MegaMarketer Coachcast for Contractors: Recent Episodes
Hudson Ink
Geared specifically toward in-home service contractors, you can access exclusive interviews with authors and experts on valuable topics like marketing trends, best business practices, and taking your business to the next level (full show notes included).
This month’s MegaMarketer podcast focuses on customer retention strategies specifically for HVAC and plumbing businesses, emphasizing how keeping existing clients can be significantly more profitable than acquiring new ones. You’ll learn actionable tactics like personalized communication, referral programs, and follow-ups, all backed by industry-specific data showing the long-term value of loyal customers.
Many contractors get frustrated with the performance of their marketing, but the problem might be the messaging you’re using. Make sure you’re heard by your prospects for better results.
The best way to predict what’s ahead of you is to look at the trends developing. Contractor’s marketing must be prepared to take advantage of the huge growth potential in 2025.
7% of small businesses do not have goals, and many more don’t know how to hit the goals they have. Here are three questions all contractors should ask to start them down the road to success in 2025.
Contractor marketing during the holidays is simple: help homeowners get what they WANT while incentivizing them to act now on their NEEDS and you’ve got a winning plan.
Homeowners are stressed and distracted, so many contractor marketing messages fall on deaf ears during the holidays. Two stand out: “I can help assure your holiday plans are successful,” and “I appreciate you.”
How you market your contracting business during the Fall season can make or break your bottom line by year’s-end. Have a plan to generate business now and book future business for later.
Advertising discounts can cheapen your brand and steal your negotiating power. Learn how to close deals without giving away the farm when you don’t have to.
Advertising discounts can cheapen your brand and steal your negotiating power. Learn how to close deals without giving away the farm when you don’t have to.
EGIA board member and Flow Odessy founder, Drew Cameron, joins the show to discuss common problems he sees that hinder contractor growth.
Years of contractor marketing advice all rolled into one simple statement: Existing customers are valuable enough to warrant more investment, and stronger relationships will transform your bottom line.
Most contractors get complacent, playing defense hoping to hold on to what they have rather than aggressively taking market-share. But simply trying not to lose will get you beaten more times than not.
Customers are skeptical of new businesses and are constantly on the lookout for being scammed. Does your communication build trust and form a mutually beneficial relationship?
Is your strategy, messaging, and target market correct for you to achieve your 2024 goals? Contractor marketing success is within your grasp.
Many contractors share the same issues, questions, and frustrations. Strategy and planning can take you out of the pity party and headed toward success in 2024.
Holiday marketing for contractors can be busy and frustrating. How can you make the most noise and get the most response over the next couple of months?
The power of messaging can boost or damage your business quicker than anything else in marketing. Are you leveraging your customer communication in the right ways?
The most successful contractors are always planning ahead, even during the busiest times. What is your marketing strategy for the shoulder season ahead?
Good price positioning is a huge problem for contractors. Most are doing way too much for far too little, but how do you demand more premium pricing? It's all in the messaging.
"Why should I choose you?" is the most important question your business' messaging can answer for your prospects. A good value proposition gives potential customers reason, confidence, and excitement in coming your way.
Referrals are the best leads you can get for growing your contracting business. Here's why your customers might not be giving them to you.
How frustrating are you to work with? Reviewing your processes and communication could be the key to keeping customers and collecting higher tickets.
Convincing homeowners they have needs isn't hard but getting them to call you to fix them is. Contractors must act first, with effective strategy and messaging, if they ever hope homeowners will be moved to respond.
All the information and recommendations business owners get hit with can be overwhelming. Focus on finding your biggest problem and work on the solution until it's fixed, before moving on to problem #2.
There's so much we can learn from those who've found success in-home service marketing. Hear some practical tips on planning, media types, scheduling, and budgeting from an expert.
Do you make the same New Year's resolution every year and never seem to make any change? You need a plan, accountability, and the proper motivation to keep you on track.
You can waste a lot of time and money marketing to distracted homeowners at the end of the year. Here's how to get the most attention and make the most impact.
Calls are at a premium during the milder seasons, so make sure you're getting the most out of each one that comes in. Special guest, CSR trainer and business coach, Dave Tester, joins us for a little "shoulder surgery."
A business is a team, and you are their coach. Are you getting the most out of your players? Strategy, goals, and proper motivation are necessary to dominate your competition.
The most important part of your marketing is the message your company is sending out. Is it being ignored? Is it reflecting your business well? You’ll see the answers reflected in your bottom line.
Most contractors spend their surplus made during the peak times just trying to survive when things get slow. But proper planning and strategy NOW can help your leads stay strong straight through the Fall.
You could be busy and still be leaving money on the table if your staff isn’t well trained, equipped, and confident while closing and adding upsells. Here are four quick tips to improve your average ticket.
Often, we’re told more exposure and ads are always better, but if not done wisely you can market more and end up driving customers away. Learn to walk the fine line of interrupting people without being intrusive.
Is your company easily recognizable in your marketplace? And what reputation does it have? Good branding can put you in front of more prospect’s eyes, bring valuable referrals, and glowing reviews.
When 10,000 contractors share their marketing headaches, you'll hear many of the same answers over and over. Are you trying anything different than the frustrated masses to get more leads and better ROI for your business?
Many contractors go into a shell when the weather turns mild, but the shoulder-season can be a great time for you to separate yourself from your competition. All it takes is marketing that's creative and targeted.
In a market where so much information is at the fingertips of homeowners, can you confidently assert yourself as an expert? Close more sales by developing trust in your opinions.
Success for contractors depends on the goals they set, their commitment to them, and the plan they put in place to get them there. How can you set your business up to grow and move forward in 2022?
Does marketing during the holidays seem like a waste of money? Find out how to produce some season-ending sales and leave everyone jolly.
If you've been in this business long, you've heard the same marketing mantras repeated to you many times. There's a reason you hear that investing in your existing customer base is the key to long-term success. When will you listen and give it a try?
Contractors have a ton of solutions and great advice given to them at training, shows, and seminars. But how much of it actually gets used to grow your business? How do you know what advice to listen to or solutions are worth your time?
Organic demand for HVAC, plumbing, and electrical services drops dramatically as temperatures get milder and the seasons change. Do you have a plan in place to keep leads flowing in when they get harder to come by?
Marketing seems to be the last thing on our minds when we’re busy, but this simple thought could change your business when things slow down: Ask for feedback and use it effectively.
Everyone gets calls during the peak seasons, but smart contractors keep a steady stream of the most profitable customers coming their way. Your marketing and image can justify a higher price point to your prospects, saving you time, headaches, and low average tickets.
Have questions about the use of social media like: audience, content, and strategy? Here are a few quick tips to grow your audience, get more reviews, and better customer engagement.
Is radio, direct mail, Google, or something else producing the leads you need? Do you know what’s working and what’s just costing you money? Here’s how to tell what to cut and what to increase.
Outdated websites, wasted money, and no conversions: Hudson,Ink’s digital strategist answers some of the common problems and misconceptions he finds in contractor’s web marketing.
The largest factor in determining the success or failure of a business is the leadership and management skills of its decision-makers. You aren’t expected to do everything yourself, but good leaders learn to delegate effectively.
Everyone is glad 2020 is over, but difficulties are coming for your business in 2021 as well. How can you stay on track for the growth you want? Set specific, achievable goals, and get accountability to stick to them.
Contractor marketing is tough during the holidays. But with a little creativity and a win-win scenario, you can persuade those homeowners to act now instead of putting it off until later.
Your prospects are busy, distracted, and stressed during the holidays, and the last thing they want to think about is home maintenance. Here are a few ways to get noticed and grab some leads during a slow time of year.
One main group should get your marketing attention to help you through the Fall slowdown. Get the most out of your existing customer base and stay profitable during a slower time of the year.
Every year, 7% of your customer base walks away and never calls you again. Here’s how to engage them and build ongoing loyalty.
The best time to plan for slow sales is when your busy. Planning ahead is essential to avoid the off-season drop off.
Sales training is essential to your business. Learn 4 things you can implement today to teach your staff to sell better.
Your customers expect you to market to them individually. Don't get caught in the trap of general marketing, learn how to personalize your marketing.
Now is not the time to pull back in your marketing. Learn more about the unique marketing opportunities that are out there.
2020 is here and now is your chance to get your year off to a roaring start! Listen to Justin’s top five marketing tips for getting your marketing off on the right foot this season, eliminating marketing stress, and finally getting the results you’ve been hoping for year after year.
Key Lessons Learned:
Hopes and Dreams
- Everyone wants basically the same things: more income, more time with our families, less stress. But we often fail to determine how to get there or put systems in place to help us.
- There is a simple marketing strategy that you can use to make 2020 the best year for your business yet.
- Doing the same things you’ve done every year before now are not going to get you where you want to go. Follow these five tips to supercharge your 2020.
Tip #1: Quit Thinking Your Old Marketing Will Suddenly Have New Results
- Contractors often run the same ad year after year but the world looks much different now than it did in 2016.
- If it’s not helping your image or your lead count, dump it and start over.
- Start with fresh messaging and better targeting and watch your market respond.
Tip #2: Set A Marketing Budget
- Only one in eight contractors set a marketing budget at the beginning of the year, even less do it right.
- If you’re aggressively pursuing market share, it’s going to cost you 6%-8% of your topline sales. Moderate marketers spend 4%-6% and marketers looking to just maintain results will spend 2%-4%.
- If you want aggressive growth but are spending 2% or less, you’re not going to get the results you want.
- Marketing is an investment in yourself and your own business. Wisely spend what it takes to reach your goal and you’ll be rewarded.
