May 14, 2024 • 31 mins
Get into the essentials of budgeting for lead generation for home service businesses. Explore effective strategies for using Google Local Service ads, optimizing local SEO, and understanding the costs associated with different advertising platforms. Learn how to calculate customer acquisition costs, get practical advice on maintaining engagement with potential clients and understand how to maximize the return on your marketing investments. Join host Adam Sylvester, and Phil Risher, owner of Phlash Consulting.
Introduction to the episode and guests [0:30]
Effective lead generation platforms and their costs [1:07]
Setting up and optimizing Google Local Service ads [3:34]
Do Google Local Service ads work, especially in competitive markets? [5:05]
Optimizing local SEO and Google map pack positioning [6:39]
Calculating customer acquisition costs [9:27]
Tracking the source of leads for accurate marketing insights [12:46]
Most important number you need to know as a business owner [14:30]
How much you should be spending on Cost per Click [18:04]
Getting optimal search impression share in Google Ads [19:38]
How Jobber helps home service businesses scale [21:17]
Ideal return on investment in marketing and the role of lifetime customer value [22:53]
Keeping leads that haven’t converted top of mind [24:15]
Adam’s takeaway tips: Google LSA are the best value and the simplest way to start basic ads, make sure your Google Business Profile is fully maxed out, get as many Google reviews as you can, once you start spending money on marketing - track everything as much as possible [30:08]
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
When you log in, you can literally,instead of cost per click,
change it to cost per conversion.That's going to be your cost per lead.
You have to know that number becausethat number is going to tell you
everything.
Welcome to Masters of HomeService. I'm Adam Sylvester.
Today we're talking about how muchyou should spend on new leads.
This is a podcast made by successfulhome service pros for home service pros,
(00:22):
all to make your business moreprofitable and more efficient.
Today's guest is Phil, richer, ownerand founder of Flash Consulting,
and he's an expert onlead generation. Phil,
tell us more about you and what you do.
Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me.
We partner with local service businesses,home services, lawn care companies,
gut cleaning companies, movingcompanies, carpet cleaning,
a bunch of different trades, andwe help them increase their sales,
(00:44):
keep their schedules fullthrough partnering with them, doing digital marketing,
consulting with the business owners.
This is definitely great. Okay,so first question I have for you.
A lot of our listeners were just thinkingthrough what kind of leads am I going
for, how do I get 'em?
But what are you seeing in the homeservice industry in terms of what are the
best lowest cost leads that havethe highest return, the best value?
(01:07):
Yeah. What we found is on Google,
Google is the search engine resultspage number one referral partner in the
world. There's really four coresections. There's your top section,
which is called Google Local Service ads,and Google actually has a calculator.
If you were to look up Googlelocal service ads cost calculator,
they would tell you how much a lead isgoing to cost in your area specifically
for Google local serviceads. So that's the first one,
(01:28):
and we can dive into all these.I'm just going to go through,
that's usually one of the lowest cost,like if you're going to pay per lead,
that's a low cost option. Thenyou have your Google search ads,
which is the next section,
which is where you kind of see your nameand other people's names and it says
sponsored.
That's usually the most expensive leadon Google because it's a search ad. Then
you have your local map pack withyour Google business profile.
(01:48):
That's going to be avery inexpensive lead.
It's just truly organic traffic andyou can increase your visibility
by getting Google reviews.
And then the last section of Google isyour website ranking where everyone's
websites are ranked out. And again,
this is going to be a low cost lead aswell because it's more organic side of
things. So I would say ifsomeone's thinking about doing leads and getting leads
(02:09):
specifically Google local service adsis a good option for inexpensive leads,
but it's also can be tough to getinto that position to get the leads.
What about the competitionmatters? The price goes up,
I'm guessing if your competitors arebig against the same clicks, right?
So explain that a little bit.
Yeah, so with Google localservice ads specifically,
(02:30):
if you don't have enough Google reviewsor someone else has more Google reviews
than you, Google's only goingto show the best company.
So it's very competitive inthere to try to be shown. So yes,
you're absolutely right. For theGoogle search ads perspective,
it's based off your bids.
So if you were to be running Googlesearch ads and other people are
bidding on the samekeywords as you, then yeah,
it's going to drive the traffic up becauseGoogle's going to try to spend your
(02:53):
money and outbid otherpeople to show you there.
But the thing with Google search adsthat we've seen a lot is that it can be a
black box,
a black hole of you set your budget at$2,000 and Google's going to spend your
money, they're going to drivetraffic to your website,
but if your website's notoptimized to convert into leads,
then you're going to get crushed andyou're just going to be spending all this
money and not have anyreal results from it.
(03:14):
No,
I totally experienced that and anyonelistening who's done any kind of Google
search, it's a black hole of spending.Google will be happy to spend your money.
The LSA is, or some peoplecall it Google guarantee,
that's what it was called in thebeginning, LSA local service ads.
Those are the best value. Let'scamp out there for a little bit.
So how does someone start running LSA ads?
(03:34):
Yeah, great question. So you can go toGoogle, type in Google local service ads.
They have a specific landing page forGoogle local service ads. You go there,
you click start now and you put inyour information for your business.
It's going to ask you togive your address, your name,
your email, all that kind of stuff,
and then it's going to try to connectyour Google business profile with your
(03:57):
Google Local service ads account. Soyou kind of go through the prompt.
It's pretty straightforward.
Once you get the Google Localservice ads account set up,
then you actually have to doa background check for you.
And so you have to go through, it'scalled evidence, you have to click on,
it's going to say do a background check,click on that, do the background check.
Then in some industries lawn,
(04:18):
in some states there arelawn care licenses that you have to submit. I would say
that it depends on your industry,
but you will have licenses that youhave to submit to Google because to your
point, it used to becalled Google guaranteed.
Google was screening people and puttingthat little green check mark next to
them,
and the way that they screened them wasby getting the background check and then
also getting the licenses inthere. And then one other thing,
(04:40):
you have to have a certificateof insurance. So really that's the three things.
License, certificate of insurance,and then background check.
So if you go through thatprocess, typically we've seen,
it usually takes about three to fivedays to go through that entire cycle.
If you submit everything,
then you'll get a notificationin your inbox that says, Hey,
you've been Google screen and approved.
Now you just set up your budget and thenat that point you're kind of off to the
(05:03):
races with your Googlelocal service ads account.
And these ads are displayed to the verytop of Google before anything else.
So basically it'll say window cleanersin your area and the ones that are Google
guaranteed or LSA ads have that greencheckbox and everyone loves a good green
checkbox check mark.
And so people who are searchingfor window cleaning in their area,
(05:24):
they're more likely to click onthose ads because they're attractive,
they're guaranteed by Google, all thatkind of stuff. And you're going to spend,
I don't know, 20, 30, 40 bucks alead, but they're simple leads.
That's what I like about 'em.
They're simple leads and it's veryeasy to monitor the results of them
as opposed to the black hole ofspending on Google search ads,
which is much more complex.
(05:46):
Yeah, I'll give you a really good example.
About three months ago we started workingwith a lawn care company there in Long
Island, and when we first started workingwith them, they probably had like 30,
40 Google reviews,
and what I would for people out thereis go to Google type in whatever service
that you do in your area andyou'll see what the competition is.
So in their area, they had atrue green that had about 50,
(06:06):
60 reviews and they had a mosquitojoe that had something else.
So we went to thebusiness owner, said, Hey,
we need to get ourreviews over 75 reviews,
and then we're going to turn on Googlelocal service ads because we're going to
have the number one reviews in thatarea over the next two months. We went,
got his Google reviewlink, gave it to him, said,
get as many reviews asyou can. He got to 75.
We turned on that Googlelocal service ads for him,
(06:28):
and now he was outranking truegreen and out ranking mosquito Joe.
So now to your point,
he was the number one spot on Googleand he's paying $17 a lead right now,
and he's loving life.
He's killing it. That's a greatreturn. So you mentioned the map pack.
How do you get in?
Our listeners know shows the mapand it shows the three best results,
(06:49):
but sometimes I see a fourth one snuckin there at the top and it says sponsored
or something like that.How do you get into that?
Yeah,
so Google is playing around with thesearch engine results page all the time.
