It’s social time! Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X (formerly known asTwitter)….whatever your platform, this is where you make connections. This is where you mindlessly scroll or dig for information or research the latest trend. In this episode, it’s all about social.
We cover key marketing questions many of you have asked on social media such as: How much should I spend on ads? Where should I focus my efforts? Is SEO worth it? Should I buy backlinks? How often should I post on social media?
In this new segment, “I Saw It On Social”, we provide practical tips and advice based on our experience working with contractors to help optimize your marketing strategy. Learn more about:
Setting expectations for your ads
Earned vs paid media is
Quality over quantity with backlinks
Tailoring your social media approach
GLSA advertisements
Send us your questions, comments, feedback, praise! We can’t wait to hear from you!
Transcription:
Amanda Joyce:
Hi, guys.
Devon Hayes:
Hello. Welcome back.
Amanda Joyce:
Yay, today’s episode, we are going to just talk about some questions that we have seen you all and other people asking on social media. We just want to chat through some things that we think are burning questions you guys often probably find yourselves asking as you run your businesses.
Devon Hayes:
So, welcome to our new most likely repeatable segment, I Saw It on Social.
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 Secrets.
All right. There’s so many of these we could cover, but we just tried to identify a couple of them that we feel like we’ve seen more recently and consistently over the years from all kinds of different corners of the internet, plus just some conversations we’ve been having recently with some new and potential clients.
Devon Hayes:
I was going to say, we don’t really always stay up-to-date on all the social chatter and all the social groups. We know there’s just hundreds of groups, so definitely we peep in on it, even though we don’t always respond and answer.
Amanda Joyce:
So, long-time lurker doesn’t mean we post very often, but somewhere out there.
Devon Hayes:
Long-time lurker, I love that. Oh, my gosh, so this one, I think we’ve seen pop up in roofing specific groups. We’ve seen it, I don’t know, in marketing groups, people chime in, in specific cities. So, Facebook groups are a breadth of knowledge, but also, I don’t know, a lot of people trying to sell their shit.
Amanda Joyce:
Or non-experts answering each other’s questions, and sometimes that one’s painful too to be like, “Oh, I don’t know [inaudible 00:01:56]-“
Devon Hayes:
When you see it from three weeks ago and you’re like, “Oh God, wish I could have helped out there.”
Amanda Joyce:
So, we’ll fix it now.
Devon Hayes:
All right, so this one we saw in quite a few places, and this is your wheelhouse. Question one, I Saw It on Social is, what should my ad spend be?
Amanda Joyce:
Such a loaded question. That’s like somebody just walking up to you as a contractor and being like, “How much is my remodel going to cost?” No background, no nothing, just what’s it going to cost? Just keep that in mind as I talk through the nuances of this, why that’s a loaded question and everyone’s answer is not the same. First, my first question for you would be, what’s your goal with said ad spend? If you are somebody who currently your pipeline’s really dried up and you need that phone ringing right now, I would say it’s time to dig into those pockets a little bit deeper and really think about what you could afford to spend and then we could start talking about where you’d put it because you also have to be really intentional with where you spend it. You shouldn’t just be like, “I need leads. I’m just going to go spend my entire monthly $3,000 marketing budget on Facebook ads. Problem solved, moving on.”
Stop right there, but you really need to look at what your current gross profit is, so what margin you even have there to spend on the ads. And then as I said, think about where you’re going to put that money. I would tell you, if you just have a little bit to spend and you want to get that phone ringing, GLSA all day, and I’m going to say that until some new product is on the market, before you do anything in social, before you do anything in Google Ads, anything else, get your Google guarantee, run those GLSA ads, set the budget as high as you can afford to have it and see what comes in.
Because another thing you will find in a lot of markets, even when you do that, your phone isn’t even ringing and it’s so saturated that you don’t even need much budget, but that’s where I would go, that’s where I would put it, and there’s different rules of thumb. A lot of people will just tell you, 3 to 5% of your gross profit is what you should be spending in Google Ads… Or excuse me, on ads in general-
Devon Hayes:
[inaudible 00:04:10] marketing.
Amanda Joyce:
… Market ads in general or marketing in general.
Devon Hayes:
Marketing in general.
Amanda Joyce:
So, you could take a portion of that out and put it towards ads, but again, there’s not one answer. So, if you’re cruising in a Facebook marketing group and you see someone posting in there, what should I be spending on my advertising for my contracting company? And someone gives you a flat answer without knowing anything about your books and what’s going on behind the scenes, don’t listen to them.