Tip #3: Set Something In Motion, No Matter How Small
- Look at your year and divide it into four seasons, two peak and two off seasons. Figure out how much you will spend to promote during those times and then decide how you will deliver your message and what media type to use.
- Just doing this will put you ahead of most of the competition.
Tip #4: Zig While Your Competition Zags
- Most contractors still use the competition as a model but you can’t stand out by being the same as everyone else.
- Typical contractor marketing is sterile and boring, this makes it practically invisible to homeowners.
- Your marketing should be the most unique and interesting part of your business. Show off your unique personality and how your benefits separate you from the competition.
Tip #5: Quit Manic Marketing
- Instead of panicking at the last minute and throwing something together, have ads ready to go that fit the season and the situation.
- A little bit of planning now will eliminate the majority of your marketing stress. You know the products and services, and you understand the seasonal patterns that are coming. Get ahead of them now.
- If you wait until the phone stops ringing to react, it’s already far too late.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
800-489-9099
coaches@hudsonink.com
Summary:
In this month’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, Justin Jacobs is on the podcast today with Lynn Wise and they are covering a common experience for many contractors. Every contractor knows how frustrating it can be when a customer says that they can do the work themselves, so why do those same contractors do the same thing with their business?
Key Lessons Learned:
Do-it-Yourselfers
- Everybody has had the experience of talking to a potential customer who believes that they can probably take care of the work themselves. There is a ton of content on YouTube so they think they are only a couple of videos away from being an expert.
- This conversation is an opportunity to come to their rescue and remind them they would be dealing with electricity or advanced machinery, and they are better off deferring to the professionals.
- We all have a tendency to believe we are capable of taking care of ourselves and ignoring the advice of professionals. When that’s combined with our desire to save money, we can see why so many people believe they can do the work themselves.
Contractor In Charge
- Lynn Wise developed the concept of Contractor In Charge after being in the contractor industry for 15 years.
- The reality is that contractors don’t have enough time in the day or resources to manage every single aspect of their business. Contractor In Charge is a centralized solution that allows contractors to focus on growing their business by providing exceptional service.
- The main services include answering inbound calls, making outbound calls for scheduling tune ups and preventative maintenance agreements, sending out marketing campaigns, and full service bookkeeping. They also use a method of cash flow management based on the KPI’s of the industry.
- The main reasons that clients come to Contractor In Charge are many contractors feel like they are being held hostage by an employee and want to get out, or they’ve realized that they don’t have the right skills to keep growing their business.
- Fear of the unknown is the main reason people shy away from working with them. They don’t know what they don’t know, but they are intimately aware of the mess they are already in.
The Benefits of Delegating
- Contractor In Charge professionals are all certified in accounting and a variety of other technical skills. Each associate has in depth training that allows them to be the best at what they do, whether that’s answering the phone or managing cash flow.
- There is also the benefit of not having to train anyone to take care of those aspects of your business. Contractor In Charge is plug and play.
- Contractor In Charge saves the average company between 40-45% of a per hour charge compared to what it would cost to have an employee handle all these tasks.
- It’s hard to understand and see the impact of not having someone available to handle things like phone calls all the time.
- You can waste plenty of money rushing into things like marketing or hiring the wrong people, by outsourcing and delegating to people that specialize in those things you can get all the benefits and avoid the downsides.
- Nobody expects the contractor to know everything, but they do expect things to get done. If your business is going to last, things like accounting and bookkeeping need to be handled properly. To be successful you need to have the right programs in place.
- Just like the customers that believe they can do everything themselves, not handling things correctly will cost you. Just by having someone who simply knows what they doing answering your phones can completely change your business.
- Another side benefit of delegating the phone work to Contractor In Charge is they can help your CSR’s avoid making those awkward collection calls to people in their own community.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
Contractorincharge.com
813-438-3666
lynn@contractorincharge.com
Mention you heard of them from the Hudson Ink podcast before Dec 31, 2019 to get your set up fee waived!
Summary:
In this month’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, Justin Jacobs is talking about one of the biggest holidays of the year and how you can leverage the holiday season to better connect with your customers while also growing your business.
Key Lessons Learned:
Marketing During the Holidays
- You may have noticed that many businesses started preparing for the Christmas holidays well before Halloween was even done with.
- Even before we’ve carved up the turkey, we are already planning for what is going to go under the tree.
- During the winter holiday season, more money will change hands than during any other time of the year. The trouble is this money is not typically spent on preventative maintenance.
- Emergency calls will come just like always but just because your market is distracted, that doesn’t mean you can take time off from your marketing.
- The most effective tactic for service businesses to get their customer’s attention is to get into the holiday spirit with them. You have to be a little more creative but the goal is to stand out from your competition and connect with your customer. If you can do that, you win.
Holiday Marketing Tactics
- Create a holiday themed offer. Package your services into a holiday offer where you defer the payments. Give them a little bit of breathing room because finances are typically pretty stretched after the holidays.
- Zig Ziglar once said “You can have everything in life that you want, if you’ll simply help others get what they want.” You want to sell more products and services, your prospects what to find more cash for the holidays while keeping their home efficiently run. If you make it make sense and let the customer justify the move in their own mind, their answer is much more likely to be yes.
- Be santa’s helper. For mature homeowners a gift certificate for a home service can be very valuable. You can offer them to your existing customer base and let them do the marketing for you.
- You can be as aggressive as you like with the offers, but be careful because you don’t want your existing customers to feel slighted.
- Sponsoring local holiday events is another great way to get your message into the market. There are huge crowds involved with these kinds of events and they will see you as linked in to the community.
- Be PR savvy during the holiday season. Find new ways to get your ideas into the hands of the news outlets. Most local news stations or newspapers would love for an expert to give weekly content that is relevant to homeowners in their area.
- Don’t be too pushy or salesy, this isn’t advertising. It’s a long term strategy and the more homeowners that see you as an authority on their home’s comfort, the better.
- Have a float in the local Christmas parade or donate some presents to kids in need. We deal with our customers on some pretty rough days in their life, is that how you want homeowners to remember you? We decide our customer’s perception more than we think we do.
- Decorate your website for the holidays. Look festive and join in the spirit of things. Web traffic jumped a 150% on Black Friday and 210% on Cyber Monday last year. Join in the fun by adding a few holiday elements like a wreath to your website. Contractors are typically seen as cold and industrial, break that tendency by decorating your site and social media.
- If you’re having trouble building your social media, tag your friends and family in holiday photos. Their friends and family will see those pictures more often and will be more likely to share them as well.
- Consider recording a holiday greeting video for your site. Be warm and personal and let customers see into the real people in your business. When a prospect sees happy employees and people they know from the community, they are more likely to do business with you.
- If your website is not optimized for local traffic it’s time to do something about that. More searches and web traffic is being conducted on mobile than ever before. Mobile traffic is increasing 20% to 30% each year, and if your site isn’t optimized you are losing that traffic.
- Change up your phone greeting and include a quick “happy holidays” or “Merry Christmas”. Even if it’s someone calling to complain, it will be a quick reminder that you are dealing with real people that want the best for their customers.
- It’s kind of ironic that the biggest sales day of the year is the day after Thanksgiving. True thankfulness is a lost idea for most of us. Make it a point to reach out to your customers with a heartfelt gesture and tell them how much it means that they chose you for their business.
- To many contractors, this seems like a wasted effort, but we’ve seen this investment pay back the following year in added activity and referrals. Doing something different and unexpected is a good thing and will set you apart. When people feel a connection with you and feel appreciated, they will pay you back with their wallets.
- It’s eight times more expensive to get a new customer or buy one back than it does to simply keep the ones you have active and engaged.
- Not many contractors will make these adjustments and take the time to create a seasonal offer, because they take added effort. Not many contractors are willing to do what it takes to be as successful as they could be.
- Long term success doesn’t come from doing one big thing right one time, it comes from committing yourself to doing all the little things right on a consistent basis.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
hudsonink.com/holidaycards
800-489-9099
In this month’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, Justin Jacobs is flying solo and talking about how to keep your phone ringing during the upcoming slow season.
Key Lessons Learned:
Marketing Your Service Business
- The HVAC world is and always will be driven by weather, and there is nothing we can do about that. When the AC isn’t running full blast all day, the chances of failure goes way down.
- There will always be peaks and valleys in your lead counts, but good marketing makes everything more consistent.
- There are two ways to keep your lead flow consistent, a strong maintenance agreement plan and strong customer engagement.
Your Service Business on Social Media
- Social media is not just for teenagers. According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of US adults have a Facebook account, and two thirds of those people visit the site at least once per day.
- In many ways, the adults have taken over Facebook and driven the kids away. Now they’re on other social networks like Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.
- Facebook may not like it but it’s great for service businesses. In 2018, the average age of Facebook users was 55. Along with being older those users skewed towards medium to high income.
- Facebook is becoming one of the fastest growing search engines in the world, but what people are searching for is completely different from search engines like Google. People are on Facebook to be entertained and catch up on other people’s lives.
- That doesn’t mean that you can’t capture someone’s attention, you just have to use a different strategy to stand out.
- Any posts on social media need three things: they have to be engaging, it has to be relevant, and it has to be interactive.
- Our eyes decide what’s worth out time before we ever read a line of copy. Spend time on the design of your post and you will see your interaction increase.
- You can have the most beautifully designed post but if the person doesn’t care about it, it’s not going to matter.
- If you don’t have a plan to add value to your audience with your posts, don’t bother. People want to hear about things that will benefit them, and if you can do that without being pushy and salesy, people will interact with you.
- A customer is 82% less likely to drift to a competitor if they feel like they have an ongoing connection with you. Social media gives them that forum and allows them to be heard.
Dealing With Negative Feedback
- You can’t please everyone, there will be some people that complain on social media but it’s better to know about the problem so you can fix it.
