Transcription
This is part two of the grow your Christmas light business from $0 to $800,000 in a season miniseries. If you missed the first episode, go back on the channel. That's where we show you how to set up a Christmas light business from scratch, everything from your website, where to buy lights from, the CRM you need to use, where to get a phone number, all that jazz.
This video specifically is how to get customers. This is the marketing portion of the course. Marketing in a Christmas light business is probably the easiest home service business to market. You are going to be pulled in a thousand different directions on how to actually market a Christmas light business. The second you start your business and you get your EIN or you do anything, everybody who's watching this that knows that because they have a business before knows that Angie, Home Advisor, all these other type of companies are going to be knocking down your door to sell you leads. You do not need to buy leads from these companies. This is exactly how you're going to market your Christmas light business.
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Step one, you're going to buy yard signs. Yard signs are going to say "Christmas Light Installation" and a phone number or "Holiday Light Installation" and a phone number. The phone number needs to be a Google Voice forwarding number if you're in an area that is not yard sign friendly. What I mean by not yard sign friendly is if you have laws and sanctions in whatever area or city in the country you live in that are anti-yard sign, you don't want to put your actual logo and brand on the yard signs because you don't want the Kairens calling or the police or someone giving you a ticket for putting out signs. So if you use a Google Voice forwarding number and it goes to a Google Voice number that isn't attached to your business, then you can put yard signs all over town.
So I don't know how much money you have if you're sitting here watching. So, the generic yard signs for Christmas lights will probably run you somewhere between $4 and $5 a sign, maybe $350, but remember, it's signs and the stakes to actually put in the ground. I like to use Dope Marketing. Dope Marketing is a print shop and a data shop out of Minnesota. Their owners and their whole team is just unbelievable. They're great people and they do really quality work on signs. So, if you're just starting out, I think you should order at the absolute bare minimum a 100 signs. So, if you know that signs are $350 to $5 a sign, you should set aside probably $350 to $550 for your signs, depending on how many you want to order.
You're going to take these signs and you're going to put them at the entrance and exits of rich neighborhoods. You're going to put them at the entrance and exits of gas stations around rich neighborhoods. You're also going to go into shopping centers like if you have a Whole Foods near you that rich people shop at. If you have a Fries or whatever Vans or whatever part of the country you live in, QFC if you're in the Northwest, you're going to find those parking lots of those rich grocery stores or bonus points Tesla chargers like superchargers that have little grass or bark or something in the islands and you're going to put signs there, too. These will generate the cheapest and most volume amount of phone calls possible. So, yard signs are the most entry-level easy way to get your phone to ring in the further videos here.
So, now you think your phone's going to ring. You're going to be like, "How do I price that?" In the videos further into this free series all on YouTube, we're going to talk about how to price and everything like that and the sales portion. Remember, this is just the marketing one. So, hang on. We're going to talk about all the marketing and then we'll talk about the sales, how much to price, how much to quote, all that jazz in later videos.
So, you've got your yard signs down. What you're going to want to do as well is order about 25 to 50 branded yard signs. These are branded yard signs that have your logo and your actual business phone number on them. And these are going to go in the yards of completed installs of people you've already done. So now we've got two types of yard signs. We've got the public facing yard signs that go everywhere. And then we've got the branded ones that have your actual logo, your actual business name, your actual website, and your actual phone number. And those go in your customers' yards of completed jobs. This is a very easy way to do it. No one cares. People want to support the local small business. When you finish a job, you say, "Hey, you know, I'm really starting to get this off the ground with my family-owned business here. I would love if you would allow me to put a yard sign in your yard until the next time you guys mow your lawn. If that's a problem, no problem, but I just figured I'd ask." Nine out of ten people let you do it. If you're scared to do that, stop running a business. You're soft. Truly, if you're afraid to get your phone to ring so much that you won't ask a completed job to put a yard sign in the yard, you're being soft and business ownership just isn't for you. But what do I know? We just did $800,000 in two months last year doing this and we put a yard sign in every single one of our customers' yards and one person complained, but she complained about a lot of other stuff, too. So, it's just part of the game.