Devon Hayes:
Well, also and it’s a matter of, what’s your expectation of the ads? We do mention GLSA all day, and that’s if you’re looking for leads, but there’s a place for Google Ads if you’re going for a branding play and there’s a place for social media ads if you’re just trying to reinforce the brand. We tell people, “Don’t expect conversions from passive users,” which passively people are scrolling Facebook, they’re not looking for a remodeler, they’re not looking for a plumber, but they’ll see your brand and that’s a great brand play. Those ads are super cheap. So it’s also like, “What’s your expectation of the ad?” Because if you don’t have a backlog, you don’t have anything in the pipeline and you need the phone to ring right now and you don’t have time to wait, you don’t want to do a brand paid social media campaign.
You go GLSA, and then if that’s not working because it’s so saturated and you got to go tie in some Google Ads, that number is very different than someone who’s established and they do all their marketing, like relational marketing by sitting in the churches, and they just need people to know their name and be sure when they go to get them vetted, vet them out online. So, it’s like there’s so many caveats that go in there. You just ask yourself, “What’s the expectation of the ad? Is it to make your phone ring or is it just to help reinforce your brand with your other marketing efforts?”
Amanda Joyce:
[inaudible 00:06:35] cost, ultimately knowing what your close rate is and what your profit is off of your average job. So, you even know, “I have room to spend about X amount per lead because I know I close 60% of them and most of them give me this much profit.” So, there should be some math that goes in on the back end based upon your own internal numbers. Some marketer who doesn’t know anything about your business cannot give you an educated answer about that question.
Devon Hayes:
All right, next question kind of ties in, where should I focus my marketing efforts? Well, well, well.
Amanda Joyce:
Another good one.
Devon Hayes:
This goes back to your expectations. This goes back to your personal business, where you’re at. Somebody who’s at less than $1 million in sales a year, we’re going to have a different answer for somebody who is between five to 10 and is established and has been in their marketplace for a while, has a great referral program going, has some BD people in place, maybe an inside marketer. So there’s expectations, there’s the timeline, and budget. SEO is our bread and butter at Elevation Marketing. So, we always talk about that one because it’s easy. Well, it’s easy to talk about, but it’s long-term strategy. If you are just starting out and you’re between one and 3 million, you need to fill your pipeline, you need to fill your backlog, you need to have a steady cash flow, which sometimes is hard when you’re buying materials and then you’re getting paid 90 days after that. Maybe that’s not the best bet, and you have to start with GLSA where it’s a guaranteed ROI for your investment right up front. Would you agree?
Amanda Joyce:
I completely agree, and it’s funny because there’s a few different talking heads in our industry that we’ll all have a different answer. Obviously, we always skew SEO first and then there’s some other things… There’s plenty of other places.
Devon Hayes:
[inaudible 00:08:34] maybe not.
Amanda Joyce:
Well, either way, it’s one thing if you’re putting together a full scale marketing plan, we’re always going to tell you the SEO should hold a pretty big chunk of that, but there’s plenty of other talking heads in our industry who will say social media is where you should start. And you and I both agree in most cases for contractors, we wouldn’t necessarily say, “If you’re going to devote some of your internal resources to marketing, that social is where you should be putting all of your eggs,” because I’m not hating on social, there’s a place for it, but back to your point earlier about passive audiences, someone’s not actively going to social. They’ll be like, “I need to find someone to remodel my house or reroof my home.” They’re going to go to Google to do that.
They’re going to go to social to look at cat videos. They might see you on social and be like, “Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to look into that. This company looks cool,” and go look you up, but it goes back to that’s a brand play. And I just feel like too often we talk to contractors who maybe have an admin who does half of her time doing all kinds of stuff around the office, and half of her time is expected to be devoted to social media. And if they really looked at how much they were paying her and what they were getting out of it, they would probably figure out that that’s not a good use of their resources, and it’s probably not where they should be focusing their marketing efforts. It doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be part of it, but it definitely shouldn’t be the end all be all of your marketing efforts. That might not be a popular answer, but I really stand behind it.
