The Future Of SEO Nobody Talks About | E-Coffee With Experts Podcast

Devon Hayes:

Instead of backlinks and keywords, it’s Google understanding who you are as an entity, as an overall entity. And schema is a really strong strategic way to do that. Just because you’re in the AI overview summary doesn’t mean that they’re even clicking through anymore. The goal of those overviews is to keep us on page and not have people clicking through to the website. And hack is really enforcing who you are, and then it’s future-proof because you’ve built that trust and you’ve built the authority. So no matter what happens, your brand is up there if you do it right.

Austin:

Welcome to another episode of E-coffee with Experts. I’m here today with Devon Hayes. She is the co-founder and Director of Strategy at Elevation Marketing out of Denver. They specialize in contractors and roofers, home services, which is a very saturated industry, and I’m sure we’ll get into different strategies that you’re going about to set yourself apart there. So welcome to the show, Devon.

Devon Hayes:

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be on here.

Austin:

I’m excited to have you here. Why don’t we go back a little bit and just give the audience some context where you started. You’re a founder now and you’ve been a founder for over a decade, but you were in the Navy, which thank you for your service before all of this. I’m curious how managing IT on a ship actually translated into digital marketing and entrepreneurship. What pulled you into this world?

Devon Hayes:

I know, right? It seems like a weird jump. So when I went into the Navy, they were like, “Oh, you scored really high on your ASVAB. Whatever you want to do, you can do.” I’m like, “I don’t know. How about communication?” So I got in and I was supposed to work radio, but then they merged data processors with radio men. So it took the two worlds and kind of combined them into IT because I never would’ve said, “I want to work in IT, that sounds great.”

Austin:

Right.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, but it was awesome. I was on a ship. And so we did all the communications, which there was obviously secure and non-secure, voice and data, but then you got to be in charge of the ship’s land or their network. So I don’t know, I kind of accidentally nerded out and got really into data then and I never would’ve chosen that. So yeah, after the Navy, I got into college and I never thought I could, which was, I just didn’t think I was smart enough.

And then sure enough, I liked the marketing side of things because you could be creative. And so it was just an interesting story of where my experience in the Navy led me down marketing and then the marketing path, which somehow right out of school, my first job was in construction as a business manager. Not quite marketing yet, but I was like, you are looking at numbers and data and on the business side of things.

And then eventually, I finally got to get into a little business development, which then led to marketing, which somehow got me here. But it was a funny path where I had all this weird experience working on a wastewater recycling facility in Petaluma, California for Kiewit. That was where I was a business manager and I don’t know, a funny path, but always in construction engineering for the most part. And until one day, I married a roofer and I love, he was an owner or is an owner.

So I got to see him living the lap of luxury where he is like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to take a powder day. We just got two feet in winter park.” And I was at that point working for the man, and I was commuting an hour a day. There was meetings on things for meeting’s sake. I’m like, “I want to do more of that where I don’t have to request time off.” So I took a leap of faith and started an agency and then his roofing company was my first client. So that’s long story long. That’s how we got there.

Austin:

And you know what? I talked to a lot of founders and that story is more common than you might imagine. It was hardly anybody studied marketing in college because a lot of the times, digital marketing as we know it now was not even a major and it wasn’t even thought about barely understanding what the internet is. So yeah, a messy real world experience path is much more common and it tends founders that have grit and that want to make a lifestyle for themselves and actually serve businesses as opposed to just exercise what they learned in college so they feel like they got a good deal out of their education.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, yeah, that’s what I did study in college, but you’re right, there was no such thing as like SEO and Google had just come out. I was part of the original Facebook club where you had to have a college.edu email address to get in. Dating myself a little bit, but yeah, it wasn’t a thing when I was in school. So yeah, that makes sense that most founders have like you said, a messy path to ownership.

Austin:

And right before we hit record, you were telling me about how the agency has grown quite a bit over the last few years, and now you’re putting in processes and now taking those SOPs and automating them with AI wasn’t always like that. And this is where I see a lot of founders who are right in the growth stage, they’re right at the million dollar mark in revenue. They start to face a bottleneck where they’re the ones who have done everything well and they’re starting to hire out and they need to write the processes, the SOPs. Now, if there’s any organization that goes by the book and has processes and documentation for everything, I would imagine it’s the military, right?