So they're taking your search ads oryour Google local service ads and they're
plugging and playing different spotsof where they can show people On Google
search though,
you can run ads and it can allow you toshow them on different display networks
(07:12):
is what they call it.
So it would allow you to then havea second ad in your local pack.
To your point, yes, that'show you can do that.
But to answer your question about howdo you get in there from an organic
perspective, because that is a relativelyquote free option for a lot of people,
and so the main thing that youcan do is to get Google reviews,
and I'll give you some otherones, but Google reviews,
(07:33):
what they found is about at 17% of yourranking is Google reviews. So if you
have a hundred Google reviews andsomeone else has 50 Google reviews,
nine times out of 10 you'regoing to be shown there.
The other things that you can do, andthis is a really, really important one,
is that if you don't have aphysical location in the city,
let's say that you want torank for somewhere in Dallas,
but you're outside of the Dallas,
(07:55):
if you don't have a physicallocation in that area,
you're not going to be shown in the mappack because you don't have a physical
location in Dallas, for example.
So your location and proximity takesa lot of that into consideration,
which taking this back tothe Google local service ads,
which is why it's so important becauselet's say you want to rank for Dallas,
well, in your Google local service ads,
you could select 20 different citiesthat you want to be the number one spot
(08:17):
for. So you could be in a suburb butthen still show up number one for a main
metropolitan area,
and we see that to be extremelyeffective for a lot of people.
Going back to the mat pack, though,
we talked about Googlereviews is very important,
making sure that your primarycategory is set for what you do.
We have an example of a company that wasa SOD company and they were trying to
(08:37):
get SOD jobs, so they putthat as the main category,
but really they wanted lawn care jobsand we switched it to lawn care and they
went to number one ranking for lawn care.
Then they could cross sell the saw jobs.
So it's extremely important toget that primary category right.
Okay. A few other free things Ilike maxing out the profile for.
I like asking clients to poston your Google profile for you.
(08:59):
They can leave a five star review,
but they can also post a photo of thework they did that you did for them and
they can give a description.Those are really powerful too.
I also like the q and a on Google.You can submit questions to Google,
you can even do it yourself. Youcan ask your friends to do it,
and then you can go in and answerthose questions and Google likes that.
So there's some free things out there.
But I want to continue on this lead costtheme because I want to know what is
(09:21):
customer acquisition cost?
How do you know how much a lead doescost and really should cost in each
individual industry?
Yeah, there's a lot of things that wecan talk about on this side of things,
but let's just focus oncustomer acquisition costs.
Then we can talk about how to build amarketing budget, that kind of stuff.
So customer acquisition costs,
the way that we look at that in theindustry is how much is your marketing
budget and then how many new customersthat you got? So with Jobber,
(09:43):
for example, there's a report, it's aclient information info or something.
It's a report that you can pull all yourclients' info and you can put a column
in there for created byand inside of that report.
Then you can see all the customersthat were created in a specific month.
So for example, you could say, okay,
this month I spent a thousanddollars and I got 10 new customers.
(10:05):
So presumably my customer acquisitioncost would be a hundred dollars,
a thousand dollarsspent, 10 new customers,
a hundred dollars customer acquisitioncost. So if we just keep it very simple,
how much did it cost toacquire new customers and whatever your marketing spend
is versus how many newcustomers that you got.
So customer acquisition cost is differentthan return on ad spend investment.
(10:25):
So you might get 10 new clients,
but they might only pay you$10 and that's not worth it.
And so it's important to know howmany new clients you're getting.
100% it matters because those clientsare upsell opportunities in the future.
Once you get a client in the door, they'remuch easier to sell to in the future,
but you also need to make sure thatthose clients are paying you enough.
So how do you calculatethe return on the ad spend?
(10:46):
Yeah, absolutely.
So when we look at coming up with amarketing budget or what's a good number,
ideally we see companies spendingbetween three and 10% of their revenue on
their marketing spend. So let's say thatyou make a hundred thousand dollars,
then you should be spending3000 to $10,000 a year on
your marketing.
And so if we zoom out orwe zoom into specific jobs,
(11:10):
let's say that your job isa thousand dollars. Well,
you don't want to spend morethan a hundred dollars to get that job because then
your job costing is going to be wayoff. So to answer your question,
you can kind of set the numbers basedoff of whatever your average ticket is,
and then you can say, okay,
I feel confident spending $200 to make$2,000 or whatever the numbers are.
Yeah, yeah. So how do you trackthat from a practical standpoint?
(11:33):
Obviously it matters whatsoftware people are using.
Our listeners are mostly using jobber.
How does a layperson go aboutThat's pretty tedious, I imagine.
I know personally that it's genius.
How do you recommend someone who'slistening? How do you track this stuff?
There's a bunch of waysthat you could do it.
I would say the easiest way is to try toget a tracking number through some call
(11:53):
tracking software. CallRail is areally good one that's out there.
You can get a trackingnumber through CallRail.
Then what you do is they have a scriptthat you can put on your website and you
can say that if someone comes fromGoogle search ads or organic or whatever
channel that they come from, thenit's called Dynamic Call changing,
something like that. Basicallythey changed the phone number.
Then when they call that number,
(12:15):
it would register in CallRail thatyou got a call from Google search ads.
So that's one way to do it.
The other way to do it is ifyou have forms on your website,
you can track the source of the forms,and so then you could say, okay,
this came from Google search, thiscame from Google Organic or whatever,
and then in your platformthat you use like Hi Jobber,
you can select the lead source andideally at the end of the month,
(12:38):
then you could go through all of yourcompleted revenue and see the campaign
that it came from or the lead that itcame from, and then pull the number,
what you're saying.
Well, but Phil, a lot of ourlisteners are saying, well,
I just ask asked the client whenthey call, how did you hear about us?
And here's the deal. That's fine in thebeginning when you just ask them, Hey,
oh, I saw you on TV or I Googled you.Most of the time they'll just say Google.
(12:59):
But here's the thing,
you can't really trust your clientsonce you start spending big money on ads
because they might tell youall kinds of crazy things.
The only way to really know is bytracking it the ways that you're talking
about. So I would say if we're going todivide our listeners into two groups,
group number one is people who justaren't spending very much money at all or
zero, that's fine. Just ask yourclients and just trust them.
(13:20):
But once you go into the secondgroup, which is spending money,
quite a bit of money on ad spend,you can't trust your clients anymore.
You have to have mechanisms in placeto make sure that the data is accurate,
because people tell us all the time,well, I think I saw yard sign. No,
you didn't. You Googled us and youspent $30 on a lead, and that matters.
We have a company that we work with andwe try to pull these numbers because we
(13:44):
want to make good data, makes gooddecisions, and we can recommend, Hey,
do this or do that. Andevery time we go in,
it says the lead source is existingcustomer, and we're like, man,
there's no way that every single persondown here is an existing customer when
they were just created, theywere just created this month,
and they're all existing customer,something's not adding up here.
So to your point, if you'regoing to spend money on your ads,
(14:05):
then you need to make sure that youhave it on the data behind the scenes
because a lot of times itfalls through the gaps.
I think we should also maybe talk aboutwhat are some of those numbers that you
should be tracking.
I think that's also very important forpeople if you're going to be spending
money.
So let's pretend we're in Google searchads. We're doing it, we're doing it.
What numbers matter?
Because a lot of times people get solda bill of goods on what numbers to
(14:27):
attract in Google ads, and they don'tmatter at all. What really matters?
Yes,
the number one number that you shouldknow as a business owner is your cost per
conversion. This isbasically your cost per lead.
So if we're looking at a cost perlead model of doing marketing,
then we're trying to say, okay,if I close 50% of my jobs,
(14:47):
if I were to give you 10 leadsand I close five of them,
that's 50% closure rates. Iknow that if I get a lead,
I need two of them to get a customer.
So if my cost per leadis a hundred dollars,
then it's going to cost me $200to get a customer. I close at 50%.
So anyone that runs your Google adsor when you log in, you can literally,
instead of cost per click,change it to cost per conversion.
That's going to be your cost per lead.
(15:08):
You have to know that number becausethat number is going to tell you
everything. It's going to say,it's too high, it's great.
You need to focus your adbudgets on this or that.