Devon Hayes:
Well, it’s your opinion, and I share that opinion, and that’s based off of I guess that the contractors we worked with throughout the US, Canada and Australia, it’s based on our experience. So, that’s where that opinion comes from. Maybe a social media marketer who focuses in the contractor space, they might have a different experience and a different data set that they have access to that we don’t see, but our clients, nine times out of 10 they’ve tried going the social route because it does seem fun and the video is massively popular. It’s a great branding play, but in terms of conversions, our clients and people we’ve talked to, it’s not a converting platform. It’s fun, it’s a good place, it’s a time suck, and there is definitely a place for it with SEO, but again, that’s one of those things where it’s like, what’s your expectation of it? Do you really think people are converting and signing on the dotted line? And if that’s your experience with it, awesome. That’s just not what we’ve experienced in the past 10 years.
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly, and then one of the things that we see, too, that’s happening all the time is that organic reach has just totally eroded in social. Facebook and Instagram specifically, they want you to build this brand online on their platforms, and then they slap your hand because they know you’re a business and their algorithm works against you, and they want you to pay for that post to even have any visibility.
So, you could have somebody creating incredibly beautiful content and working around the clock for you to post all this stuff, and most of it’s probably not even going to get very many eyeballs. And it’s not necessarily a reflection that you’re not doing a good job, it’s just the different platforms, Facebook, Instagram, whatever you’re on, are not going to favorite it because at the end of the day, they’re advertising companies, they have to make money. It’s also one of those-
Devon Hayes:
And you pay.
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly, so it’s just one of those things that I hate seeing people that have worked tirelessly at creating these beautiful profiles that now, it’s a great asset, but unless you’re willing to not only invest your time in creating all of that beautiful content, also take some of that marketing budget and use it to pay the social gods. It’s not going to pay off.
Devon Hayes:
It’s true, the organic reach for pages, once you are classified as a page, it’s like a big flag to Facebook like, “You got to pay me.” Even if they showed your content because it had a lot of engagement and people like your content, the second they start seeing how much engagement it has, they’re like, “Well, wait a minute, I’m going to pull that back because I’d like to cash in on this.”
Amanda Joyce:
It’s like you end up getting punished for all that hard work you’re putting in. So if you are going to go down that route, just make sure that you… Kind of, the way like if you’ve run Yelp Ads, just plan to do it forever because once you stop, they’re going to make you hurt. So, just put it in your marketing budget if you’re going to continue to do that, and just know that it’s probably going to go up 10 or 15% year over year to just keep getting those same eyeballs on your content.
Devon Hayes:
And again, I guess that goes back to the question we asked, too. What’s your goal? What’s the point of it? When somebody goes to vet you out, they want to see current content, they want to see what you’ve been up to. That’s great, and have it meet that goal that you have fresh content, people can learn about your company, see the team, look at an office lunch, stuff like that. And learning about it is great, too, and serves a role, and the way we use social as an SEO agency is a little bit different than maybe the way a contractor’s mind thinks about social media and how it should work, but what’s the goal of it at the end of the day? Are you doing it to get conversions? Probably not. Are you doing it because you see that everybody else is doing it?
Probably, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s a good brand play and it’s a good way to share your content, but just know what your expectations are and match that with the time and resources you put into it. People aren’t going to not go with you because… Well, now if you’re a remodeling contractor, you definitely want to put the best pictures in your finished projects up there for sure, but if you’re a roofer, a roof is a roof. There’s some very beautiful ones out there, but it’s only going to take you so far. So just temper your expectations, I would say with organic social.
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly, and then if you do have somebody internally that’s doing it a lot, maybe quarterly or at least like biannually or whatever, just take a quick look at their hours devoted and just make sure it’s still making good business sense for you. It doesn’t mean you tell them to stop completely, but maybe you’d be like, “Oh, maybe we could pull it back to two posts a week and be really intentional with them, so we’re still active, we’re still sharing those beautiful images, the ones that we know people react to the best, but maybe we don’t have to do it every day of the week, and it could save some internal resources.”
Devon Hayes:
And use your Google Analytics, see what traffic is coming through from social to your website because your website is what should be converting them. That’s the goal of it, and look at that traffic, look at your organic social traffic as an acquisition channel, and that’ll help you make some informed decisions. Are you only getting 24 people that clicked through in three months? Maybe you don’t need to be devoting 10 hours a week to social then to get 24 people to organically come on through. And just to reinforce what Amanda said, it could have something to do with your efforts, but likely not. It’s just Facebook, Instagram, they’re not serving organic content. All right, so next question from I Saw It on Social, is SEO really worth it? Well, well, well.