Devon Hayes:

Yes.

Austin:

When you started Elevate, how did you bring that idea of processes and SOPs over into your business? Or did it start that way? Or I guess tell me the origin story.

Devon Hayes:

No, at Elevation Marketing are just, I think the past year we really spent refining our SOPs because we started off with contractors who when you hire a contractor, they’re 1099, you’re not supposed to provide any training. They’re already supposed to know how to do the thing that you’re hiring them for. At least that’s what our accountants tell us. So that was a bit different, and then when we really got into the growth mode and started hiring people on actually W-2 employees, that’s when we realized we had a hole in our SOP process.

No, no, I did not follow my training and we did not start with SOPs here. And I think with a lot of owners, especially marketing, you’re the jack of all trades. You can do email marketing, you can do graphic design, a little bit of copywriting. You can dabble in some Google Analytics and set up events. So you know a little bit of all of it. So you don’t, I think it gradually happens with time at least, I don’t know a lot of the agency owners that I’ve talked to, so that’s usually not those. But I don’t know, maybe there’s a lot of organized people that know. I know I need SOPs from the-

Austin:

… Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s a learning experience for sure. And I’m curious, you mentioned that your husband’s roofing company was the first client. How did you get your second, third client, and how is that different from how you acquire clients today?

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, so with his company, I don’t know if people still do this. I know we do, but you put your old URL in the footer of the website managed by or run by Elevation Marketing, and then it leads back to our website. So in Denver, it’s a really saturated market for roofers. Any storm based market like Omaha, Dallas, Austin, those heavy storms where you know, get hail every season, from that, actually, I had a lot of roofers reach out and say, “Well, this is who I Googled.”

I’m sitting here in Dallas, I’m sitting here in Omaha, I’m sitting here across the country, and when I google roofing contractor, Denver, my husband’s company would come up and then they would go scroll to the bottom, look for managed by and find us that way because it was just me. So I didn’t do any marketing, any BD. I just used my sphere of influence, as they say, and just reached out to people I knew and it was all word of mouth in the very beginning.

So that’s how I got the next few roofing contractors. And then locally, I just had tried to go down the cannabis realm at first before we reached down to contractors. But because that was the oil boom of, or what we thought was going to be the oil boom of our, I didn’t know enough about it. I just wanted to get in on it because I’m like, “Hey, this is where business is at. There’s a ton of money here.” But it was hilarious. I was live tweeting for this big brand and I don’t know anything about the flower, and I called it this little guy here, and all these people who are in the know are like, “It’s a girl, you idiot.”

Austin:

Excuse me.

Devon Hayes:

“Hi, I am a carpetbagging son of a gun.” I don’t know this stuff and I don’t know anything about it. So that was short-lived, but I did meet some really interesting people. And then all the roofers that I worked with were just great. Salt of the earth people. And so moving forward, I just found those were the clients where we had long-term relationships, and I really had figured out the formula to bring them a lot of success.

It was, you could repeat it, and then we started dipping outside of roofers. We got into a couple of electricians, tried the same formula, a little bit different, but it had the same amount of success with you pull the levers and tweak a bit. But yeah, so that’s kind of how we naturally just niche down, but at first it was like, “Come on, come on, we’re new. We need business.”

Austin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s the age-old trap that we fall into as entrepreneurs is we want the business, so we’re going to serve everybody, but as we scale up, that is not the way niching down even further, even a step further, we have a topic and then a subtopic and then a third subtopic, and there’s still a massive market there. I’m curious with contractors and home services, roofing, et cetera, usually these founders or these owners, they’re not digital savvy, they’re not technical people.

Their hands are much more used to holding a drill as opposed to typing on a keyboard. So I guess you go about interacting with clients in home services and explaining to them the importance of strong web presence, strong SEO, solid link strategy. How do you go about explaining what’s the most important thing for them online? Is there a place where you start?