Another example of that islet's say you're lawn care and you do sawd and you're
running Google Ads foryour sawd installation,
and then you're running them for yournormal jobs or something, just basic jobs.
(15:29):
Well,
your cost per conversionmight be different on every single keyword that you're
running. So you have to be ableto look at that and say, well,
my cost per lead for SA is ahundred, but I'm happy with that.
You know what I'm saying?
A hundred dollars on a10,000 side job is one thing,
but a hundred dollars on asmall mowing job is not good.
Definitely make a difference betweenthe two. So I know that one thing,
(15:49):
a mistake I made in the beginning wasI would only look at the data inside of
Google Ads, so I would look at costper click, which kind of matters,
but not that much.
But the reason that I didn't look at costper conversion is it was harder to get
that data. It can be in GoogleAds if you really set up properly,
but that requires more workon my end to make sure that my
(16:13):
CRM and Google are talking to each other,
so I know because that keyword conversionis all the difference. It's like,
well, Google doesn't know if,so-and-so became a client.
They don't know that kind ofstuff. Any thoughts on that? Yeah.
So two parts to that.
The first one is that Google has changedfrom universal analytics to Google
Analytics, and not toget onto all the jargon,
but it's very easy now to add a Googletag manager to set up a conversion.
(16:38):
You could watch a YouTube videoand figure out how to do it.
It's not rocket science.
It used to be you have to put allthese codes and all this stuff.
It's pretty straightforward now,but a lot of times to your point,
there needs to be some intermediarybetween your Google search ads and then
what do you actually get becausejust because you get a conversion,
well then people always say,well, who was the conversion?
(16:59):
What was their phonenumber? What was their name?
Because it's just a bunchof bots sending me leads.
And so there's a bunch of tools outthere. We use one called What Converts,
and basically what that allows you todo is to kind of tie all the pieces
together to the end so then you cansee, well, what exactly did they search?
When did they turn into a phone call?When did they turn into a actual web form?
(17:20):
That kind of stuff.
Yeah. What convertsbasically is the bridge.
It's like the liaison betweenGoogle search and your CRM,
because what comes in isGoogle to Google as a number,
just a random number in cyberspace.It goes into your CRM as a person,
but then those can't talk to each otheruntil you have an app. What converts,
what converts then goes back into Googleand tells you that cyber number just
(17:43):
turned into Jane Doe because now we knowit helps communicate between the two
platforms, which I like,which is really important.
And CallRail has a component of that too.
So there are components in there thatCallRail allows to do what conversion just
makes it clean and easy to see.
Okay, gotcha.
Are there any other relevant numbers inGoogle search so we should pay attention
to on top of conversion?
(18:03):
Yeah, you mentioned cost perclick. I think that there is,
you want to try to shoot betweenthree to $5 your cost per click,
and that's just a fluffnumber that's out there,
but if you see something crazy like14, 20, $30, it could be alarming.
It just depends on whereyou're at in your industry.
Cost per click is basically telling youthat how many people go to your website
(18:24):
or click on something.
So if you're trying to get a hundredpeople to your website that if you get a
hundred people,
you're going to get 10 leads out of itbecause your website converts to 10%,
then you know that ifmy cost per click is $5,
then I have to spend X amount of dollarsto get a hundred people to my website,
and you can start doing some of themath there, which is why it's important,
but it doesn't giveyou a true lead number,
which is why I like cost per conversionbetter. The other number that is very
(18:45):
important, that is typically,
again buried in there is calledyour search impression share.
The reason search impression share is soimportant is because let's say that for
the SOD job,
let's say that your search impressionshare is taking the total searches that
happened in your area,
and it's saying how many times wereyou shown on that specific keyword?
So if there was 10 searches and youshowed up two times out of those 10,
(19:08):
your search impression share is 20%.
So what that means is that you have 80%of the time that you're not being shown,
so you could increase yourbudget and be shown more.
And on the flip side of that is if you'reat 90% search impression share, well,
maybe you need to scale that back a littlebit because you're being shown every
single time, but you're notactually converting at the spot that you need to be.
So I would say that's animportant one, but really.
(19:30):
Is there a sweet spot there? 50%, 80%,
or is it completelydependent on the industry?
It dependent on the industry, but ifyou want to dominate search, which good.
Luck I do. Yeah, if.
You want to dominate search, thenyeah, your search impression share,
if you're going to be like70, 80% on all of these ones,
it's going to cost alot of money. But yeah,
you want to take your targets servicelike I saw a job and you want to try to
(19:51):
ramp that up as much as you canwith search impression share.
Yeah, I mean you want todominate on the right keywords.
You and I were having a conversationlast week because one of our keywords
was spending a lot of money, and Iwas like, man, our ad spends so high.
And he said, well, what if wejust turn off this one keyword?
It was good repair. And I was like, oh,yeah, I don't want those leads. Anyway,
so we turned that off,
(20:11):
brings our ad spend downon bad leads anyways,
and so now if we wanted to,
we could actually take that money andspend it on even more on other leads or
just save that money,
but there's a lot of ways that you cantweak it so that you really hone in on
the exact things that youwant to get leads for.
Yep, exactly.
And to kind of tie this back together isthe reason I like Google local service
(20:31):
ads is inexpensive leads and there's notall this jargon of cost per conversion,
all this stuff. It's just like,click this button, call me,
and then you're going to charge mefor a lead, and it's just very clean.
There's no random algorithms andkeyword research and all this stuff.
Yeah, I like LSA because it so simple.
You go into Google Ads and it'sa mammoth of a platform and
(20:53):
you don't understand any of it. Basically,
most people listening just have noidea what any of that stuff means,
including myself. But LSA, you go in thereand it asks you what services you do,
what's your service radius,what's your zip code,
and then you basically click thebig blue button and you're done.
It takes 10 minutes, which I like, andI think that's really key. And also,
I mean it's at the top. That's importantnumber one. Yeah, it's at the very,
(21:14):
very top. Google prioritizes that. First,
let's pause the conversation here totalk about why we like jobber so much.
Phil, what do you like about Jobber?
How does Jobber help peoplescale their businesses?
Yeah, the two things thatI really like about Jobber,
the first one is the online scheduling.It allows you, if you're running ads,
you can drive traffic to your websiteand then people can just schedule right
online. So you don't even have to callthem or go through that whole process.
(21:36):
You just schedule right online.
I love that they also rolled out a bunchof new reports and it gives a lot more
clarity to walk through the cycle.
You can see clients that have come inquote requests and ultimately all the way
to the end so you can see that lifecycle of the client through your funnel.
So I really like those thingsabout Jobber to help you scale.
Online booking is so key. Eventually, LSA,
we've been talking aboutthis this whole time,
(21:57):
is going to connect into your onlinebooking, and so people are going to say,
Hey, Siri, since I'm going to cut mygrass tomorrow straight into jobber,
straight into onlinebooking, that's coming,
and our listeners willbe ready when that comes.
I personally like the new marketingtools that Jobber released.
You can now email within jobberclient with upcoming work.
In the next say week orso, you can say, Hey,
(22:18):
we're coming to your house next week,
and then you can give them some bulletson upsell services or make sure you ask
your technician about clean watersystems or whatever the case may be,
and prep them. Get them to startthinking about those upsells. Really,
really key. If you wantto give jobber a try,
new users can get an exclusive discountby going to jobber.com/podcast deal.
You need to try jobber.
(22:39):
It's going to make your business so muchbetter and you can scale with jobber.
Go give jobber a try.Generally speaking, Phil,
what is a good expectedreturn on marketing our
listeners? What should theyexpect If they put a dollar in,
what should they get back?
Yeah, ideally you would wantto shoot for five x return,
you spend a thousand dollars, youget $5,000, that's going to be good.
(23:01):
Great is obviously 10 x is like,wow, this is absolutely crushing it.
Three X is like, okay, this is all right.
Maybe we'll give it a couple more monthsand see if we can really work this,
but if you're spending a thousanddollars and making a thousand dollars,
that's a dud that's not working.So three x five x, 10 x,
that's kind of thethresholds that we look at.