- When a problem does pop up, interact with that person and try to make it right. When other people see that you handle complaints in a professional manner and in good faith, it can actually work in your favor.
- 76% of people will give feedback if they are given an easy way to do so and they’re asked. Social media makes it easy because people are willing to talk about their experiences.
Common Social Media Mistakes
- Advertising to an empty room. Your follower number is the maximum number of people who will see your posts organically, but if the only people that follow your page are employees and family members it’s not very valuable.
- It takes some work on the front end to build up your follower count but it’s worth it.
- Consistently posting on social media is a challenge for many contractors. It’s common to see business pages with only a handle of posts each year and it’s not enough to keep that business top of mind with their customers.
- Most people don’t want to hear from their contractor everyday, the best frequency is once per week and only as long as the information is valuable and useful to the homeowner.
- Be careful where you are sending your audience, when you share a link to another website you are pushing your customers to someone else’s business.
- The best scenario is sharing articles that are on your website. That makes you the expert while also contributing to your search engine rankings.
- With the right marketing strategy and a little bit of effort you can see a lot of return for your money and time. Putting these little systems in place will smooth over your slow season and make your lead flow a little more consistent and reliable.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
coaches@hudsonink.com
https://hudsonink.com/
Phone: 1-800-489-9099
How Hard Are You To Do Business With?
Summary:
In this month’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacobs and David Tester talk about getting the most out of your sales calls. Learn about the five most important pieces of info you need to get out of every phone call and why great marketing can’t overcome a bad sales process.
Key Lessons Learned:
Why Your Sales Process Matters
- Web traffic on cell phones is up 220% over the last 5 years so your website has to be mobile optimized to take advantage of the growth in mobile traffic.
- 70% of homeowners will forget about you in the first three months if you don’t reach out to them after your first invoice.
- The breakfast of champions is feedback. The number one thing you can do today is to call your own business and see how hard it is to get a hold of you.
- Is your team answering within three rings? If not, you’re losing business. Your team should be on red alert when the phone rings.
- Are you listening with the intent to understand, or with the intent to respond?
- Are you speaking with empathy while trying to build rapport? Or are you speaking so fast that the person on the other end feels lost and confused?
- Is your automated answering machine too complicated, so that you’re frustrating the caller and driving them to your competition? Automating and outsourcing your inbound calls may save you time while making it harder on your customer. If it’s preventing you from booking an appointment is it worth it?
- Answer the phone and take care of your customer, don’t make them work through multiple automated menus just to speak to a real person.
- You can generate any number of leads for your business but if your sales process doesn’t work well and captures the caller’s info it can make those leads worthless.
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The little details of how you deal with customers as they call in can add up to significant revenue for your business or be a considerable but mostly invisible expense.
The Big Five Pieces of Information You Need From Every Call
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When someone calls, coach your team to get their first and last name.
- Next up is the caller’s phone number.
- An easy one to forget is to also asking how the caller heard about you, so that you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing.
- The final step is to invite them to schedule an appointment with your business.
- They called you for a reason but life often gets in the way. By collecting that info you can call them back if you get disconnected and show them that you care enough about their problems to reach out again.
- Listen and take notes before trying to diagnose the caller’s problem. It’s very easy to go right into the technical details of the call but that’s also an easy mistake to make. Most potential customers don’t know the details and it’s not a great idea to make your customer feel dumb.
- You should make your customer feel good about the overall experience. Use their first name during the conversation and keep asking questions to get to know the customer better.
- It’s important to follow a script for every call and to check in and listen to your calls as they happen. The worst time to think of something is the moment it comes out of your mouth, have a script instead. Without randomly checking the calls you can be confident the script is probably not being followed.
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Do not quote prices on the call. Nine times out of ten their inquiries or concern has nothing to do with price. Always ask why the caller is asking instead.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
godavetester.com
Email coaches@hudsonsink.com for your free script.
Phone: 800-489-9099
Summary:
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacob and Jimmy Hiller talk about a problem that is plaguing the industry. Hiring is something that every business struggles with but Jimmy has some unique advice that will make it easier for you to find the right people for business.
Key Lessons Learned:
The Origins of Hiller
- Jimmy had his first job as a senior in highschool pumping gas but he didn’t have a lot of direction in his life. His father guided him to become a plumber and after working for several years and getting his Master’s licence went into business for himself.
- There are three things that Jimmy attributes his success to. Jimmy knew he always wanted to be a business owner and it’s important to know what you want in the first place.
- Jimmy was also willing to do whatever it takes to make his business successful. That meant going out and learning the things you don’t know right now.
- The third element of success is tenacity. The world will knock you down and you have to make the decision to get back and move forward with your life if you want to succeed.
- In terms of daily struggles, finding good people is the ever present and greatest challenge to building a great business.
Hiring The Right Team Members
- Early on Jimmy had relationships with everyone that worked for him, but now that his business is so large that’s not really possible. Now he lays the foundation for the kinds of people they are looking for within the business.
- The first thing they look for is a good attitude. Are they going to show up and be happy to work there, as well as put in a good effort.
- Next they look for skill, but they’ve got the training and knowledge so if the person has the right attitude Jimmy’s business can impart the skills.
- If you effort, attitude, and skill on a foundation of integrity then you have what Jimmy calls the “perfect picture of an employee”.
- When hiring people it’s important to have an established and reliable process. For Jimmy that includes drug testing and background checks.
The Zig Ziglar Connection
- One of Zig Zigler’s more famous quotes is “You can have everything in life you want, if you help other people get what they want.”
- Jimmy listened to Zig Zigler for many years, he was actually fortunate enough to become Zigler Legacy certified and can now teach Zig Zigler’s methods.
- When a customer calls you they want to solve their problem. Your business needs the revenue the customer has to keep the business going. The employee that services that customer wants to provide for their family or rise in the organization. As the business owner, it’s your job to help them achieve those goals.
Keeping The Hiring Pipeline Full
- There is a shortage of people in the industry so looking for the right pool to find people is crucial. For Jimmy one of the best places to look is the military.
- The discipline that the military instills aligns very well with working in the trades. Jimmy has developed a close relationship with the nearby military base and offers a lot of people coming out of the military employment opportunities.
- Jimmy’s business developed a training program that has trained over 470 soldiers and 94% of them have found a job in the trade.
- Jimmy has employees that have worked for him from anywhere to 18 years to just six months. His business is hiring anywhere from 10 to 15 per month depending on the market they’re in.
- If you’re in a smaller population area, the first thing to realize is that there are qualified people out there. There are kids who are graduating from highschool that want to get into a trade but just don’t know what the path is.
- Getting someone in the business when they are younger gives you the opportunity to train them exactly the way you want to and gives them a great foothold in the industry.
- Hiring employees is an investment, you have to make sure you are finding the right individuals. You have to put in the work to find them but they are out there.
Increasing Interest In The Trades
- The industry needs to reach out to highschool guidance counsellors if they want to increase interest in the trades.
- They are realizing that college is not the best answer for every student. If you have any kind of training in the trades, you can find a job somewhere.
- You have to show up and get in front of the guidance counsellors and they will get you in front of the students. Highschool teachers want their students to be successful and the trades are a great way for people to build a successful life.
The Smart Contractor vs The Wise Contractor
- The smart contractor works hard and learns from his mistakes and never makes those mistakes again. The wise contractor finds somebody who has been where they want to go and then never makes those mistakes.
- Mentors can open your eyes to a world of opportunity that you didn’t even realize existed.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
coaches@hudsonink.com
800-489-9099
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacob and China Morissette talk about preparing for the slow season instead of reacting to it once it’s already here. Find out why being proactive can pay off for your business. Right now is the time to get a game plan for the fall.
Key Lessons Learned:
Make Sure You’re Offering Maintenance Agreements
- Servicing maintenance agreements during the off season is the only way a lot of business owners keep their techs busy.
- With any new customers you serve you should be doing your best to make sure you sell them a maintenance agreement.
- You can access of pair of scripts to help you with the maintenance agreement conversation with your customers within your Hudsons Ink coaching resources.
- So many contractors lack a compelling maintenance agreement to offer their customer and that’s a big problem. Maintenance agreements are a great way to keep your techs busy and avoid laying people off during slow seasons.
You Need To Focus On Customer Retention
- Leads and customers are hard to come by, so once you have them make sure they stick around.
- Get all the customer’s information that you can when you’re in their home so that you can follow up with them and market to them more effectively.
- Don’t get so busy during the busy season that you forget about marketing. You should always be on top of mind for your market so that when someone searches for your service in an emergency your business is the one on the top of the list.
What You Should Be Focusing On Social Media
- Email addresses are extremely valuable to your business, don’t forget to ask the customer when you visit them at their home.
- People often wonder what to post on social media or doubt that you can generate business with it but in some ways it’s possible. As long as you’re saying something interesting, people will be okay with you talking to them.
- Social media can be a great tool to keep people engaged with your brand, but it’s important to keep it professional.
- One day you will want to communicate with them regarding a sale, as long as you are adding value to the relationship most of the time people will be happy to see what you have to offer.
- Being active on social media is a great way to foster a sense of community but it can also help you recruit new employees as well.
- Be careful about what you are sharing. As much of the content that you share as possible should go to your website.
Reputation Management
- Lots of business owners get a lot of sales through word of mouth but technology has moved that process online. Reviews are the new word of mouth.
- You should have a process in place for gathering as many positive reviews from your customers as possible.
- If you do get a negative review, having a plan to gather positive reviews is a way to protect yourself from the impact by diluting the negativity.
- Feedback in reviews is an opportunity to grow, positive or negative. Negative reviews may reveal areas of your business that actually need to be improved.