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, so it depends on the owner and it depends who I’m talking to. So in the contractor marketing space, there is a lot of competition from other marketing agencies and a lot of those agencies and loud voices in the space, not just marketing agencies. They provide a lot of education, and I think a couple challenges we have is contractors come to us and they’ve heard about, “I need to get social media ads. I need these social.” Because in the space that they’re in and in their spheres and at the conferences and expos and things they go to, they’re told they need to do this.

And sometimes we’ve got to, there’s that set of guys where we’re coaching them. We’re like, “Well, what’s the goal of the marketing activity? If it’s [inaudible 00:11:25], do you think social is the best play? Let me tell you our experience.” And then there’s the other side of it where there’s actually some business owners that have invested in business coaching and they have really, really great business coaches specifically for contractors. And those guys are our favorite clients because they understand.

They’ve been taught the value of marketing and web presence and tracking your lead acquisition and all of those things. So those business owners are easier to work with because somebody’s taught them and they’ve taught them the KPIs and things that they should be looking for from their marketing agency. It’s the other guys who haven’t been coached and we’re trying to teach them, but almost, it depends on the contractor, you can’t just lump them all and say they’re the same, but they’ve been burned by so many agencies that to them, they don’t care to understand the background.

They’re like, “What are my leads? And am I number one?” That’s all I care about. And so it’s really hard to explain some of the other work, the invisible work that they don’t see and why there’s value in it and why we’re setting them up for success long-term. So there’s those two different owners, and then the third bucket is you want to educate them. You want to share with them, because even if they don’t go with you, knowledge is power for them and choosing a partner, and some of them are like, “It’s too much. It’s too much. Just can you just do it? Can you just do it and not tell me how it’s done?”

So it’s like you want to meet them where they’re at and whatever makes them comfortable, but it’s hard in a loud space because everybody is selling something so they don’t know what to trust and you don’t know their history. It’s like, I don’t know if you get into a relationship and I don’t know, the guy’s, somebody’s been cheating on someone, then they’re always looking.

Austin:

Yes.

Devon Hayes:

It could just be messy. It could be messy.

Austin:

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That’s a whole separate podcast that you and I can have, and I’m happy to have that.

Devon Hayes:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess there’s no easy answer. I love the contractors though that invest in a business coach and really understand the value of marketing because then you are not trying to sell them on a service while telling them why it’s important and serves them long-term.

Austin:

And the search game is changing, as we all know, that’s why we’re here on this podcast is because everything is changing from SEO to search everywhere optimization, or we talk about GEO with Google’s AI overviews and more people searching on ChatGPT and tools of the like, how are you approaching the strategy differently so that things don’t just show up in the AI overview, and you might get a click on the website, the traffic might increase on the website, but really, it’s not leading to booked calls. How are you adapting your SEO strategy to accommodate?

Devon Hayes:

So yeah, that’s like a heavy-loaded question here. So there’s two things kind of happening there. There’s obviously getting placed in the AI overview, that’s a whole separate strategy now with SEO and how you get in that AI overview, but like you said, just because in the AI overview summary doesn’t mean that they’re even clicking through anymore. The goal of those overviews is to keep us on page and not have people clicking through to the website.

So that’s a challenge in itself is even to get cited in the AI summary because that’s where people are getting their information. The way we’re approaching it is that you have to have Google understand your entity as a whole, understand who you are, what you do, and where you do it, and then you to have a broad enough, you’re casting a wide enough net that yes, as our user behavior is changing, it depends on what we’re searching in that AI summary to have that cited there.

Now, is it top, mid, or bottom of the funnel content that’s listed? That’s part of it because typically, those bottom of the funnel, they’re ready to convert, they’re ready to buy. They’re looking for trust, they’re looking for a trusted brand. So it helps to see your client’s name in that AI summary, but usually conversions are happening in that local three pack, that’s where people are buying.

So making sure that our clients rank in that local three pack is huge for actual conversions. And I guess to answer your question about what are you doing once they click through to the website and they get there and ensuring they convert, that’s a whole study in itself, but we’ve tried to meet the customer where they’re at. Do we have an online booking? Because a lot of times, it used to be we would all do form fills and then wait for someone to get back to us.