Amanda Joyce:
Goddamn right it is.
Devon Hayes:
It is, so this goes back to our core belief that this is an asset that you are building with an external agency. This is earned media, not paid media. This cannot be taken away from you, this cannot be stripped away from you. If you have to tighten the belt buckle, pull up the bootstraps, and you have to kind of start maybe blogging for yourself the traction that you can-
Amanda Joyce:
Assuming that you own your website and if you had to pull up the bootstraps, assuming that you do, then yes.
Devon Hayes:
Great point. Assuming you own the website and assuming you’ve gone with a reputable agency, you own that content, that content that’s working for you, being crawled by the search engine crawlers that’s helping you rank for specific. It could be like a DIY blog, it could be project profiles, it could be your service page, all of that content on your website you should own. And if you had to fire your agency and say, “I love you, but we’re going through a recession, can’t afford you anymore,” everything they’ve done for you is not going to be taken away from you. And so, you might have to modify it and tweak it of course over time, but you’ve earned that position, you’ve earned that media. And so we think, yes, it’s 100% worth it, worth the investment and it is a marketing asset that you own. So, when you look at it that way, it’s like, can you put a price tag on ranking when people search for services related to yours in the towns and the service areas that you work in? I don’t think you can.
Amanda Joyce:
And it goes back what we were talking about earlier, active versus passive audience. That is an active audience looking for your service. I think as business owners, we would all day, if we had to pick which line we were going to get in, if we had to get in a line where we got to have face time with someone who wants our service, or in a line with cool people in and around your business who may or may not want your service, you’re going to wait in the line all day where you’re going to get face time with the person who wants your service.
So, it seems like a good way to look at whether SEO is where you should be putting those efforts, and I love the analogy of the SEO sailboat, the wind in your sails. You get that moving in the right direction and that’s an asset that’s working, and then you can start tacking on these other assets and trying and seeing what else works for your business, but this is already in place and it’s gaining momentum. And then you can figure out other buckets to invest those marketing dollars.
Devon Hayes:
Yes, so SEO is the win in the sail of your marketing ship. All right, next one here. Oh gosh, this is a fun one. The question is, should I buy backlinks? This is related to SEO. It’s not super technical. I think a lot of business owners, a lot of contractors have heard about backlinks by now, but what they are is it’s just a link from another website that links to your website and that’s called a backlink, and some of those are worth more to you than others. Spoiler alert, the ones you can buy, typically everyone else can buy, so they’re really not worth as much as the earned, organic backlinks from your chamber of commerce, maybe a referral partner or you two guest blog on each other’s blogs if it’s relevant, if you get listed, I don’t know, like in a manufacturer’s directory, those all count as backlinks. They’re not all created the same. You should definitely, definitely, definitely be cautious when buying backlinks.
Amanda Joyce:
I feel like a good rule of thumb, I was going to say, is just if you’re not working with an agency or an SEO specialist, a backlinks campaign is not going to suddenly make you start ranking without the whole SEO puzzle. So, just cool your jets and don’t let someone call and sell you on backlinks as if that’s going to solve your SEO issue. Maybe this is a broad stroke, but I would just say if you’re not investing in SEO, just say no thank you to anyone who tries to sell you a backlinks campaign because it needs to be vetted out by someone who knows what they’re doing.
And then we find people that spent $500 and then got a bunch of porn backlinks that basically throw off the value of their URL that otherwise was doing just fine, and then now you have to spend all this time and effort to remediate crappy links when you could have just not done it at all. In the case of the person I’m thinking of, that I know you’re thinking of, it hurt them 100 times more than it helped them, and it was just like a passive-
Devon Hayes:
He had no idea.
Amanda Joyce:
… “I could throw 500 bucks at that and just not even think about it and move on.” It didn’t do a many favors. So, I think we should just say, don’t do it unless you have an SEO person that’s vetting it out for you.
Devon Hayes:
Well, and even I know that not all SEO people vetted out. So, not all SEOs are created the same either. And so if you have an agency doing it for you, maybe that’s a question you ask them because 500 backlinks from China pointing to your website give you no local authority. So even if they’re not spam, but they’re in another language, that’s still useless to you and actually drives down the value of your domain, had it not had those backlinks pointing to them, but now your backlink number is up. It doesn’t work that way. Now, you can see companies ranking number one on Google, right in the map pack, you can see them number one on the organic results and they’ll have maybe like 10 backlinks, but the authority of those backlinks is higher than websites that are in position 10 with 1,400 backlinks. So I agree, broad sweeping stroke, don’t buy them. Don’t buy them if you’re not doing SEO, and make sure your SEO person knows how to vet out a backlink and isn’t selling you on garbage.