The other thing to calculate in this isyou want to look at the lifetime value
(23:22):
of your customers, and youmight not have that data,
but at least you can make a best guessthat this person's going to come in for a
year long service contract or whatever,
and then eventually they'regoing to get this job.
So really it's not just a thousand dollarsand it's done or $500 and it's done.
It's maybe $2,500 nowthat I got this person.
There's different ways to look atyour return on ad spend for sure.
(23:43):
Well, you touched on this.
I want to go this direction nowbecause return on marketing spend,
it doesn't necessarily mean today ortomorrow. It could be a month from now.
It's a long game. We're inbusiness for a long time,
and so a client or a future client mightgo to website and not convert right
now, but they're still in our system.We still have their information,
(24:04):
and so we can mail them postcards,
we can show them banner ads and Facebookand Google and all these different
things.
So how do you guys recommendkeeping these people on the line,
so to speak, if theydon't convert immediately?
Yeah,
I mean ideally you would have some typeof monthly email that's going to these
people that's staying top ofmind because a lot of times,
(24:24):
let's say someone come, they fill outa form, so it is, you did get a lead,
right? You paid Google,you got a lead out of it,
but then you send them an estimate andit's not the right time or it's too high
or whatever, and thenthey're basically gone. Well,
if you have some nurturing sequence,like an email every single month,
for example, you'll say top of mind,
or if it's a quarterly blast ofa special or something like that,
(24:44):
you'll stay top of mind. Sojust keeping it very simple,
I would start with somethinglike that where I think jobber,
they have something that'sreally nice. You go in,
you can set up a quick campaign and sendit out to people at least just to stay
top of mind, do a blast of aspecial that works really good.
Trying to stay in some type ofa cadence is really important.
A lot of times we see, oh, I'm slow.Lemme send out a blast. That's great,
(25:07):
but it's also good to have a consistentflow staying top of mind for sure.
Yeah. What I have found is,and this is all mental I think,
but broke salespeople smell bad.
If you send that email blast out whenyou don't have any work tomorrow,
it kind of smells a little bad, butif you send that out when you're fine,
it seems like more people respond.I dunno if that's true or not,
(25:28):
but you want to send thatwhen you're not desperate.
The other thing I would say in that isif you're not emailing your clients on a
regular basis, you're losing money.
Email marketing is an ATM machineand sometimes you'll get 10 leads,
sometimes you'll get one,but they're both worth it,
and so if you're not emailingyour clients regularly,
then you're just missing the boat on oneof the most fundamental ways of growing
(25:52):
your business, which is by resellingto your existing client base.
I agree, and I have agreat example of this.
So typically around the holidayspeople are like, oh, I'm really slow.
It's Thanksgiving, it's Christmas,
so I am not going to be blowing up mypeople and emailing them and stuff,
when really that's the optimal timeto be emailing people because you get
(26:12):
referrals,
so you can stay top of mind forThanksgiving and share something about it,
but then when they go totheir Thanksgiving dinner and someone says, yeah,
I really need to get some sod this springin my whatever, then it's like, oh,
I actually work with this greatcompany. So to your point,
you don't want to be tryingto jam something in there.
You just want to be adding value andstaying top of mind during the slow points
(26:33):
and during the busy seasonsas well. Same thing.
Yeah, I'm a huge fan and Ilike jobbers new platform.
They've introduced a version of MailChimpinto their software, which I love.
I've already used it a couple,Anna. It's really handy. So Phil,
any final thoughts to leave with ourlisteners on whether, maybe two things,
one,
for someone who's just getting startedand then maybe a pretty good hack for
someone who knows all this stuff andthey've been a business owner for a long
(26:56):
time, they're may be doinga couple million dollars, what would you say to them?
Yeah, so first, if you're starting out,
and also if you've beenin business a long time,
a lot of times when wemeet with business owners,
and these could be multi seven figures,
they haven't gone through and figuredout what their marketing budget is,
and so it's hard to recommend thingsbecause we don't know how much money that
(27:16):
we're playing with here. So even ifyou're just starting out like, Hey,
I had my best year yet and Iwant to start doing marketing,
but where do I begin andhow much money do I spend?
So ideally what you would do is set asidethree to 10% of your monthly revenue
or yearly revenue, and you woulddesignate that towards marketing,
and it could be so small as a hundredor 200 bucks a month, but then just say,
(27:37):
I'm going to pick and I'm going tostart with Google local service ads. I'm
going to start with whatever else,Yelp or Better Business people,
or Angie or something, Thumbtack,whatever you want to do,
just start with something and then youwon't feel the pinch of like, oh my gosh,
I need to get money back from this.
Every single time you'll at least feelconfident that this is my budget for this
thing and this is what's going to happen,
and I might need to move this budgetaround. That's the first thing.
(27:58):
Have a marketing budget. Second,
a super pro tip thatI would say is on LSAs
specifically,
you got to go in and make sure that you'removing stuff to the right buckets and
responding, answering calls within 30seconds or however that much that is.
The reason that this is a pro tip isbecause Google LSAs only makes money
(28:19):
when someone answers the phone when theygive you a lead. So if you don't answer
the phone,
then Google's going to move you down intheir rankings because they're going to
say, Hey, you're not answering the phone,
so we're not going to show you becausewe're not making any money off you.
We're going to move to the nextperson that might answer the phone.
So that's the first thing. Secondthing is inside of Google LSAs,
you can move things fromactive to completed to,
(28:40):
they have a couple different sections.
If you go in and actuallymove those things,
you're basically giving Googletriggers back that says, Hey,
I'm actually using your platformand I'm using it to the full extent,
so send me more leads because I'mactually doing what you want me to do.
That's a great tip.
I would say in terms of my final thoughton this is in terms of marketing spend,
most service companies arespending three to 5% on marketing.
(29:01):
The really aggressive ones are spendingsix to eight and the really aggressive,
maybe slightly too aggressive or at 10,I know I'm at seven or eight right now.
I'm trying to be really aggressive.That is percentage of your revenue.
So if you want to do amillion dollars a year,
then your marketing spend is 80 grandthat year. Now, here's the key for me,
if it's 8%,
then that's the same thing as acommission rate for an internal referral.
(29:24):
So if one of your techniciansor one of your workers,
there's that Lowe's one day andsomeone walks up to them and says, Hey,
I see your uniform, and they getthat person on board and booked,
and that person becomes a clientbecause of your employee, give them 8%.
I love that.
Because it's the same cost to you,
and it creates army of peoplewho are pitching your services.
(29:44):
A lot of business owners arenarrow minded and think, oh,
that's just a free lead. No, no.
Reward your people if you want them todo that again and again and again. Yeah.
One thing that we've seen that companiestake it to the next level is they
actually build an army of peoplethat will go out and sell for them.
They're building relationships withother companies. If you're a lawn care,
find a roofer that then give them4% or 5%, something like that.
(30:06):
I think that that goes a long way.
Well, this is great. Thanks, Phil.
I'm going to try to summarize these inthree actual steps. Number one is LSA,
Google's LSA.
Ads are really the best valueand the simplest way to start
doing basic ads.
Make sure your primary categoryis correct and just get moving on
(30:27):
LSA ads.
Number two is make sure that yourGoogle business profile is fully
maxed out Q and as. Photos,photos from clients, correct,
address all that stuff. Make sure that'sall fully built out. Lots of photos,
the more photos, the better.Anything to add there, Phil?
The number one thing that you can takeand implement that's going to be free,
(30:49):
that's going to help those two thingsspecifically is getting Google reviews and
it's free. Go get as manyGoogle reviews as you can.
It's going to help youwith your Google LSAs.
It's going to help you rank higher onyour Google business profile. Adam,
you'll be shocked how many people don'thave their Google business profile even
filled out. They don't have a website,they don't have a phone number,
they don't have any reviews. Theydon't respond to their reviews.
So just use the free tools that arethere and build the trust with Google,
(31:11):
and it's going to help youtremendously in the long run.
Awesome. And number three is once youstart spending more in the first group,
you're just asking peoplehow they found out about you,
but once you start spending the big bucks,
you need to have actual mechanisms inplace to be able to actually properly and
accurately track where allyour lead sources are coming.
I'm a big fan of jobberusing all this stuff.
(31:31):
Jobber has an awesome marketingtools. You can email past clients,
future clients. You can emailyour whole list all within Jobber.