Now, there’s so much technology, there’s automations where people will click to call and that’s great because that’s typically a conversion, if they’re calling you, they’re ready to buy. But what’s different now is the online, you can’t have, we’ve seen people who just have an online booking link, but not a form fill. And at the same time, if I’m at work and I can’t jump on the phone with you or I don’t know if I want to book with you, I want to ask you a few questions. You just have to meet the customer where they’re at.

So I think for actual conversion rate optimization, meeting the customer where they’re at is how you do it on page. Those flyaway tabs that are right there so that people, they don’t get lost in the scroll, the right CTA, all of those things I think is part of getting them to convert. If you captured them with some of that topical authority type of content and they’re coming through to the site, is it easy for them to take action from the blog? Do you have enough internal links that point back to the actual service page that might give them more information?

So I think once you get them on page, your CTAs and your internal linking will help get that conversion over the line and then making sure that you have available the type of way they want to convert. Do they want to talk to a chatbot to ask questions? Overwhelming to have a button and a pop-up and a tab and a chatbot, you really have to think about the user’s experience, and especially on mobile because we’re understanding each vertical that we work in is a little bit different and how users use the site.

For our landscapers, it’s a very visual business. We’ve done some CRO, like A/B testing on that. We see people, they do want to see your projects, they do want to look at your work. They do want it segmented by the type of work, show me all of your hardscapes, show me all of your fire pits. But on roofs, roof people really don’t click through and look at those galleries. They don’t look at your projects, they don’t really look at it. So it’s a different users based on the type of contractor.

So doing that A/B testing once they’re on page to make sure that you’re meeting them where they’re at, they’re not overwhelmed, and it’s really, really clear what action you want them to take and making it easy for them to do it. And again, that’s understanding, are they mobile? Are they desktop? Because that will change how you lay things out. So it’s great.

Austin:

Oh yeah.

Devon Hayes:

Long-winded answer.

Austin:

No, thanks for going there. Thanks for going there. I mentioned to you that I came to Arizona for solar, and I would notice the same thing. When people were on the website, they didn’t really care about how the solar looked. I mean, yes, to a certain extent because it’s an additional aesthetic, but more so they were looking at the reviews and the testimonials that were listed on the website and on the Google Pages, Yelp, et cetera, Angie’s list.

So the testimonials were really, really important. I’m curious, do you have campaigns that go alternate routes other than just on page, off page? Are there campaigns that you do as an agency for your clients to reach out to the customers on their behalf, ask for reviews and things that you can then add into your on page to help with that, let’s say middle of the funnel?

Devon Hayes:

So we do. So for every client that we get, they get a, it’s called NiceJob, NiceJob license, and NiceJob does that review asking for a review and automation for that. You can set it up however you want to, but their analytics show that for touches in requesting a review. The first and the fourth touch are the most successful, and it’s a mix between email and text messages, and the most conversions happen on the, so I think the first touch is an email, and then the third, sorry, the fourth touch is a text, and those are the two highest converting touches in a four ask sequence.

So for our clients, we always put NiceJob on their website and they have that automation where again, it has the four touch sequence, and then it does pull in reviews from as many review sources as you want. So it has that trust factor. It’s not someone typing in on a page like this person’s review. It’s actually pulling in real time and you get it to only show four and five star reviews.

So that is what we do because as you know, reviews are huge for that local three pack positioning, and if you’re not consistently getting them, then you’re never going to maintain your position in the local three pack. And so we’ll help people with their initial outreach campaigns for getting reviews if they’ve never done that before. We’ve got some cool things that we do with our roofers. There’s another satellite quote based thing called ROOFLE, and people that submit a request for, fill out the lead form, get their quote online, there’s a way to then contact them. I guess that’s away from reviews, but we try to work that into the fold. What did you think about your experience? Because truly if they interacted with your business, you can ask for a review.