- Techs should be looking to prevent issues before they leave the home.
- Beware of companies that gather reviews for you and make sure you are the owner of them. Also be wary of paying people for reviews.
Focus On Getting Referrals
- Take get so busy trying to fill up the schedule that you forget to ask for a referral.
- Make sure you leave a lawn sign and cloverleafing the surrounding homes so that you can get those referrals.
- Don’t get so busy that you forget about the simple things that are going to help your marketing.
- Build a list of people that you can follow up with and generate business once your phone starts to slow down.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
china@hudsonink.com
coaches@hudsonsink.com
800-489-9099
Summary:
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacob and China Morissette talk about techniques and strategies for getting more upsells and improving your closing ratio.
Main Questions Asked:
- What does it mean to upsell?
- How would you go about looking at a market to see if offer a new service would be a good investment to make?
Key Lessons Learned:
Getting The Upsell
- It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, there are only three ways to grow. You add to your customer base, you increase the number of transactions, or you increase the transaction size.
- If you can increase the average size of your transactions by $50, that can translate to a large amount of revenue at the end of the year.
- The first thing you need to do to earn your customer’s trust is to make sure that your technician is on time. First impressions are very important, your tech has to be on time, prepared, and friendly.
- Covering your feet in a customer’s house can go a long way. It shows that you actually care about their home, and by extension them.
- Always take the time to walk the homeowner through what you’re doing. It shows you to be the expert they believe you are and establishes the trust that leads to the next step.
- The technician can be a major difference for the customer, if they build a relationship with the technician, that can function a lot like customer retention.
- Make sure when you arrive at the home to investigate the original problem first. Don’t jump the gun trying to go for the big sale. An upsell needs to go up from somewhere, without the initial sale you won’t have anything to build off of. Your technician needs to have the technical skills to solve your customer’s problem but also the soft skills to see down the line and articulate what they need in a professional way.
- It takes time to build a relationship and earn trust. Sales is not for everybody though, there are a lot of technicians that aren’t interested in doing sales. In those situations, it makes sense to have a designated closer come in to help the homeowner make a positive decision.
- Presentation can make all the difference. Show the homeowner that you are on their side. Present the benefits of fixing the problem instead of doing a band aid solution.
- Train your technicians to look for the additional parts that will need to be fixed. Those will naturally become the upsell offer.
- If you are running a campaign or a manufacturer is offering something special, make sure your technicians know about it. A special offer may be the thing that gets a customer to commit, but they can’t do that if the tech doesn’t know about the offer.
- Convey to the customer what the cost of not making the big decision today is going to cost them over time.
- Homeowners may need to plan for the expense. Your tech should be able to help them understand what the expense is going to be and leave them with information if they need time to make a decision.
- If the people in your market never answer their phone, or show up on time, those are the things that will set you apart.
- The big brands are very rarely the lowest price. People are calling them because they have spent time building up their brand and reputation.
- We usually understand the benefit of the upsell to our bottom line, but we also have to convey the benefit to the customer. Those are things you have to sell, that you are saving them time and money.
- When you think about what the customer actually needs, that’s going to give you the empathy you need to come up with great marketing.
- If you want to increase your closing ratio, you have to put in the time and the training. If you don’t make an investment in your staff, you will reap the results.
- When you’re finished with your homeowner that needed the service call, go to the neighbor’s houses and check with them as well. A lot of times the equipment in a neighborhood is in the same condition and they may be in the same situation soon enough. Saying you were over at Mr. Smith’s house doing some work can create instant trust and is a great way to find new customers.
Offering Additional Services
- The first step is doing research on the competition. Is there anyone else doing it? Can you do it as well or better? Can you do it for the same price or less?
- Just because no one else is doing it, that doesn’t mean it needs to be done. There may be a reason that no one is doing it.
- If there aren’t many people doing it, but it is something that people have asked about you may have found the sweet spot.
- The following step is putting together marketing pieces that educate the customer on what the service is and why the customer needs it. The extra service then becomes marketing gold, because it’s something that differentiates you from the competition.
- Be careful about jumping into a new technology, you can buy into some very expensive equipment that can become obsolete very quickly.
- Although price is going to be important for a lot of consumers, trust will trump price.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
china@hudsonink.com
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacob and China Morissette talks about the most important word in the English language, yes! Justin and China talk about different ways that you can get to that final yes.
Main Questions Asked:
- What are the different stages of saying yes?
Key Lessons Learned:
Getting To Yes
- The final yes is actually a series of yes’s that build up to the customer choosing you to be their contractor.
- The process starts with everyone and everything in your business. Every team member and marketing piece should be a part of your sales team that is helping you get to yes.
- When you realize that everyone that interacts with your customers has a part to play in making sure that customer stays a customer, then you will always be closing throughout the process.
- The marketing process is the first step in getting your customer to say yes to your business in the form of a click or a call. This is essentially your customer raising their hand and saying they are interested.
- For every opportunity to get a yes, you also have an opportunity to hear a no. Try to remove all the hurdles that you can and avoid answering the phone with a negative attitude in your voice. If you have phone calls coming in and they don’t convert to appointments, you can’t blame the media. You have another issue with the sales process.
- Everyone in your organization should understand your value proposition and why a customer should choose your business.
- You don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver, but if you can be the first person to schedule an appointment and commit to fixing their problem, the better your chances of standing out and making a good impression.
- Letting the customer know you’re willing to work for them by being flexible with your hours can be quite effective.
- Not every customer is basing their choice on price, for those customers their main consideration is usually how convenient you can make it for them.
- The next yes for a customer is allowing a contractor into their home. Be careful with who you are hiring, your CSR is going to be the face of your company for that customer.
- A knowledgeable and friendly CSR can be very powerful in building trust.
- The big yes is where your business lives or dies. It’s where your customer trusts your knowledge over their own or their competitors. You have to maintain your designation as an expert in the eyes of your customer but be careful about selling against your competitors.
- Ask questions at that point, questions that convey that you understand their problem and also have their solution. Refocus their attention on the problem and not the cost of the service. Make sure the customer knows that you are there to help and fix their problem, not to pressure them on the sale.
- The reality is that most customers go into this conversation a little jaded and think that you are trying to take advantage of them. Do what you can to give them more confidence in what you can do for them and that you are not there to pressure them. You will probably get the work because you are there on the scene and showing them the problem.
- Your customers should never feel like you are presenting a solution with a big price tag because you are motivated by the commission.
- You also have to fight against the person’s natural inertia and preference for the status quo. Paint the picture for them about the cost of their problem over time and why your solution adds more value than the cost to them.
- Make it so that there are so many benefits to choosing you that it becomes the default option. Don’t oversell fear but present all the benefits of working with you.
- Remember the solution is going to hurt, and the job of the CSR is to make the solution hurt less and that the cost of not doing something will far outway the negatives of dealing with their problem. Show them the hidden costs of inaction.
- A risk reducer is a good way to get the close. Guarantees and warranties can be the final nudge for the customer to say yes.
- Don’t wait until the final yes to be closing, throughout the conversation you should be getting buy in from the customer with simple questions like “does that make sense?”.
- Doing an assumptive sale once it seems like the customer has made the decision to work with you is a good way to close. Give the customer options where both answers are yes. People like options but be careful with giving too many, you customer will choose none of the above if they feel overwhelmed.
- There are micro yes’s at every stage of the process. Once you’ve got the big yes it’s time to ask for the referral and if they is anything you can improve on.
- Asking what you can do better is a no-lose proposition. If they say yes, that’s great. If they say no, you now have a chance and the knowledge to improve.
- Some customers will say no and that’s okay. When you find you have lost to a competitor, take note on what they did and if it’s something you can duplicate.
- Maybe is really just a “yes, if…”. Phrase your pitch in a way that leaves them the opportunity to say what they are concerned about and that gives you the opportunity to earn their trust again.
- Remember that it’s also okay to say no to a customer, sometimes you are not the best choice for the customer and that’s alright. You can go a long way with those customers by helping them find the solution they need with someone else.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
china@hudsonink.com
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, host Justin Jacob interviews Mike Montano. Mike had been a contractor for over 20 years and when he started his business marketing was one of the areas he struggled with. He put in the work and learned that trust and credibility were crucial, which is when the idea for ReviewBuzz came from.
Main Questions Asked:
- How does ReviewBuzz work?
- Why are reviews important?
- What are some best practices to dealing with bad reviews?
Key Lessons Learned:
ReviewBuzz
- The customer experience is pretty much entirely dependent on your employees. For contractors, it’s not about looking good, it’s about being good. Nothing will move the needle more than the quality of your work.
- ReviewBuzz is both a review management system as well as a review engagement program. It incentivizes employees and technicians through gamification to deliver better customer experiences.
- Most employees will not ask for a review, but customer experience management is one of the most important things for the future of contractors.
- The simplest way to get more reviews is to ask. If you deliver a good experience, the customer will usually be happy to give a review. If they’re reluctant or you think they may not give a good review, that’s an opportunity to address an issue and make it right.
- If you personalize the ask, it increases the number of customers engaging and the overall number of positive reviews.
- Most people will leave a positive review if you make it easy to do so.
- A lot of contractors will be able to relate to the experience of creating positive word of mouth and how referrals can build their business. Today word of mouth is online, people will look to see what others have said about you before making a buying decision.
- Google competes against companies like Yelp and Facebook, if you want to rank highly for SEO positive reviews matter.
- Reviews will also impact your ability to upsell additional products and services. When you’re selling your services, it’s not just about the quality of the equipment, it’s also about the quality of the installers. Review show that your installers have a track record of taking care of your customers needs.