It's a new feature. Love it. Great.Jobber on that, Phil. Thanks.
PRA being here. How do peoplefind out more about you?
Yeah, we do free marketingaudits that are pretty custom.
We build out a custom plan for youwhether we work together or not.
You can go to our websiteslash consulting.com, P-H-L-A-S-H consulting.com.
(31:54):
Just hit discuss yourbusiness. We'll set up a call,
and we're happy to help you.
Thanks for being here.I really appreciate it.
You can find me@adamsylvester.comand I hope you found something
valuable to make your business moreprofitable, more efficient today.
Your team and your customers deserveyour very best, so go give it to 'em.
When you log in, you can literally,instead of cost per click,
change it to cost per conversion.That's going to be your cost per lead.
You have to know that number becausethat number is going to tell you
everything.
Welcome to Masters of HomeService. I'm Adam Sylvester.
Today we're talking about how muchyou should spend on new leads.
This is a podcast made by successfulhome service pros for home service pros,
(00:22):
all to make your business moreprofitable and more efficient.
Today's guest is Phil, richer, ownerand founder of Flash Consulting,
and he's an expert onlead generation. Phil,
tell us more about you and what you do.
Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me.
We partner with local service businesses,home services, lawn care companies,
gut cleaning companies, movingcompanies, carpet cleaning,
a bunch of different trades, andwe help them increase their sales,
(00:44):
keep their schedules fullthrough partnering with them, doing digital marketing,
consulting with the business owners.
This is definitely great. Okay,so first question I have for you.
A lot of our listeners were just thinkingthrough what kind of leads am I going
for, how do I get 'em?
But what are you seeing in the homeservice industry in terms of what are the
best lowest cost leads that havethe highest return, the best value?
(01:07):
Yeah. What we found is on Google,
Google is the search engine resultspage number one referral partner in the
world. There's really four coresections. There's your top section,
which is called Google Local Service ads,and Google actually has a calculator.
If you were to look up Googlelocal service ads cost calculator,
they would tell you how much a lead isgoing to cost in your area specifically
for Google local serviceads. So that's the first one,
(01:28):
and we can dive into all these.I'm just going to go through,
that's usually one of the lowest cost,like if you're going to pay per lead,
that's a low cost option. Thenyou have your Google search ads,
which is the next section,
which is where you kind of see your nameand other people's names and it says
sponsored.
That's usually the most expensive leadon Google because it's a search ad. Then
you have your local map pack withyour Google business profile.
(01:48):
That's going to be avery inexpensive lead.
It's just truly organic traffic andyou can increase your visibility
by getting Google reviews.
And then the last section of Google isyour website ranking where everyone's
websites are ranked out. And again,
this is going to be a low cost lead aswell because it's more organic side of
things. So I would say ifsomeone's thinking about doing leads and getting leads
(02:09):
specifically Google local service adsis a good option for inexpensive leads,
but it's also can be tough to getinto that position to get the leads.
What about the competitionmatters? The price goes up,
I'm guessing if your competitors arebig against the same clicks, right?
So explain that a little bit.
Yeah, so with Google localservice ads specifically,
(02:30):
if you don't have enough Google reviewsor someone else has more Google reviews
than you, Google's only goingto show the best company.
So it's very competitive inthere to try to be shown. So yes,
you're absolutely right. For theGoogle search ads perspective,
it's based off your bids.
So if you were to be running Googlesearch ads and other people are
bidding on the samekeywords as you, then yeah,
it's going to drive the traffic up becauseGoogle's going to try to spend your
(02:53):
money and outbid otherpeople to show you there.
But the thing with Google search adsthat we've seen a lot is that it can be a
black box,
a black hole of you set your budget at$2,000 and Google's going to spend your
money, they're going to drivetraffic to your website,
but if your website's notoptimized to convert into leads,
then you're going to get crushed andyou're just going to be spending all this
money and not have anyreal results from it.
(03:14):
No,
I totally experienced that and anyonelistening who's done any kind of Google
search, it's a black hole of spending.Google will be happy to spend your money.
The LSA is, or some peoplecall it Google guarantee,
that's what it was called in thebeginning, LSA local service ads.
Those are the best value. Let'scamp out there for a little bit.
So how does someone start running LSA ads?
(03:34):
Yeah, great question. So you can go toGoogle, type in Google local service ads.
They have a specific landing page forGoogle local service ads. You go there,
you click start now and you put inyour information for your business.
It's going to ask you togive your address, your name,
your email, all that kind of stuff,
and then it's going to try to connectyour Google business profile with your
(03:57):
Google Local service ads account. Soyou kind of go through the prompt.
It's pretty straightforward.
Once you get the Google Localservice ads account set up,
then you actually have to doa background check for you.
And so you have to go through, it'scalled evidence, you have to click on,
it's going to say do a background check,click on that, do the background check.
Then in some industries lawn,
(04:18):
in some states there arelawn care licenses that you have to submit. I would say
that it depends on your industry,
but you will have licenses that youhave to submit to Google because to your
point, it used to becalled Google guaranteed.
Google was screening people and puttingthat little green check mark next to
them,
and the way that they screened them wasby getting the background check and then
also getting the licenses inthere. And then one other thing,
(04:40):
you have to have a certificateof insurance. So really that's the three things.
License, certificate of insurance,and then background check.
So if you go through thatprocess, typically we've seen,
it usually takes about three to fivedays to go through that entire cycle.
If you submit everything,
then you'll get a notificationin your inbox that says, Hey,
you've been Google screen and approved.
Now you just set up your budget and thenat that point you're kind of off to the
(05:03):
races with your Googlelocal service ads account.
And these ads are displayed to the verytop of Google before anything else.
So basically it'll say window cleanersin your area and the ones that are Google
guaranteed or LSA ads have that greencheckbox and everyone loves a good green
checkbox check mark.
And so people who are searchingfor window cleaning in their area,
(05:24):
they're more likely to click onthose ads because they're attractive,
they're guaranteed by Google, all thatkind of stuff. And you're going to spend,
I don't know, 20, 30, 40 bucks alead, but they're simple leads.
That's what I like about 'em.
They're simple leads and it's veryeasy to monitor the results of them
as opposed to the black hole ofspending on Google search ads,
which is much more complex.
(05:46):
Yeah, I'll give you a really good example.
About three months ago we started workingwith a lawn care company there in Long
Island, and when we first started workingwith them, they probably had like 30,
40 Google reviews,
and what I would for people out thereis go to Google type in whatever service
that you do in your area andyou'll see what the competition is.
So in their area, they had atrue green that had about 50,
(06:06):
60 reviews and they had a mosquitojoe that had something else.
So we went to thebusiness owner, said, Hey,
we need to get ourreviews over 75 reviews,
and then we're going to turn on Googlelocal service ads because we're going to
have the number one reviews in thatarea over the next two months. We went,
got his Google reviewlink, gave it to him, said,
get as many reviews asyou can. He got to 75.
We turned on that Googlelocal service ads for him,
(06:28):
and now he was outranking truegreen and out ranking mosquito Joe.
So now to your point,
he was the number one spot on Googleand he's paying $17 a lead right now,
and he's loving life.
He's killing it. That's a greatreturn. So you mentioned the map pack.
How do you get in?
Our listeners know shows the mapand it shows the three best results,
(06:49):
but sometimes I see a fourth one snuckin there at the top and it says sponsored
or something like that.How do you get into that?
Yeah,
so Google is playing around with thesearch engine results page all the time.
So they're taking your search ads oryour Google local service ads and they're
plugging and playing different spotsof where they can show people On Google
search though,
you can run ads and it can allow you toshow them on different display networks
(07:12):
is what they call it.
So it would allow you to then havea second ad in your local pack.
To your point, yes, that'show you can do that.
But to answer your question about howdo you get in there from an organic
perspective, because that is a relativelyquote free option for a lot of people,
and so the main thing that youcan do is to get Google reviews,
and I'll give you some otherones, but Google reviews,
(07:33):
what they found is about at 17% of yourranking is Google reviews. So if you
have a hundred Google reviews andsomeone else has 50 Google reviews,
nine times out of 10 you'regoing to be shown there.