Austin:

True.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. What is critical with reputation management and getting those reviews is, I’ve heard of people buying reviews. The thing is, you never want to go and we’re really careful with the review, email campaigns that we do, asking for reviews. We never upload an entire list. We segment out the list of past customers who haven’t left a review, because if you get a ton of reviews all of a sudden, you’ve been getting one every two weeks and then all of a sudden you get 10 in a week or 15 in a week, you’re going outside the standard deviation of what you’ve established for yourself and the trust that Google has with you.

So anytime you go outside of that standard deviation, you’re raising your hand to Google and they’re looking at you going, “This is outside the norm. I don’t think I trust you.” And you could fall off if you already have strong positioning. So that’s something that we keep an eye on when we do those reputation management campaigns for clients, but yeah.

Austin:

Yeah, it’s all about trust with the algo gods and yeah, don’t be waving the red flag. That could also be, yeah, exactly.

Devon Hayes:

Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was going to say that’s where people did themselves in when they would upload 200 blogs at a time. You’re like, with their AI content, you’re like, “Don’t do that.”

Austin:

What are you doing? Use the AI to automate. Oh my gosh, what are you talking about? Set up a posting channel.

Devon Hayes:

Slow it down. Slow it down. Yeah, totally.

Austin:

Yeah, yeah. What about schema? With everything that’s happening, changing in the SERP world in AI, pulling everything in with overviews, how important is schema? Are there things that you alter, things that you’ve changed? Tell me a little bit about how you’re approaching that.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, yeah. Schema is huge. It’s critical for any SEO campaign. It’s critical to appear in Google’s knowledge Graph, but it’s critical in, I don’t know if it’s a hot take, but before there’s all different schema types and instead of having a plugin on your website for schema, a lot of the SEO plugins come with them. You can get way more strategic with it. You want your service area schema, stacking that with your Wikipedia entity, with your category, your GBP category, and aligning those is critical for today’s SEO with AI citations and AI, sorry, summary overviews.

So yes, there’s different schema types, and I think most SEOs, we would scoff at those automated plugins that do it for you because there’s a schema strategy for what you have on your homepage, your service pages, your location, landing pages, your service area pages, FAQ pages, there’s review schema. So there is the more clearly LLMs what you do via schema, the better it is for you and it helps. Again, we’ve moved, SEO has moved away from those keyword-based SEO to now it’s instead of backlinks and keywords, it’s Google understanding who you are as an entity, as an overall entity, and Schema is a really strong strategic way to do that.

I think with SEO plugins, you’ll get maybe 30 to 40 lines of schema, and the way we do it for our clients is there’s like 4,000 lines of schema. Yeah, you can really juice it up if you know what you’re doing. So it’s huge. Any port in a storm, if you are bootstrapping it and you are running your website by yourself that the schema plugins, there are enough. You can probably use AI to help you juice it up a bit more and run different schema types on different pages on your site. Any port in a storm, it’ll just definitely have schema no matter what you do. It is critical. Yeah.

Austin:

Okay. Yes. So schema is important, and any schema is better than no schema, right?

Devon Hayes:

Yes.

Austin:

You have to have some sort of strategy. That’s essentially what I heard. Is that right?

Devon Hayes:

Yeah.

Austin:

Okay, perfect. Well, I want to be conscious of time. We’re wrapping up here, but talk to me a little bit about AI and how you’re using it internally as an SEO agency and what it’s doing for you to make things more efficient, to make things more effective, to deal with clients better. What sort of tools are you using or workflows are making an impact for you?

Devon Hayes:

I will admit that we should be using AI way more than we do. We’re attending a conference at the end of September. The way we’ve seen it done is we’ve tried implementing it for business development purposes where there’s some automations and some scraping of email addresses through LinkedIn that there’s a whole workflow and custom GPTs for that. But internally, I think we still use it at, it’s a really basic kind of way.

Help us with outlines, we’ve identified we want to write this thing. What would we’d be missing if we didn’t put it in here in this piece of content? I’ll use it for data analysis sometimes, but no, I swear, we are dinosaurs a little bit on that area, other than I think some standard uses that everyone probably uses AI for. We’re trying to lean into it. I think we watched it when it first came out and everyone used it for writing content, and then we saw what Google did to that content.