- The most valuable reviews will focus on the experience more than the equipment. 97% of shoppers say review influence their decision one way or another. Displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by up to 200%.
The Customer Experience
- As the algorithms get smarter the consistency of the reviews are becoming more important.
- You can’t just look good, you have to actually be good. Ideally from the first call to the final install.
- No one has more of an impact of the customer experience than your employees. When they don’t have to protect their personal reputation, there is not as much commitment on their end.
- One way you can avoid negative reviews is by giving your potential customer options. If your CSR is booked up, offer to recommend the customer to one of your friendly competitors.
- Your employees and marketing are the face of your business. Unless there is something in place to encourage accountability in your employees, it can be hard to maintain a consistent customer experience.
Dealing With Bad Reviews
- It’s never too late to go back and apologize.
- Going above and beyond to make things right can turn a bad review into a good one.
- Talking to disgruntled and unhappy customers is the perfect opportunity to learn how to improve your business. There is a lot you can learn about your business that you would not be able to otherwise from people who are more than happy to tell you what your company did wrong.
- Investigate what the issue is, many of the times you can make the issue go away with nothing more than your time and willingness to listen.
- Your customers don’t care about your brand, they do care about your people.
- Being remarkable is essentially showing authentic care. If you show that you care about your customer, your customer will reciprocate with a review for your business.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
mike@reviewbuzz.com
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacob and China Morissette talks about putting programs in place that will drastically change your business. Find out why the last thing your competitors want is for you to implement a customer retention system.
Main Questions Asked:
- What is customer retention?
- Should contractors focus on digital or offline?
Key Lessons Learned:
Customer Retention
- Customer retention is basically the process of keeping the customers you have spent the time and energy to acquire. You should put in as much effort to keep your customers as you did to gain them in first place.
- We often fall into the trap of assuming that once someone does business with us they will continue to do business with us, which just isn’t true.
- Customer retention isn’t optional.
- The first thing you have to decide is who your customer is. According to the Pareto Principle, 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your customers.
- You have to train yourself to look at your customer database as a resource. Studies say that 11% of existing customers will leave your business for totally avoidable reasons.
- Most people don’t leave because they are upset with your service or product, they leave because they just don’t remember who you are and drift away.
- By the year 2022, the battleground of retail sales will not be over price or availability of product, but the experience of the customer. That can make the business of contracting tricky, you have to ask yourself what you can do to add to the experience of a person being a customer of yours.
- Are you communicating with your customers in the way they want to communicate? You have to take into account how your customers want to interact with your business and allow them to do that. Just because you may not use social media, that doesn’t eliminate the fact that a large proportion of your potential customers do.
- You have to add value to your customer’s relationship and not just try to sell them all the time. Tips on how to save money and conserve energy are great options.
- You have to consider the content you are posting on social media, the purpose of your posts is to create a window that allows people to connect with your business.
- Investing in the relationship will increase your ability to eventually make an offer to your customer.
- It’s very easy to set yourself apart in your marketplace by going above what everyone else is doing. Don’t lower your price, add more value to the customer experience.
- If your plan doesn’t include some sort of customer retention, you make moves without having the foundation to support them. If your customers are falling through the bottom of your funnel, you will have to spend 5x to 8x more to buy them back.
- Don’t forget your competitors, they are trying to bring your customers over to their business. It’s their lead generation versus your customer retention.
- Running a loss leader offer relies entirely on keeping the customer for the long term, without a structured customer retention plan in place the offer will never pay off.
- Commercial contracts are built on the relationship you have with the principals of the business. Many deals are based on likability rather than price.
- It’s not just about digital marketing, offline marketing can be extremely powerful as well. Putting effort into both approaches is a better strategy to connect with more customers. Don’t let potential customers get neglected because you don’t want to take advantage of a particular channel.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
china@hudsonink.com
800-489-9099
In this episode of the Mega Marketer Coach Cast Justin Jacobs and Melissa Broadus discuss the benefits of being an ACCA member. Find out why the ACCA is the place to be for contractors and what resources are available to help you grow your contracting business.
Main Questions Asked:
- What is the ACCA?
- What are some of the tools are resources you offer?
- How do you reach out to contractors?
- What are the largest benefits of going to a conference?
Key Lessons Learned:
ACCA
- The ACCA is the Air Conditioner Contractors of America, they are a national trade association and they represent all the HVAC contractors in the industry.
- They create the standards in the industry that help contractors install equipment the right way and pick the right material to work with.
- ACCA also acts as an advocate on Capitol Hill to help explain the contractor side of the equation. The ACCA story is the story of contractors.
- They also offer training in all aspects of the business.
- Taking the good information that is available in the ACCA forum and duplicating it in your business is a great way to grow and avoid making mistakes. Asking questions will get answers from contractors all over the country and of all sizes.
- You can get access to good ideas from contractors that aren’t competing with you but have still been in the same position as you. Knowing who to talk to to break through to the next level can be priceless.
- Every contractor needs to be at the national ACCA conference. It is a contractor lead mega learning event with an expo as well. Learning takes place everywhere.
- Having a different perspective is a great way to refresh your business.
Tools and Resources
- There is a lot of material available in the ACCA blog, content that is only available to members. The blog is a great way for contractors to get inside info on the industry.
- ACCA also offers webcasts that bring in experts to share their accumulated wisdom.
- For the techs in the membership, the downloads that they make available is another great resource.
- Being a member of the ACCA also gets you on their contractor locator which makes it very easy for customers to locate them.
- Contractors love to talk to other contractors. The forum gives them a place to connect with other contractors and share what they’re learned.
Outreach
- Contractors are a multi-generational bunch so to reach them ACCA has to use a number of different outreach methods. For some that means the fax machine or direct mail, and for others that can be digital.
- If you send out a stunning, informative direct mail piece, you are going to see a good return on that. Direct mail works and is worth the time and money.
- You’re dealing with different people that consume media in different ways. You have to use the different tools available.
- You have to tell the story, not just asking the person to buy something. Calls to action are important but you have to explain why it’s worth their time.
- People don’t like to be sold to on social media. 80% of your social media content should be helpful, valuable, or entertaining.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
Acca.org
Promo code: HUDSON
justin@hudsonink.com
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacobs brings on Allen Kent to discuss what’s working and not working in North Indiana and Kent Heating and Air.
Main Questions Asked:
- What is your story?
- What are some things you did to establish yourself in the area?
- What changes have you seen over time?
- What does 2019 look like for you company?
Key Lessons Learned:
Kent Heating and Air
- Kent has been in business for 65 years and regard themselves as a marketing company. They specialize in the design and service of HVAC.
- They have a targeted customer acquisition program thanks to Hudsons Ink.
- Allen’s father started the company in 1954 and Allen purchased it in 1991.
- After four years of effort, the company moved into a brand new 7700 sq ft facility and set a sales record last year with a 14% in sales. Despite the big move Allen still found the time to make sure that everyone that worked there still had fun and got things done.
- Just because you’ve been around a long time, that doesn’t necessarily lead naturally to success.
- No matter what size your business is, if your employees are enjoying their work and feel appreciated, it will show in what their doing.
- To pull off substantial growth you have to stay focused on your core business. Your core business drives it all.
- Do your employees have the same pride and ownership as you do? Let your employees take ownership of what they do.
- When Allen took over the business didn’t really have a brand identity so one of the first things they did was develop a marketing plan and line up the brand image across the company.
- In a lot of ways Hudson Adams became Allen’s mentor and helped them rework their yellow pages ad that increased its effectiveness by 245%.
- Allen believes the economy is going to slow down a little bit so he’s aiming for 5%-6% growth. His plans include getting ready to transition the business to the next owner and to be more timely on his Tuesday night thank you calls.
- Every Tuesday afternoon Allen calls his recent installation customers and personally thanks them. That’s one of the things Allen believes has really helped build his business and generate referrals. It’s a great way to find out about your business and shows that you really care.
- People will give you feedback if you make it easy for them.
Marketing
- The yellow pages used to be the go to resource for contractors. It wasn’t a question of whether you were going to run yellow pages ads, it was how much money are you going to spend?
- The great shift in marketing is going from offline to online, but that also means there is an opportunity in the direct mail channel. The mailbox is less crowded now, and that means your message is more easily seen by your customers.
- Social media and websites have been one of the biggest changes in marketing in the last several years.
- You have to sell to a potential customer in the way that they want to be sold.
- Email used to be the easiest and cheapest way to reach people but then email became crowded as everyone jumped on the bandwagon. The pendulum has swung back to direct mail.
- The secret is a consistent marketing message.
- Referrals and direct mail and Allen’s best sources of new customers. There is nothing quite as powerful having someone refer your business. Everything has to work together to turn your customers into raving fans.
- Don’t give people a reason not to refer you.
- Cheesy offers deliver cheesy results. Don’t do gimmicks.
- Try to enter into the conversation that your customer is having their own mind and when that battle.
- Any media you choose, the standard will be the same. Some portion of people will respond and some won’t, the ones that won’t might respond the next time.
- You make specific offers to different areas, the important point is to ensure the message is consistent with everything else you do.
- Making the transition from talking about yourself to talking about your customer is one of the biggest hurdles for new marketers. Your customers don’t care about how long you’ve been in business, they want to know you can fix their problem.
- You have to build and earn your customer’s trust, they’ve probably been burned by some bad contractors before.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
coaches@hudsonink.com
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Justin Jacob and China Morissette talks about how to balance your marketing holistically. They also go over how you should approach the end of the year season in preparation for 2019 and why retention may be the most important strategy you implement in your business.
Main Questions Asked:
- Did you feel like you were being sold most of the time?
- What should contractors do right now?