The other things that you can do, andthis is a really, really important one,
is that if you don't have aphysical location in the city,
let's say that you want torank for somewhere in Dallas,
but you're outside of the Dallas,
(07:55):
if you don't have a physicallocation in that area,
you're not going to be shown in the mappack because you don't have a physical
location in Dallas, for example.
So your location and proximity takesa lot of that into consideration,
which taking this back tothe Google local service ads,
which is why it's so important becauselet's say you want to rank for Dallas,
well, in your Google local service ads,
you could select 20 different citiesthat you want to be the number one spot
(08:17):
for. So you could be in a suburb butthen still show up number one for a main
metropolitan area,
and we see that to be extremelyeffective for a lot of people.
Going back to the mat pack, though,
we talked about Googlereviews is very important,
making sure that your primarycategory is set for what you do.
We have an example of a company that wasa SOD company and they were trying to
(08:37):
get SOD jobs, so they putthat as the main category,
but really they wanted lawn care jobsand we switched it to lawn care and they
went to number one ranking for lawn care.
Then they could cross sell the saw jobs.
So it's extremely important toget that primary category right.
Okay. A few other free things Ilike maxing out the profile for.
I like asking clients to poston your Google profile for you.
(08:59):
They can leave a five star review,
but they can also post a photo of thework they did that you did for them and
they can give a description.Those are really powerful too.
I also like the q and a on Google.You can submit questions to Google,
you can even do it yourself. Youcan ask your friends to do it,
and then you can go in and answerthose questions and Google likes that.
So there's some free things out there.
But I want to continue on this lead costtheme because I want to know what is
(09:21):
customer acquisition cost?
How do you know how much a lead doescost and really should cost in each
individual industry?
Yeah, there's a lot of things that wecan talk about on this side of things,
but let's just focus oncustomer acquisition costs.
Then we can talk about how to build amarketing budget, that kind of stuff.
So customer acquisition costs,
the way that we look at that in theindustry is how much is your marketing
budget and then how many new customersthat you got? So with Jobber,
(09:43):
for example, there's a report, it's aclient information info or something.
It's a report that you can pull all yourclients' info and you can put a column
in there for created byand inside of that report.
Then you can see all the customersthat were created in a specific month.
So for example, you could say, okay,
this month I spent a thousanddollars and I got 10 new customers.
(10:05):
So presumably my customer acquisitioncost would be a hundred dollars,
a thousand dollarsspent, 10 new customers,
a hundred dollars customer acquisitioncost. So if we just keep it very simple,
how much did it cost toacquire new customers and whatever your marketing spend
is versus how many newcustomers that you got.
So customer acquisition cost is differentthan return on ad spend investment.
(10:25):
So you might get 10 new clients,
but they might only pay you$10 and that's not worth it.
And so it's important to know howmany new clients you're getting.
100% it matters because those clientsare upsell opportunities in the future.
Once you get a client in the door, they'remuch easier to sell to in the future,
but you also need to make sure thatthose clients are paying you enough.
So how do you calculatethe return on the ad spend?
(10:46):
Yeah, absolutely.
So when we look at coming up with amarketing budget or what's a good number,
ideally we see companies spendingbetween three and 10% of their revenue on
their marketing spend. So let's say thatyou make a hundred thousand dollars,
then you should be spending3000 to $10,000 a year on
your marketing.
And so if we zoom out orwe zoom into specific jobs,
(11:10):
let's say that your job isa thousand dollars. Well,
you don't want to spend morethan a hundred dollars to get that job because then
your job costing is going to be wayoff. So to answer your question,
you can kind of set the numbers basedoff of whatever your average ticket is,
and then you can say, okay,
I feel confident spending $200 to make$2,000 or whatever the numbers are.
Yeah, yeah. So how do you trackthat from a practical standpoint?
(11:33):
Obviously it matters whatsoftware people are using.
Our listeners are mostly using jobber.
How does a layperson go aboutThat's pretty tedious, I imagine.
I know personally that it's genius.
How do you recommend someone who'slistening? How do you track this stuff?
There's a bunch of waysthat you could do it.
I would say the easiest way is to try toget a tracking number through some call
(11:53):
tracking software. CallRail is areally good one that's out there.
You can get a trackingnumber through CallRail.
Then what you do is they have a scriptthat you can put on your website and you
can say that if someone comes fromGoogle search ads or organic or whatever
channel that they come from, thenit's called Dynamic Call changing,
something like that. Basicallythey changed the phone number.
Then when they call that number,
(12:15):
it would register in CallRail thatyou got a call from Google search ads.
So that's one way to do it.
The other way to do it is ifyou have forms on your website,
you can track the source of the forms,and so then you could say, okay,
this came from Google search, thiscame from Google Organic or whatever,
and then in your platformthat you use like Hi Jobber,
you can select the lead source andideally at the end of the month,
(12:38):
then you could go through all of yourcompleted revenue and see the campaign
that it came from or the lead that itcame from, and then pull the number,
what you're saying.
Well, but Phil, a lot of ourlisteners are saying, well,
I just ask asked the client whenthey call, how did you hear about us?
And here's the deal. That's fine in thebeginning when you just ask them, Hey,
oh, I saw you on TV or I Googled you.Most of the time they'll just say Google.
(12:59):
But here's the thing,
you can't really trust your clientsonce you start spending big money on ads
because they might tell youall kinds of crazy things.
The only way to really know is bytracking it the ways that you're talking
about. So I would say if we're going todivide our listeners into two groups,
group number one is people who justaren't spending very much money at all or
zero, that's fine. Just ask yourclients and just trust them.
(13:20):
But once you go into the secondgroup, which is spending money,
quite a bit of money on ad spend,you can't trust your clients anymore.
You have to have mechanisms in placeto make sure that the data is accurate,
because people tell us all the time,well, I think I saw yard sign. No,
you didn't. You Googled us and youspent $30 on a lead, and that matters.
We have a company that we work with andwe try to pull these numbers because we
(13:44):
want to make good data, makes gooddecisions, and we can recommend, Hey,
do this or do that. Andevery time we go in,
it says the lead source is existingcustomer, and we're like, man,
there's no way that every single persondown here is an existing customer when
they were just created, theywere just created this month,
and they're all existing customer,something's not adding up here.
So to your point, if you'regoing to spend money on your ads,
(14:05):
then you need to make sure that youhave it on the data behind the scenes
because a lot of times itfalls through the gaps.
I think we should also maybe talk aboutwhat are some of those numbers that you
should be tracking.
I think that's also very important forpeople if you're going to be spending
money.
So let's pretend we're in Google searchads. We're doing it, we're doing it.
What numbers matter?
Because a lot of times people get solda bill of goods on what numbers to
(14:27):
attract in Google ads, and they don'tmatter at all. What really matters?
Yes,
the number one number that you shouldknow as a business owner is your cost per
conversion. This isbasically your cost per lead.
So if we're looking at a cost perlead model of doing marketing,
then we're trying to say, okay,if I close 50% of my jobs,
(14:47):
if I were to give you 10 leadsand I close five of them,
that's 50% closure rates. Iknow that if I get a lead,
I need two of them to get a customer.
So if my cost per leadis a hundred dollars,
then it's going to cost me $200to get a customer. I close at 50%.
So anyone that runs your Google adsor when you log in, you can literally,
instead of cost per click,change it to cost per conversion.
That's going to be your cost per lead.
(15:08):
You have to know that number becausethat number is going to tell you
everything. It's going to say,it's too high, it's great.
You need to focus your adbudgets on this or that.
Another example of that islet's say you're lawn care and you do sawd and you're
running Google Ads foryour sawd installation,
and then you're running them for yournormal jobs or something, just basic jobs.
(15:29):
Well,
your cost per conversionmight be different on every single keyword that you're
running. So you have to be ableto look at that and say, well,
my cost per lead for SA is ahundred, but I'm happy with that.
You know what I'm saying?
A hundred dollars on a10,000 side job is one thing,
but a hundred dollars on asmall mowing job is not good.
Definitely make a difference betweenthe two. So I know that one thing,
(15:49):
a mistake I made in the beginning wasI would only look at the data inside of
Google Ads, so I would look at costper click, which kind of matters,
but not that much.