And I know that’s the tip of the iceberg with AI. I know there’s so much it could do, and I even have an AI guy that I met at an agency conference, and he’s like, “Any task that you do more than twice a week, you should really automate.” I’m like, “Okay. I know, I know.” And he has all this cool stuff built out. It’s incredible. But to be honest, I just feel like we’re dinosaurs and we’ve got some automations in our project management set up. We have ClickUp, we use that, and we have a ton of automations that will then create folders inside of the drive for a new client setup, automate the 285 tasks that go with a new client and assign into due dates. So I guess that’s a big automation, but not really AI-based. So I’m sorry to be a letdown in the AI realm.

Austin:

No, ClickUp is great. Clickup is great. And it’s funny, even using auto-text or word completion, technically that is AI. So there’s a lot that goes on. But yeah, I love ClickUp too. We use it internally, that’s fascinating. The last thing I wanted to ask you about Devon, is we’ve heard here and there, it’s almost like a hot take I guess, how important is link building and how are you approaching link building now?

Devon Hayes:

So link building is, I think it takes a back seat to brand mentions on Google. So brand mentions now are what we strive for. Backlinks is they’re good and they play a role, especially high quality, but the days of running a citation campaign are just really not, those links aren’t the best. So what we try to do and try to work with our clients on is it’s all manual. Are you sponsoring the PTA at your kid’s school? Let’s get a back link from that site that gives you some local authority.

Can you sponsor a little league team? Can you please get a QR code up there just so that over and over again you’re getting traffic from that location through to your website? Our backlinks are really built around building the brand over, getting them placed in a Forbes magazine, whatever. It’s relevant publications like Roofing Contractor magazine for roofers know, the top 100 roofing contractors.

Stuff like that is great, but old-timey SEO, you would be like, “Okay, the number of backlinks is huge, but now it’s brand mentions, making sure the brand name is exactly how it appears on their site, so there’s no entity confusion and trying to build the bubble around local links, local QR code scans through to a website.” And so we build campaigns around that, which performs really well over a lot of times.

If you can get the high domain authority with those high topical relevance and reinforce your authority, great. We would definitely not shy away from it, but we love all the expertise, best top 25 landscapers in Denver. We would love to have those links, but really anymore brand, brand, brand, brand name mentions, brand mentions, brand mentions, people scanning locally through to the website.

Austin:

I love that, yeah. And we’ve kind of heard the same thing.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah.

Austin:

Is since AI is able to crawl everything, that’s how these overviews come up. They’re not necessarily looking for the citations, they’re looking for context, right? They’re looking for associations. Yeah.

Devon Hayes:

Yes. Instead of keyword matches, they want to understand who you are and understand that you’re an authority, and then they’ll cite you and then they’ll give an overview of the piece that you’ve written that points to the fact that you’re an authority and who authored that piece is huge too. That points to the authority piece helps build trust to then lend itself to getting you in that summary. So yeah, it’s a different ball game when you’re trying to be understood by LLMs. It’s fun. I really like it because then there’s more creativity with how you rise a brand, float a brand and have it understood versus just trying to do service plus location, keyword matches in a hundred different variations.

Austin:

Yeah, we have to get creative and keep up with the machines, but it’s this weird infinite loop where we’re trying to anticipate what the machines are going to do, but at the same time, they’re learning based on our behaviors. So it’s like, “Oh man, chicken in the egg scenario, right?”

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, but it’s cool because even with the development of AI. Ultimately, the way we do SEO now and our agency, I think a lot of other agencies, we are not special there, but I think is that it’s really it’s future-proof if you build the brand over the new hack of getting in the AI overview summary that the hack is having your brand understood, and the hack is really enforcing who you are, and then it’s future-proof because you’ve built that trust and you’ve built the authority. So no matter what happens, your brand is up there if you do it right. So yeah, that’s a bit.