Key Lessons Learned:
Marketing
- Hudsons Ink coaches against spending a ton of marketing dollars near the end of the year. People are spending money, but it’s mainly allocated for Christmas.
- The smarter contractors are using this time of year to figure out what they should be focusing on and getting organized for next year.
- A lot of contractors look back at what didn’t work over the past year and tend to want to cut those activities out completely.
- You should try to balance out your marketing so that when one thing doesn’t work, another effort picks up the slack.
- Don’t scrap one thing entirely but don’t go all in on one tactic either.
- You have to be willing to skip over a large portion of your prospective customer base if you go all in on one direction.
- Having a balanced approach makes it easier to adapt when things do change.
- Every marketing trend will eventually change. At one time email was very effective and exciting but is now extremely crowded. Even Amazon is circling back with direct mail and print marketing materials.
- When a customer is ready to buy, the first place they go to is the business that communicates with them the most.
- Target your message and use a bunch of different mediums to reach them.
- New customers are not the only way to grow. Your current customer base is a gold mine.
- Past customers want to work with people they know and trust, as long as they know you’re there and ready to go you should be their first choice.
- There are three ways to grow your business: you can grow your customer base, increase the frequency that customers buy, or increase the average amount of money your customers spend.
- When it comes to marketing, you need to have an offense and a defense. Without making sure your customers know who you are and staying top of mind, your competitors will take your customers away.
- Be careful with your judgements of what worked. Not every message you send out will get a response.
- It’s hard to measure the ROI of a retention strategy, but if you have a good retention strategy in place you will notice the benefits.
- When you look at your customer base you probably think of them as ‘your’ customers, but do they think of you as their contractor?
- Provide value in your marketing efforts. If every time your customer hears from you and you’re trying to sell them something, they will eventually turn away. Even a small extra step can set you apart from your competition.
- Marketing is about momentum and setting up a smart plan and sticking to it.
Sales
- The sales people that China remembers most were the ones that took the time to get to know what she truly needed.
- As the marketing coordinator, you are responsible for establishing the ROI from all marketing activities.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
justin@hudsonink.com
china@hudsonink.com
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Scott Smith talks about everything to do with your website. Find out whether you need a new site, why your current site is not converting and what you can do about it.
Main Questions Asked:
- Should I have website or not?
- How do I measure my results?
- How do I use email marketing?
Key Lessons Learned:
Web Marketing
- Everyone needs a website, even if you’re a one truck operation.
- Your customers will research you online before they call you, they want to verify you first.
- Your website is your digital storefront, without one you are hobbling your business.
- Keep the content on your website up to date. Put a plan together to keep your site fresh and target seasonal keywords. You are trying to impress Google and get high rankings for the keywords you care about.
- Make sure what you are doing is in line with Google’s best practices, you don’t want to be blacklisted.
- Make sure you have a lead capture form on your homepage, if you have it buried somewhere you are not going to convert your website traffic to leads.
- Offer your visitors something useful in exchange for their contact information. Don’t be shy about asking for that info, people aren’t checking in with your website casually just to see what you’re up to.
- Creating content is a great way generate traffic. If you already do radio or television spots, use that info on your website as additional content.
- Don’t just throw money at your digital marketing, measure your results and track the metrics that actually matter to your business. Leads and conversions are all that ultimately matter. A digital campaign is only as good as the conversion tools on the backend.
- Live chat on your website is a great option for many websites, it gives a visitor the opportunity to connect with someone instantly or failing that, a chatbot can walk them through the process.
- Find a good company to partner up with and expand your reach. There is no better introduction than from one vendor or contractor to another.
- Keep a focus on ROI and make sure the money you spend is money you’ve invested. About 5% of your total residential sales should be going to marketing.
- Have a system in place to manage your online reputation. Ask your customers for positive reviews because most contractors don’t bother.
- You are going to get negative reviews on your business, but how you respond is more important than the review itself. If you can resolve the issue, ask them to revisit the review. Show that you are willing to make things right because not every business is willing to do that.
Email Marketing
- Many contractors have a huge database but no email addresses, there are ways to get that info and take advantage of email marketing.
- Don’t use email to always hard sell, send out useful content at least twice a month and sell only occasionally.
- There are a number of free services that you can take advantage of when it comes to email marketing.
- You need to have an autoresponder that keeps your new lead engaged. Every second that goes by after someone submits their information, the lead gets colder.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
hudsonink.com/scorecard
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Scott Smith and Sara Kathryn King discuss the topic of social listening to help you identify your next likely buyer. They also discuss a number of tactics you can use to drive repeat business and encourage positive reviews.
Main Questions Asked:
- What is social listening?
- What are the platforms we should be thinking about?
- What is conversation growth?
Key Lessons Learned:
Social Listening
- A social marketer should always be on the lookout for new ways to approach and identify new buyers.
- Social listening is essentially putting your feelers out and hearing what people are talking about. It’s way of solving someone’s problem before they even realize it’s a problem.
- For example, someone complaining about their high energy bill is a perfect target for a contractor to connect with because they can probably offer them a solution.
- Spend time on the social networks that have the highest volume of conversation about things that are relevant to your brand.
- What are some tell tale signs that you can recognize because you are a contractor that you can help people with?
- Your conversation isn’t just about your brand, it’s about everything your brand deals with. Just targeting your brand will leave out 90% of the conversation that your customers are having.
- Search your competitors to learn how you can differentiate your business and highlight how you’re superior. You can actually advertise to a competitor’s customers specifically in an indirect way.
- Hootsuite, Brand Watch, and Google Alerts are great tools to help your social listening efforts.
- Knowing your local market is an asset, you can identify what is happening and target it directly and immediately.
- There are different types of conversations that you will generally have on social media. Your customers will probably not rave about the product that was installed, they are more likely to talk about the service they received.
- People complain more than they praise the service they receive. The best way to prevent a large disproportion of negativity is to ask for a good review, don’t leave it up to chance.
- Get ahead of problems and turn complaints into an opportunity for higher and better service.
- Repeat business is the name of the game in contracting, anything you can do to keep people interested and engaged will help you keep customers coming back for more.
Conversation Growth
- You have to identify which platform the conversation is happening on and which one is currently growing.
- You don’t want to spend money on advertising on a platform where your customers are not spending their time on.
- It’s easy to give up if you only try it for a month, you have to give time for people to talk and your skills in social listening improve.
- Pay attention to conversations and engagement drivers around your brand. Certain hashtags can be extremely valuable to your business.
- Hashtags are basically a content well that allows you to see everyone who is talking about that topic.
Influencers
- Influencers don’t have to be LeBron James or Kim Kardashian. A local news anchor or even your wife can be a social influencer that has a valuable reach that you can tap into.
- Social networks are putting more emphasis on authentic connections between people and less on brands, leverage your personal connections.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
Call your coach 1-800-489-9099
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Scott Smith and Justin Jacobs discuss the basics of marketing by covering the 5 M’s of marketing. The 5 M’s cover nearly everything you need to know about marketing and building your business.
Main Questions Asked:
- What are the five M’s?
Key Lessons Learned:
Message
- Identifying what you want to say is important. Marketers have a tendency to say everything they want to say in one spot but it’s a big mistake.
- People are distracted, you have a matter of seconds to communicate your message quickly. People will not read through a piece to learn every service that you offer.
- If you’re offering a service, get to the reason why they should call you for that service.
- Make sure your headlines are capturing their attention quickly.
- When you blend all your offers together, none of them stand out and they all lose effectiveness.
Media
- The media can be almost anything including direct mail, YouTube videos, Facebook, or TV.
- The consensus for the last few years is that everyone wants to talk digital but a lot of the tech giants are circling back to direct mail.
- As one media becomes saturated, it makes the less crowded channels more effective.
- You need a good balance between physical media and digital media for your marketing campaign to have the greatest impact.
- Every market is different and prices will change depending on where your business operates.
- Radio is not the best option for direct response, but it works well as a branding effort and to generate top of mind awareness.
- One of the benefits of digital is it provides a fair amount of segmentation and allows you to target more accurately.
Month
- Marketing is salesmanship multiplied by media.
- Imagine your best sales pitch being presented to five thousand people at the same, that’s what marketing can do for you.
- You have to shape what you’re saying and presenting to fit the time it’s going out.
- Match the message match the market you are after when it makes sense for your market to hear it.
- If your timing is off, you can have a great offer with a great message and the right media and still get no return.
Money
- At least 3% of your top line residential sales to as high as 10% should be dedicated to marketing.
- You can sort the kinds of messaging you want to put out and segment your budget to the efforts you know to be the most effective.
- No two plans are the same, you have to tailor your plan to your unique local market and your unique business.
- You can have an excellent campaign but still waste money if there is a weak link in your business’s ability to service the clients.
- The best way to not waste money on marketing is to track your results.
- Marketing is not money spent, it’s money invested.
- Digital marketing has a bad habit of measuring metrics that don’t build your business, you can’t put a Facebook like in the bank.
Market
- Your market is the most important component, if you don’t put your message in front of the right people, the whole effort was a waste.
- If you were to look at your database and find your twenty best customers, what do they have in common?
- Ask for the rankings of any radio spots you are considering, does that radio station have listeners that you even want to target?
- When all five components of marketing are working in unison, you can achieve incredible results.
- Marketing has a momentum, it can be hard to get it going but once you have it moving it will keep producing results for your business.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
Call your coach 1-800-489-9099
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Scott Smith talks to Sara Kathryn King about the in’s and out’s of Instagram marketing.
Main Questions Asked:
- What are some of the basics we should know?
- Can you tell us something about paid ads on Instagram?
- What is a carousel ad?
- How can you hone in on your target?
- What are some of the automation options?
