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and those are two great places. Google Analytics is on your website. Google Search Console is how you’re performing on Google Search within the search engine results pages themselves, the SERPs, as you’ll hear us say. So those are two great places to take a look, but really, hopefully you have have CRM and it’s your own data that you can really look at.
And then if you’re working with an agency and you’re like, “Wait a minute, we’re spending X amount of dollars and we’re only getting X amount of leads,” well, look at yourselves internally before you start to say, “We got to cut that off. We’re not getting enough leads from it.” Well, is there anything else broken in the process? It could be that more leads need to be coming in and that your internal processes are perfect, but these are just some things to contemplate. Have you had some attrition and you have maybe a new receptionist who doesn’t know as much about your services or your service area, and so there’s some gray area there. Did you launch a new website? That’s massively going to impact what your starting point in terms of ranking and positioning online.
So the questions that we encourage you to ask yourself, what’s been working? How do you know? What hasn’t been working? How do you know? But yeah, I guess, in the spirit of trying to keep this short, I will cut myself off and try not to keep going, but we would love any questions that you have. Reach out. You can comment. We are pretty active on Instagram, Facebook. So reach out to us there, comment, DM us. Let us know what we missed. If you need to know what tools or what you should look at, we’re happy to talk to you about it. So let us know. And then yeah, part two of this 57-part series is going to be…
Amanda Joyce:
Is continuing to get your shit together. This is when we start talking about setting marketing goals and looking at your budget and timelines. So stay tuned so that you can figure out how to take all this analysis and everything that you’ve defined here and how to really put it into an actionable plan for 2024.
Devon Hayes:
Absolutely. Thanks for listening. If you think it was helpful, share it with someone else that you think might find it helpful as well. We’ll see you next week where you get more of your shit together.
Amanda Joyce:
That was today’s Trades Secret. Thanks for listening.
Devon Hayes:
Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.
Amanda Joyce:
Subscribe, and don’t miss our next reveal.
Devon Hayes:
Until next time.