Austin:

Yeah. Yeah, and it also comes from strong relationships with publishers. Just the journalists knowing who you are, knowing that you’ve produced good pieces in the past, maybe helping them out with some data or a unique report that you’ve put together, now that’s leaning into the digital PR space, which is a different conversation. But yeah, it almost seems like the lines are blurring between link strategy and digital PR. It’s like, “Okay.” Yeah.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, totally. And because the content that gets favored that would then have a reporter ask you to go on record with X, Y, and Z, it’s the case studies that you’re putting out for someone, it’s those white papers. It’s those things that AI can’t really make up when you’re telling the story at a success story or like, “Oh God, this is what we learned. Everything went wrong on this project, and here’s how we tried to write the course.” Those are genuine stories that, again, they make you an authority because you can talk about a negative experience, it’s just how you handle that negative experience, especially for our clients, it’s construction.

Most people are reasonable and understand that you can’t help it if a permitting office is going to take 30 days to give you a permit, and that sets your entire timeline. You just talk through the real world things that I guess AI could make it up, but theoretically, it’s those pieces that reinforce your authority and reinforce, I’m sorry, reinforce your trust over just your knowledge and your expertise in an area, those real life stories.

Austin:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s something I wish more contractors would do, and even more marketing agencies just lead with, “Hey, we’re not perfect. Things happen. But an example of when something went sideways in the past, here’s how we handled it, and we actually fixed it and made sure that the client came out on top. And we still have a strong relationship because we’re always transparent, we’re always upfront, and we’re always trying to do what’s best for the client.” I think that sort of transparency in age of information abundance where stuff can be made up left and right, that’s sort of transparency and having those hard conversations from agency to client, but also from client to customer.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, I love those. I love reading those like, oh God, and then you just feel bad when stuff is hitting the fan. The contractor feels terrible, the homeowner’s having a horrible experience, or if it’s your agency, and then you. When we’ve had stuff go wrong and I know it’s horrible for our client, and I’m like, “I’m so.” All the pain of it, and so then I question myself whenever anything goes wrong, I’m like, “Oh my God.”

I freak out. But I think that’s what makes you good is when you question yourself and you care. But yeah, those stories, it humanizes the brand and it shows like, “Hey, these are good guys. Even if something goes south, they are going to do the right thing.” And it takes away that fear like, “Are you going to screw me over?” And the agency, “Are you going to take my website? Are you going to keep my content? Are you going to keep my profiles?” All those things.

Just to be like, “No, no, we’re not keeping any.” Just ease that fear that comes with, especially marketing. We all do a lot of invisible work, and our clients don’t always know what we do. They don’t know what goes into setting up events in Google Analytics. They don’t understand why that’s how many hours of work. So I think you nailed it when you said transparency and just talking through when stuff does go wrong. Success stories are great, we love them, but also what happens when it goes south, that’s a really great point.

Austin:

Yeah, yeah. Plus, we all know that negative headlines make for better click-through rates, obviously.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, yeah.

Austin:

Right? Someone in Denver, Colorado had a hole in their roof for 10 days. Here’s what happened. And then it’s like, “Yeah, we fixed it. We came in. We bought them a new house or something.”

Devon Hayes:

That’s great. Totally.

Austin:

That is all fantastic. Devon, thanks so much for being here. If people want to get a hold of you and learn more about Elevation Marketing or any of the contractors that you work with, if they’re local and they maybe need some roof work done, is LinkedIn the best way to reach out with you? Or how do you prefer to be contacted?

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, LinkedIn, or you can go to our website. Elevmarketing.com is a great way, and you can just interact with a chatbot or fill out a form, whatever you like. And yeah, we’ll be in touch with you.

Austin:

Fantastic. And I think you should give yourself more credit. You actually do have AI working for you with the chatbot on the website.

Devon Hayes:

Oh yeah, that’s right.

Austin:

There you go.

Devon Hayes:

Her name is Adrienne, and if you type in, “Yo, Adrienne.” You’ll get a fun little surprise on that one.

Austin:

Yo, Adrienne, what’s up? I’m going to try that after this call.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. Yo, Adrienne,

Austin:

That’s awesome. Thanks again, Devon.

Devon Hayes:

All right, thank you.