Key Lessons Learned:
Instagram Marketing
- Instagram is extremely large and growing rapidly, more than 100 million users have come on board since April 2017. Many Facebook users naturally become Instagram users.
- The first step is to start an Instagram account and then create a business account either within Instagram or through Facebook. It costs nothing to set up and post, the only time you will spend money is when you want to advertise or boost your posts.
- There are several types of paid ads you can run on Instagram and most of the time, the ads themselves are very non-intrusive.
- Don’t discount Instagram because you think it’s only used by young kids, more and more of your key demographic is coming on the platform every day.
- Video ads are gaining popularity with users online, 87% of advertisers online are using video. 60 second videos are a great way to attract new customers and share your story or your customer’s story.
- Carousel ads allow you to use more than one image at a time, this could be an opportunity to share a transformation.
- Stories are a great way to engage follows and create content for your highlight reel.
- Go back to the basics if you’re on a budget and engage your followers. Reply to their posts, start a conversation, and make them feel valued.
- Share the behind the scenes work with your audience with the stories feature. Anything you can do to be at the top of your customer’s mind is a good thing, even if they don’t watch it your brand still appears at the top of their feed.
Targeting on Instagram
- You have to think about the medium you are using to target and adjust your demographics to fit the platform.
- Targeting your ads on Instagram works exactly the same as Facebook and can be customized extensively, including retargeting with the Facebook pixel.
Influencers
- Influencers are another great way to reach new followers. Your customers can actually be influencers within their social circle.
- The hardest part is the ask, the worst thing they can say is no.
- Reach out to notable people in your community and ask them to mention you.
Contests
- Contests are simple, fun, and an easy way to create a viral prospecting mechanism.
- Using hashtags to track entries is the easiest way and manage the contest.
- If you choose your winner, you can rebrand their post and highlight them which encourages them to participate again the next time.
Automation
- Social media is not meant to be time consuming. Hootsuite and AMP allow you to schedule out your posts for every platform from one place.
- Marketing can often become reactive, automation allows you to stay ahead.
- What gets measured, gets managed. You can learn a lot of what works and what doesn’t from the analytics of the automation software.
- Facebook and Instagram are working on making it as simple as possible to understand how the system works and what to do.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
Call your coach 1-800-489-9099
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Scott Smith and Justin Jacobs discuss list segmentation and why fishing in the right pond is the best way to catch fish.
Main Questions Asked:
- How can I get the most out of my existing customer base?
- What does it mean to develop a customer avatar?
- How can I improve response rates?
- What is the best way to grow my list?
- How can I target a specific area without wasting money?
- What should my average value per customer be?
- What demographics should I look at when selecting a list?
- Do you have a recommendation for the number of prospects I should send to?
- Where can I get a list of prospects for my area?
Key Lessons Learned:
Loyalty
- Loyalty is a very popular word these days and it stretches across industries. Technology has enabled price shopping in retail but less so with larger purchases. In those situations, customers are looking for expertise.
- Price shopping may get the customer in the door, but service will keep them coming back.
- You don’t want to be the lowest priced contractor, there will always be someone willing to go lower and there will be zero loyalty.
- Some of the biggest service businesses see the first call as a loss leader.
- Set the expectation early that your company is different and then exceed the expectation and follow up.
- Marketing is a momentum process, it takes time to become impactful.
Avatars
- You need to know who your customer is. When you understand the demographics and motivations of your customer avatar you can ‘fish in the right pond’.
- You can learn who makes the best customer for your business and figure out what market is the best one to target.
- There is an immense amount of data that you can use to target on a list, once you have it take advantage of it.
- Having a customer avatar allows you to customize your message to speak directly to your ideal customer.
Direct Mail
- More people have been turned away from direct mail by using every door direct than any other service.
- Scatter shot marketing is the opposite of having a customer avatar. Everyone is not your customer.
- If you’re not getting a return on your marketing efforts, it doesn’t matter how cheap each piece was.
- The piece is less important than the list. Everytime you send something out, think about the audience that is seeing it.
- If the piece is bad, change it.
- If you want to target a specific area, you have to get to know the area and do what you can to create a presence there.
- A bill board can be useful but it is not a direct response piece.
- If you’re not trying to aggresively grow, you should be sending out 70% of your mail to existing customers and 30% to new customers that are as similar to your existing customers as you can manage.
List Building
- It depends on your definition of a customer, you can grow your list in 3 minutes if you’re not picky.
- Identify your customer avatar and market aggresively.
- Spending 8%-10% of your annual revenue on marketing is a rule of thumb if you want to double your revenue next year.
- People have to be able to know who you are in order to respond to you.
- If you’re only seeing your customers one time, you are actually going in the wrong direction and are probably losing money in long run.
- Acquisition is far more expensive than retention.
- Look at household income, age of the head of the household, the age of the home when selecting the demographics for a list.
- The best way to get something out of a list is consistency. If you can have someone call behind a direct mail piece you can increase the effectiveness exponentially.
Value
- If you look at your average customer base of people you’ve done business with in the last 48 to 60 months, the average value per customer should be around $500.
- If your number is a lot higher than that, you are probably doing a lot replacements. If it’s less, you probably don’t have a process of service agreements and are more service based.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
Call your coach 1-800-489-9099
justin@hudsonink.com
scott@hudsonink.com
coaches@hudsonink.com
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Scott Smith and Justin Jacobs discuss why people don’t like calling contractors.
They explore various ways you can defeat the objections of your prospects, how to ask questions that advance the sale, and the value of being the expert and authority in your local area.
Main Questions Asked:
- What are some questions that advance the sale?
Key Lessons Learned:
Contractor Business
- As a contractor, it’s very important to stay up to date with what’s going on in your industry and to be able to explain it to your customers.
- By conveying why certain aspects of the job are valuable to your customer, you become the expert. The key is to be knowledgeable and explain it in a way that makes sense.
- You need to understand what it is that your customers are going through. What is the reason they made the call in the first place?
- If you ask the right questions, your prospect is going to lead you down the path that you want to go.
- People want to trust you, don’t use industry jargon that will go over their head. Show them the solution to their problem and give them control of the situation. Consult your prospects and give them options.
- Your techs need to be experts in your products or services. They need to understand the sales process and your sales people need to understand what the techs work on.
- Your team being experts gives your customer a better overall experience.
- The industry is always changing, if you can be the first business to bring something new to your area it can be huge. If you see an opportunity to differentiate, do it.
- Changes can be hard, but even small changes can help you stand apart from the crowd.
- When the right people, the right process, the right home, and the right time come together, everything gets easy.
Sales
- Asking leading questions doesn’t get to the root of the problem. There is no set plan that works for everyone and every business.
- You have to get to know your customer in order to work with them the most effectively. Every time you go into your customer’s home is a chance for you to get to know them and build a relationship.
- Getting to know your prospect gives you the information you need to tailor your marketing to their needs. It can also help you know which tech to send to the home.
- The more you are able to group and segment your list, the more valuable it becomes.
- Looking at certain demographics of your list is how you segment your list and get the most bang for your marketing dollars.
- Don’t be afraid to ask your customer about what you can work on and improve. If you don’t know, you can’t fix it.
- Your tech should ask at the end of the job “Was my service good enough to earn your positive review?”. Make positive reviews easy to get.
- If you have the opportunity to put together a quote for a prospect, take the time to research the prospect and customize your offering. Use their information to create a custom solution and sales process.
- Your prospects for the most part have no idea what they need. The more you can do to make them feel like they have the information they need to make the right decision, the more likely they will work with you.
- Ask the prospect “What criteria other than price you will you use to make your decision?” Explain the benefits of your options and personalize the offer to what’s important to the prospect.
- Create some urgency and give the prospect a deadline. Don’t be afraid to walk away from a deal.
- If the prospect has a fixed budget, put something together that fits their budget.
- Personalizing and customizing takes more time on the front end, but will increase your closing conversion on the back end and make your efforts more effective in the long run.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
Call your coach 1-800-489-9099
coaches@hudsonink.com
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, host Scott Smith interviews Justin Jacobs.
Today's podcast explores service and how to partner with the weather rather than being dependent on whether it is currently hot or cold. They also dive into retention marketing and how to get your past customers eager to work with you again and again.
Main Questions Asked:
- Do you notice a time of year where the weather really matters?
- Do you notice any trends about the best time of year to market?
- What should you expect for a response rate?
Key Lessons Learned:
Partnering with the Weather
- The effect weather has on the industry varies across the country and depends heavily on the month and the area. You have to track the cycles for your business.
- You should be planning for when your calls naturally start dropping off, the smart contractor starts marketing before the calls stop, not after.
- You have to identify where the slowest point of your season is going to be and then market around that. Back up from that day by 21 days and that’s when you begin.
- Identify your target market, people you have serviced before, and market to them to get in front of them and on top of mind.
- 14 days out from your slowest time, push your marketing out towards your ‘like’ audience, people just like your target market. They are your second most likely to buy group.
- 7 days out, this is when you start to target geographic areas and aim for a broad market. Once you reach the slowest day of the season, that’s when you begin marketing to the world with media like radio and television.
- Have your service techs look out for opportunities when they go out on service calls. Focus on maintenance agreements and older equipment.
- When the weather's nice, it’s not that your customers are opposed to calling you. They just aren’t thinking about you at the time. That’s when you have to get your business in front of them and present your message that shows them it’s smart to call you now rather than later when they are in an emergency situation.
- Putting the right message in front of the right people at the right time generates results. Craft your message so that it speaks to what they care about that season.
- When things are slow, reach out to your past customers. People generally want “their guy”, remind them of that.
Retention Marketing
- Quality touches are different from a sales piece that goes out to everyone in the neighbourhood.
- Your existing customer base is your most valuable asset. Tend to your customers and let them know you appreciate them.