Amanda Joyce:
And just one more thing on that before we put a pin in it, years ago, old-timey SEO, it was quantity over quality. And so, you could probably find some articles on the web that are going to tell you that, but look at the date on them. Google has long since updated the algorithm and quantity over quality is just not a thing anymore. So, if you’re doing your homework, make sure you keep that in mind.
Devon Hayes:
And if you know enough about it, you can look at this yourself. Take the top three results and run them through one of the free SEO tools and look at how many backlinks they have. It’s crazy. Some of the really hard markets that we work in, the top three positions, they have 12 or 18 backlinks and then positions like seven, eight, nine, 10 have literally 12, 14, 1,800 backlinks, so quality over quantity fo sho. Last one for this episode of I Saw It on Social. How often should I post on social media? Well, well, well, again-
Amanda Joyce:
We’re going to repeat a lot of what we just said.
Devon Hayes:
What’s your expectation? What’s your goal of posting on social? Do you think you’re going to get leads from it? You got to post a couple times a day every day, hashtags, reaching out, engaging on other… It’s not just posting. You got to engage in other people’s posts, follow other people, like their stuff, comment on their stuff, but I would say if you’re a small business and you’re like, how often should I post to social media? I would say once or twice a week and have it be meaningful and really good content and call it a day.
Amanda Joyce:
Exactly, if you’re wanting it to be a place, people can come vet you out and see that you’re a legit company and see your beautiful work and be able to kind of humanize your brand, a couple times a week is perfect. And like you said, if you want to post a million times to ideally drive some leads, there’s probably other things your sales guys could be doing to help you close those leads without having to create beautiful content because one thing that we all know with social is it takes so long. You look at it, and if it’s a well curated post, getting the image, and selecting the hashtags, and doing all the writing-
Devon Hayes:
And emojis.
Amanda Joyce:
And that’s one of the things as an agency, one of the reasons why we don’t love doing full-scale social, and we really just don’t do it anymore, we do it a couple times a week for SEO for those signals is because a lot of people look at it and they feel like they should be able to hire you and pay a couple hundred bucks a month and you’re going to be able to create all this beautiful content because sure, it’s like little short pieces of text. It takes so long to curate one piece of content you’re going to post on all your channels.
Devon Hayes:
Resize the image for each channel, and and don’t forget to add emojis, add a call to action. Look at the time of day that you’re posting. Does this image have text on top of it? This one shouldn’t. All of those things that you just don’t think about how much… Then mixing up the media, how many images, a carousel of images, one image, a video, like a story?
Amanda Joyce:
A story, yeah.
Devon Hayes:
It just goes on and on. It’s really intense and expensive and to be done right, it’s better done by you internally anyway. An agency is never going to know about the quirky things that some of your staff has going on or the funny things that happen, like the guy that has to have a bowl of Cheetos at every sales meeting. Those are funny things that make your brand your brand, and you can share those. We would have to ask you for that, but this does make me also think about one more question that wasn’t on this list, which was, do I need to post on every social media platform? We’ve been asked that pretty frequently, too, and the answer is no, you don’t have to. But should you absolutely have your profile on every social platform? The answer is yes. You want to claim your brand on those platforms, even if you don’t use them, but also they can serve as a backlink, healthy backlink, for your website, and they have a high domain authority-
Amanda Joyce:
And free.
Devon Hayes:
And free and a high trust course. So yes, have a branded, uniform profile on everything, on X, formerly known as Twitter. I feel like there’s a joke in there about Prince and the artist formerly known as, but anyways, claim your profiles, brand them, make sure you have your website URL in them and your physical address, if it allows you, call it a day. It’s not that hard to do, so that’s it. So, let us know what you think about our new segment, I Saw It on Social. I know you’re going to comment on how much you love it when I say it that way, and if you’ve got questions you’d like us to address on our next one, send them to us. We’d be happy to. We love helping, so thanks for tuning in.
Amanda Joyce:
Thanks, guys. That was today’s Trades Secrets. 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.