But the reason that I didn't look at costper conversion is it was harder to get
that data. It can be in GoogleAds if you really set up properly,
but that requires more workon my end to make sure that my
(16:13):
CRM and Google are talking to each other,
so I know because that keyword conversionis all the difference. It's like,
well, Google doesn't know if,so-and-so became a client.
They don't know that kind ofstuff. Any thoughts on that? Yeah.
So two parts to that.
The first one is that Google has changedfrom universal analytics to Google
Analytics, and not toget onto all the jargon,
but it's very easy now to add a Googletag manager to set up a conversion.
(16:38):
You could watch a YouTube videoand figure out how to do it.
It's not rocket science.
It used to be you have to put allthese codes and all this stuff.
It's pretty straightforward now,but a lot of times to your point,
there needs to be some intermediarybetween your Google search ads and then
what do you actually get becausejust because you get a conversion,
well then people always say,well, who was the conversion?
(16:59):
What was their phonenumber? What was their name?
Because it's just a bunchof bots sending me leads.
And so there's a bunch of tools outthere. We use one called What Converts,
and basically what that allows you todo is to kind of tie all the pieces
together to the end so then you cansee, well, what exactly did they search?
When did they turn into a phone call?When did they turn into a actual web form?
(17:20):
That kind of stuff.
Yeah. What convertsbasically is the bridge.
It's like the liaison betweenGoogle search and your CRM,
because what comes in isGoogle to Google as a number,
just a random number in cyberspace.It goes into your CRM as a person,
but then those can't talk to each otheruntil you have an app. What converts,
what converts then goes back into Googleand tells you that cyber number just
(17:43):
turned into Jane Doe because now we knowit helps communicate between the two
platforms, which I like,which is really important.
And CallRail has a component of that too.
So there are components in there thatCallRail allows to do what conversion just
makes it clean and easy to see.
Okay, gotcha.
Are there any other relevant numbers inGoogle search so we should pay attention
to on top of conversion?
(18:03):
Yeah, you mentioned cost perclick. I think that there is,
you want to try to shoot betweenthree to $5 your cost per click,
and that's just a fluffnumber that's out there,
but if you see something crazy like14, 20, $30, it could be alarming.
It just depends on whereyou're at in your industry.
Cost per click is basically telling youthat how many people go to your website
(18:24):
or click on something.
So if you're trying to get a hundredpeople to your website that if you get a
hundred people,
you're going to get 10 leads out of itbecause your website converts to 10%,
then you know that ifmy cost per click is $5,
then I have to spend X amount of dollarsto get a hundred people to my website,
and you can start doing some of themath there, which is why it's important,
but it doesn't giveyou a true lead number,
which is why I like cost per conversionbetter. The other number that is very
(18:45):
important, that is typically,
again buried in there is calledyour search impression share.
The reason search impression share is soimportant is because let's say that for
the SOD job,
let's say that your search impressionshare is taking the total searches that
happened in your area,
and it's saying how many times wereyou shown on that specific keyword?
So if there was 10 searches and youshowed up two times out of those 10,
(19:08):
your search impression share is 20%.
So what that means is that you have 80%of the time that you're not being shown,
so you could increase yourbudget and be shown more.
And on the flip side of that is if you'reat 90% search impression share, well,
maybe you need to scale that back a littlebit because you're being shown every
single time, but you're notactually converting at the spot that you need to be.
So I would say that's animportant one, but really.
(19:30):
Is there a sweet spot there? 50%, 80%,
or is it completelydependent on the industry?
It dependent on the industry, but ifyou want to dominate search, which good.
Luck I do. Yeah, if.
You want to dominate search, thenyeah, your search impression share,
if you're going to be like70, 80% on all of these ones,
it's going to cost alot of money. But yeah,
you want to take your targets servicelike I saw a job and you want to try to
(19:51):
ramp that up as much as you canwith search impression share.
Yeah, I mean you want todominate on the right keywords.
You and I were having a conversationlast week because one of our keywords
was spending a lot of money, and Iwas like, man, our ad spends so high.
And he said, well, what if wejust turn off this one keyword?
It was good repair. And I was like, oh,yeah, I don't want those leads. Anyway,
so we turned that off,
(20:11):
brings our ad spend downon bad leads anyways,
and so now if we wanted to,
we could actually take that money andspend it on even more on other leads or
just save that money,
but there's a lot of ways that you cantweak it so that you really hone in on
the exact things that youwant to get leads for.
Yep, exactly.
And to kind of tie this back together isthe reason I like Google local service
(20:31):
ads is inexpensive leads and there's notall this jargon of cost per conversion,
all this stuff. It's just like,click this button, call me,
and then you're going to charge mefor a lead, and it's just very clean.
There's no random algorithms andkeyword research and all this stuff.
Yeah, I like LSA because it so simple.
You go into Google Ads and it'sa mammoth of a platform and
(20:53):
you don't understand any of it. Basically,
most people listening just have noidea what any of that stuff means,
including myself. But LSA, you go in thereand it asks you what services you do,
what's your service radius,what's your zip code,
and then you basically click thebig blue button and you're done.
It takes 10 minutes, which I like, andI think that's really key. And also,
I mean it's at the top. That's importantnumber one. Yeah, it's at the very,
(21:14):
very top. Google prioritizes that. First,
let's pause the conversation here totalk about why we like jobber so much.
Phil, what do you like about Jobber?
How does Jobber help peoplescale their businesses?
Yeah, the two things thatI really like about Jobber,
the first one is the online scheduling.It allows you, if you're running ads,
you can drive traffic to your websiteand then people can just schedule right
online. So you don't even have to callthem or go through that whole process.
(21:36):
You just schedule right online.
I love that they also rolled out a bunchof new reports and it gives a lot more
clarity to walk through the cycle.
You can see clients that have come inquote requests and ultimately all the way
to the end so you can see that lifecycle of the client through your funnel.
So I really like those thingsabout Jobber to help you scale.
Online booking is so key. Eventually, LSA,
we've been talking aboutthis this whole time,
(21:57):
is going to connect into your onlinebooking, and so people are going to say,
Hey, Siri, since I'm going to cut mygrass tomorrow straight into jobber,
straight into onlinebooking, that's coming,
and our listeners willbe ready when that comes.
I personally like the new marketingtools that Jobber released.
You can now email within jobberclient with upcoming work.
In the next say week orso, you can say, Hey,
(22:18):
we're coming to your house next week,
and then you can give them some bulletson upsell services or make sure you ask
your technician about clean watersystems or whatever the case may be,
and prep them. Get them to startthinking about those upsells. Really,
really key. If you wantto give jobber a try,
new users can get an exclusive discountby going to jobber.com/podcast deal.
You need to try jobber.
(22:39):
It's going to make your business so muchbetter and you can scale with jobber.
Go give jobber a try.Generally speaking, Phil,
what is a good expectedreturn on marketing our
listeners? What should theyexpect If they put a dollar in,
what should they get back?
Yeah, ideally you would wantto shoot for five x return,
you spend a thousand dollars, youget $5,000, that's going to be good.
(23:01):
Great is obviously 10 x is like,wow, this is absolutely crushing it.
Three X is like, okay, this is all right.
Maybe we'll give it a couple more monthsand see if we can really work this,
but if you're spending a thousanddollars and making a thousand dollars,
that's a dud that's not working.So three x five x, 10 x,
that's kind of thethresholds that we look at.
The other thing to calculate in this isyou want to look at the lifetime value
(23:22):
of your customers, and youmight not have that data,
but at least you can make a best guessthat this person's going to come in for a
year long service contract or whatever,
and then eventually they'regoing to get this job.
So really it's not just a thousand dollarsand it's done or $500 and it's done.
It's maybe $2,500 nowthat I got this person.
There's different ways to look atyour return on ad spend for sure.
(23:43):
Well, you touched on this.
I want to go this direction nowbecause return on marketing spend,
it doesn't necessarily mean today ortomorrow. It could be a month from now.
It's a long game. We're inbusiness for a long time,
and so a client or a future client mightgo to website and not convert right
now, but they're still in our system.We still have their information,
(24:04):
and so we can mail them postcards,
we can show them banner ads and Facebookand Google and all these different
things.