- You are recommended to have six or more quality touches per year.
- Quality touches shouldn’t be a pushy sales piece, offer value and something that will help build your relationship. Make your customer feel special by sending them something unique from your business and they will be more likely to work with you again.
- These pieces can be a thank you card, an email, a phone call, there are a lot of options.
- Send out educational material once a season to stay in contact with your base.
- Don’t buy email addresses, they are a waste of effort.
- A one off marketing piece will almost always perform poorly no matter how well designed or well written the copy. You have to integrate your marketing on multiple channels and platforms. Your direct mail piece is the most powerful, but it needs to be supported.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
Call your coach 1-800-489-9099
coaches@hudsonink.com
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, host Adams Hudson interviews Eric Shidell.
Today's podcast asks the question “are you chasing the ghost?”. Learn how to eliminate excessive warranty calls and no money call backs and it’s probably not the way you first think.
Eric Shidell gives advanced service training to contractors on his website and specializes in catching the ghosts for his client’s business.
Main Questions Asked:
- What do you mean by “tracking the ghost”?
- How do we discover the scope of the problem?
- How do we minimize warranty calls?
- How do you handle this once you know there is an issue?
- Should we create competitive environments?
- What is an average number of call backs?
- How do you put a figure on how much it’s worth to solve the problem?
Key Lessons Learned:
Chasing The Ghost
- All of businesses are focusing on attracting new customers, retaining those customers, and increasing sales which is a great focus to have but later on you may find that you are stuck in a realm of diminishing returns.
- Your bottom line may show you that sales are up, or that labour costs are up even more, but it won’t show you why.
- Warranty calls and no money callbacks are affecting your bottom line more than they appear to do.
- Warranty calls are generally considered to be a fact of life but the truth is the vast majority of them are completely preventable. They are often unaccounted for correctly and end up looking like just increased labour costs. You have to accurately assess the dollar value of a warranty call and how it affects the bottom line.
- If you don’t track something, you can’t correct it. The first step is to assign a dollar value of every call. There shouldn’t be an option for a tech to not complete a service ticket and there should never be a zero sum service ticket coming across the manager’s desk.
- The technician should price out every field call, even if they are not collecting from the customer. In the situation of a warranty call, the tech should fill out the service ticket with the accurate value being provided and then subtract it from the price, so the price to the customer is zero.
- It’s important to reassure the customer that their issues are incredibly important to your business instead of making a warranty call an unhappy experience for everyone involved. The most positive experience is the negative experience that never has to happen.
Warranty Calls
- Warranty calls have two main sources: manufacturer’s defect and human error. Manufacturer’s defect are extremely rare.
- 40% of warranty returns are found to be caused by damage done during the installation which is why it’s important to know who was the tech involved.
- If you’re doing performance tracking, the warranty dollar amount should go against that original job which will reframe the cost you are experiencing.
- There are opportunity costs to warranty costs that are often not seen as well. It’s a much bigger dollar amount than most people realize, anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 times the original value of the ticket.
- Once you begin tracking, you will begin to see patterns as to who, and where the issues are coming from. There is usually a fundamental aspect of the installation that the field tech doesn’t understand.
- You should look at these issues as opportunities for your team to grow and learn.
- Warranty claims under 5% is good measure of success. Anything in the double digits and you’ve got a problem.
Catching The Ghost
- Once you identify the issue, you can find training opportunities that your techs will probably be happy to take advantage of.
- Incentivising your techs to become better is the best way to improve them, punitive actions will often reduce overall performance.
- If you want to create a competitive environment, offer rewards that will get them to strive to succeed without making them jealous of other people on the team. The goal is friendly rivalry.
- It’s very difficult to solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that got you into it. Understanding the why of what you’re doing is how you take things to another level.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, host Scott Smith interviews Hayley Bridges.
Today's podcast with Scott Smith and Hayley Bridges covers the digital marketing strategies you can use to grow your contracting business.
Main Questions Asked:
- What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
- If you have a limited budget, should you improve SEO or spend money on paid ads?
- What type of budget should be allocated to online advertising?
- How often should a contractor contact their customer via email?
- Should you manage your social media yourself?
- Do you have any tips for using YouTube?
- What are the options when it comes to social media for paid advertising?
- How much does social media impact your SEO?
- Should a contractor manage their email marketing?
- What are some best practices for a website?
- What are some tips to convert traffic into leads?
Key Lessons Learned:
Digital Marketing
- The world of digital marketing is always changing so you always have to stay up to date to stay on top of the newest tech.
- SEO is a part of your overall SEM strategy. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, and SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is just one of many tools in the SEM toolbox.
- There is no one tool that is the best for everyone, every tool works in specific ways depending on what your goals online are.
- Your long term goals should be to succeed in building up your SEO rankings. If you are in a very competitive market, a good short term goal would be to use PPC and other paid ads to get an edge over your competition.
- PPC and paid ads give you analytics that allow you to make even better decisions about your marketing. Analyze the main source of your traffic and focus on maximizing that source.
- The magic number for online marketing when it comes to budget is 36%. This includes nearly everything that you spend online. It may sound like a high number but it will be money well spent.
- Emailing your list once a month is a good rule of thumb, if you have a sale going on, once every two weeks works well too.
Social Media
- Social media generally works faster than email. Posting once a week is a good start. The content you post should be educational but can also be light and personal as well.
- The key to social media is to be consistent. If you can’t commit the time you may want to work with an agency that can take care of it for you. If a customer looks at your Facebook page and doesn’t see anything recent, they will probably think you’ve gone out of business.
- Contractors should be on YouTube because it’s an asset you can use on other social media sites. People go to YouTube searching for content so it can be a bit more relaxed than other forms of content.
- Putting out value without asking for something in return is how you build good faith with your audience and turn them into customers down the road.
- Facebook has an exceptional ad manager that allows you to control exactly who you target and how much money you spend.
- Social media shares and likes impact your search engine rankings very positively.
Email Marketing
- Email marketing can be pretty complicated. Having an agency manage your list is usually your best choice.
- Analytics are one of the most important tools when it comes to communicating with your list via email.
Websites
- Your website is your hub for all your digital marketing. It should function in a way that takes some of the work off yourself.
- Using blog posts and content will make you an expert in your space and improve your SEO.
- Make sure your website is always up to date!
- Install analytics on your site so you can understand your traffic and how your site is performing.
- You need a good partner to manage your site, keep up with software updates, and making sure it’s fulfilling your marketing goals.
- Create a lead magnet that gets your traffic onto your list. You can also ask for an email address in order to access a popular piece of content. Make sure the value of the lead magnet is worth it to the user so that they want to give you their email address.
- Your digital marketing and your offline marketing working together is what will give you immense success. It’s not a question of one or the other. Integrate your marketing efforts.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Links to Resources Mentioned
www.hudsonink.com/scorecard
America's Service Coach, Joe Crisara shares his expertise so you can learn what verbal packaging is, how to create them and how they can be used to close more sales.
Learn what influences people to act, the anatomy of a sales call and how to be world class so you can boost your conversions.
Top marketing questions answered by Adams Hudson, with a focus on coaching and consulting. Adams Hudson discusses topics such as where to start, how to approach your marketing budget, knowing the best marketing channels to reach your audience and basic metrics for evaluating your marketing plan.
Today's podcast teaches how to 'stop marketing and instead be remarkable'. This podcast showcases Yelp expert, Mike Montano. He will be sharing tips and strategies for getting five-star reviews, how to earn trust and methods for being remarkable on Yelp.
Today's podcast with Kenny Chapman discusses ways to motivate others and inspire your team. Learn strategies and tips for challenging your team appropriately, establishing methods of recognition, creating environments that motivate, and much more.
Are you leaving money on the table? Word of mouth and referrals are the BEST ways to build and maintain a strong business. Today's podcast features Mike Crow, Founder of Millionaire Inspector Community. He's sharing tips and strategies for getting consistent referrals in your business, along with some common myths that might be holding you back.
This podcast is about performance-based pay. There is a a correct and an incorrect way to pay for performance for contractors. It must be set up correctly, as well as making sure you do not over OR under compensate with pay. Dr. Collier, founder of Collier Consulting Group - Provides business management training workshops and business evaluations and valuations (in North America). HVAC specific.
Ellen Rohr The Business Makeover Expert® teaches the few things that make all the difference to your business success: Easy financial clean up, profitable pricing and powerful business planning. Learn how to unplug from distractions, gain clarity of your vision and finally take action!
We chat with Business Warrior MIke Agugliaro who is going to help us unlock the secrets where we all want answers: creating wealth, freedom and market domination.
The cost to your company, the bottom line, your level of customer service and employee morale is tremendous. You need to eliminate communication problems as soon as possible. This podcast with help! To maximize your experience, be prepared to take notes and learn everything there is to know about today’s topic, "Benchmarking for Profitable Performance"!
Anticipate hearing the thunderous ring of truth from Joe, who stands apart from traditional contracting training professionals as he helps contractors achieve revenues 3-5 times greater than the average person.
Larry started as a service technician and is now the owner of a seven figure powerhouse in one of the most competitive industries in the US. Hear his expertise on networking to grow your business.
Rodney Koop shares his passion in motivating business owners to get past obstacles and roadblocks and get unstuck.
Bernie Heer, a systems improvement specialist shares an action plan to improve your sales process.
Brian Kraff and Alain Parcan who have continued to push the front edge of contract web marketing including advanced SEO, website building and maintenance, and social media, share their insight.
Kim is a social media extraordinaire and shares tips on social media marketing and direct response marketing.
Tom Borg is customer profitability expert and shares how to increase customer service, improve systems and open up their mindset.