So how do you guys recommendkeeping these people on the line,
so to speak, if theydon't convert immediately?
Yeah,
I mean ideally you would have some typeof monthly email that's going to these
people that's staying top ofmind because a lot of times,
(24:24):
let's say someone come, they fill outa form, so it is, you did get a lead,
right? You paid Google,you got a lead out of it,
but then you send them an estimate andit's not the right time or it's too high
or whatever, and thenthey're basically gone. Well,
if you have some nurturing sequence,like an email every single month,
for example, you'll say top of mind,
or if it's a quarterly blast ofa special or something like that,
(24:44):
you'll stay top of mind. Sojust keeping it very simple,
I would start with somethinglike that where I think jobber,
they have something that'sreally nice. You go in,
you can set up a quick campaign and sendit out to people at least just to stay
top of mind, do a blast of aspecial that works really good.
Trying to stay in some type ofa cadence is really important.
A lot of times we see, oh, I'm slow.Lemme send out a blast. That's great,
(25:07):
but it's also good to have a consistentflow staying top of mind for sure.
Yeah. What I have found is,and this is all mental I think,
but broke salespeople smell bad.
If you send that email blast out whenyou don't have any work tomorrow,
it kind of smells a little bad, butif you send that out when you're fine,
it seems like more people respond.I dunno if that's true or not,
(25:28):
but you want to send thatwhen you're not desperate.
The other thing I would say in that isif you're not emailing your clients on a
regular basis, you're losing money.
Email marketing is an ATM machineand sometimes you'll get 10 leads,
sometimes you'll get one,but they're both worth it,
and so if you're not emailingyour clients regularly,
then you're just missing the boat on oneof the most fundamental ways of growing
(25:52):
your business, which is by resellingto your existing client base.
I agree, and I have agreat example of this.
So typically around the holidayspeople are like, oh, I'm really slow.
It's Thanksgiving, it's Christmas,
so I am not going to be blowing up mypeople and emailing them and stuff,
when really that's the optimal timeto be emailing people because you get
(26:12):
referrals,
so you can stay top of mind forThanksgiving and share something about it,
but then when they go totheir Thanksgiving dinner and someone says, yeah,
I really need to get some sod this springin my whatever, then it's like, oh,
I actually work with this greatcompany. So to your point,
you don't want to be tryingto jam something in there.
You just want to be adding value andstaying top of mind during the slow points
(26:33):
and during the busy seasonsas well. Same thing.
Yeah, I'm a huge fan and Ilike jobbers new platform.
They've introduced a version of MailChimpinto their software, which I love.
I've already used it a couple,Anna. It's really handy. So Phil,
any final thoughts to leave with ourlisteners on whether, maybe two things,
one,
for someone who's just getting startedand then maybe a pretty good hack for
someone who knows all this stuff andthey've been a business owner for a long
(26:56):
time, they're may be doinga couple million dollars, what would you say to them?
Yeah, so first, if you're starting out,
and also if you've beenin business a long time,
a lot of times when wemeet with business owners,
and these could be multi seven figures,
they haven't gone through and figuredout what their marketing budget is,
and so it's hard to recommend thingsbecause we don't know how much money that
(27:16):
we're playing with here. So even ifyou're just starting out like, Hey,
I had my best year yet and Iwant to start doing marketing,
but where do I begin andhow much money do I spend?
So ideally what you would do is set asidethree to 10% of your monthly revenue
or yearly revenue, and you woulddesignate that towards marketing,
and it could be so small as a hundredor 200 bucks a month, but then just say,
(27:37):
I'm going to pick and I'm going tostart with Google local service ads. I'm
going to start with whatever else,Yelp or Better Business people,
or Angie or something, Thumbtack,whatever you want to do,
just start with something and then youwon't feel the pinch of like, oh my gosh,
I need to get money back from this.
Every single time you'll at least feelconfident that this is my budget for this
thing and this is what's going to happen,
and I might need to move this budgetaround. That's the first thing.
(27:58):
Have a marketing budget. Second,
a super pro tip thatI would say is on LSAs
specifically,
you got to go in and make sure that you'removing stuff to the right buckets and
responding, answering calls within 30seconds or however that much that is.
The reason that this is a pro tip isbecause Google LSAs only makes money
(28:19):
when someone answers the phone when theygive you a lead. So if you don't answer
the phone,
then Google's going to move you down intheir rankings because they're going to
say, Hey, you're not answering the phone,
so we're not going to show you becausewe're not making any money off you.
We're going to move to the nextperson that might answer the phone.
So that's the first thing. Secondthing is inside of Google LSAs,
you can move things fromactive to completed to,
(28:40):
they have a couple different sections.
If you go in and actuallymove those things,
you're basically giving Googletriggers back that says, Hey,
I'm actually using your platformand I'm using it to the full extent,
so send me more leads because I'mactually doing what you want me to do.
That's a great tip.
I would say in terms of my final thoughton this is in terms of marketing spend,
most service companies arespending three to 5% on marketing.
(29:01):
The really aggressive ones are spendingsix to eight and the really aggressive,
maybe slightly too aggressive or at 10,I know I'm at seven or eight right now.
I'm trying to be really aggressive.That is percentage of your revenue.
So if you want to do amillion dollars a year,
then your marketing spend is 80 grandthat year. Now, here's the key for me,
if it's 8%,
then that's the same thing as acommission rate for an internal referral.
(29:24):
So if one of your techniciansor one of your workers,
there's that Lowe's one day andsomeone walks up to them and says, Hey,
I see your uniform, and they getthat person on board and booked,
and that person becomes a clientbecause of your employee, give them 8%.
I love that.
Because it's the same cost to you,
and it creates army of peoplewho are pitching your services.
(29:44):
A lot of business owners arenarrow minded and think, oh,
that's just a free lead. No, no.
Reward your people if you want them todo that again and again and again. Yeah.
One thing that we've seen that companiestake it to the next level is they
actually build an army of peoplethat will go out and sell for them.
They're building relationships withother companies. If you're a lawn care,
find a roofer that then give them4% or 5%, something like that.
(30:06):
I think that that goes a long way.
Well, this is great. Thanks, Phil.
I'm going to try to summarize these inthree actual steps. Number one is LSA,
Google's LSA.
Ads are really the best valueand the simplest way to start
doing basic ads.
Make sure your primary categoryis correct and just get moving on
(30:27):
LSA ads.
Number two is make sure that yourGoogle business profile is fully
maxed out Q and as. Photos,photos from clients, correct,
address all that stuff. Make sure that'sall fully built out. Lots of photos,
the more photos, the better.Anything to add there, Phil?
The number one thing that you can takeand implement that's going to be free,
(30:49):
that's going to help those two thingsspecifically is getting Google reviews and
it's free. Go get as manyGoogle reviews as you can.
It's going to help youwith your Google LSAs.
It's going to help you rank higher onyour Google business profile. Adam,
you'll be shocked how many people don'thave their Google business profile even
filled out. They don't have a website,they don't have a phone number,
they don't have any reviews. Theydon't respond to their reviews.
So just use the free tools that arethere and build the trust with Google,
(31:11):
and it's going to help youtremendously in the long run.
Awesome. And number three is once youstart spending more in the first group,
you're just asking peoplehow they found out about you,
but once you start spending the big bucks,
you need to have actual mechanisms inplace to be able to actually properly and
accurately track where allyour lead sources are coming.
I'm a big fan of jobberusing all this stuff.
(31:31):
Jobber has an awesome marketingtools. You can email past clients,
future clients. You can emailyour whole list all within Jobber.
It's a new feature. Love it. Great.Jobber on that, Phil. Thanks.
PRA being here. How do peoplefind out more about you?
Yeah, we do free marketingaudits that are pretty custom.
We build out a custom plan for youwhether we work together or not.
You can go to our websiteslash consulting.com, P-H-L-A-S-H consulting.com.
(31:54):
Just hit discuss yourbusiness. We'll set up a call,
and we're happy to help you.
Thanks for being here.I really appreciate it.
You can find me@adamsylvester.comand I hope you found something
valuable to make your business moreprofitable, more efficient today.
Your team and your customers deserveyour very best, so go give it to 'em.
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