So, now you've got your yard sign strategy. Non-branded for the public places, branded in your customers' yards. The next step you're going to do is you're going to launch Facebook and Instagram ads and you're going to target the wealthiest and most affluent areas only. Christmas lights, especially paying a company to do it, is a luxury service. This is not junk removal. This is not house cleaning. This is the ultimate feel-good purchase. It does not increase the value of the home. There's no use case for it outside of making people feel good. So this is largely an upper middle class, upper class, and mega rich person service. So you want to advertise to those areas.
So you're going to run Facebook and Instagram ads. You do not need an agency to do this. You can do this yourself. Easy way to start is you can spend $25 to $30 a day if you're new and you're tight on money. Or if you're a little bit more aggressive, you can spend $40, $50, $60, $70 a day, depending on how much money you make. And you're going to make three video creatives. I have a ton of other videos on this channel that talk about how to run Facebook ads, all that jazz. All of Home Service Accelerator's like main reason people buy is they come in and we actually show them how to set up Facebook and Instagram campaigns from scratch, script all the ads for you, show you how to film it with an iPhone and an Amazon lapel mic, all that jazz, and just rip it and put it into it. That's like what the majority of people buy Home Service Accelerator for. I have a ton of free content on my YouTube about it. But if you do want like really really really crazy in-depth look into like all of the marketing systems and the nuance and get a little bit of one-on-one help, that's what the accelerator is for. But you also can do it yourself if you feel like you're pretty savvy.
So in these Facebook and Instagram ads, you're going to target the wealthy areas only. The best way to do this is go on the US Postal Service's EDDM website and you're going to see there's like an EDDM tool. I will link it in the description of this video. In that EDDM tool, you can type in every zip code in your market and it will show you down to the street the average income of those markets down to the street. So, you can see exactly where to put your yard signs. You can see exactly what places you want to target your Facebook ads and all that jazz and then run it from there.
When you launch a campaign, you should launch three separate ads in the campaign. Two of those ads need to be videos. And the videos have to be you, the owner, maybe wearing a Santa hat, maybe wearing your gear if you have your gear, all that jazz. And you're going to just break down and follow this same structure. The first words out of your mouth are calling out the location you're targeting the ads to. So if you're in Medina, Washington, the first words out of your mouth are going to be, "What's up, Medina homeowners?" Then you're going to talk about who you are, what you do. So I'm Steve Huner, the owner of Valley Christmas Lights. We are the premier temporary Christmas light installers in the Medina area. Why you're different. So, what we like to say is we are the only Christmas light installation business that all we do is temporary Christmas light installations. We don't have an additional home service business that we added this on. All we do is Christmas lights and that's why we're the best. So now you've gone call out the location, who you are, what you do, why you're different, and then you give them an expiring offer at the end. "Until the end of this month, if you click this 'Get Quote Now' button, we'll give you $150 off your first install. Click 'Get Quote Now' to get started." That's your structure of your ads. You either film these at dusk in front of a lit Christmas light job you've already done. You can film them on your balcony. I don't care what you do. Get two separate videos like that and then just get a third still image. The still image you can make on Canva. If you look up my business on the Facebook Ad Library, you can see all my still image ads. It's really not that hard. It's pretty easy. You can copy them. Everybody copies them anyway. So, just do that. That's what everybody else does with my business anyway.
So, now you've got yard signs going. You've got Facebook ads going. Now, you're going to post organically in all of these Facebook groups. This is I don't do this anymore because my business is too popular. We have too strong of a brand. But if I was starting from zero, I would do this. I would hang out in the mom Facebook groups, in the neighborhood groups, all that jazz. And I would talk about my business. You can also get family members. You can also get past customers to post in these groups for you. It will look a lot better if someone else sings your praises in these local neighborhood groups than if you go in and try to solicit yourself. Both will work, but someone else posting in those groups for you is going to work a lot better because people don't feel like you have sales breath if someone else is posting about how great you are instead of you posting how great you are.
So now you've got yard signs out. We're posting Facebook and Instagram ads. We're posting some occasional organic content on the Instagram and Facebook. Don't overthink it. Just document what you're doing. And that's so that when people see ads, they're going to click your organic pages. You got to make it look like somebody's home. So now you've got those three things going. The fourth thing you're going to want to do is get those Facebook group posts. Now you've got four going. Get them to post you on Nextdoor. If Ring is popular in your area, do that. All that jazz.
After that, I need you guys to start a Google Business page. This is why in the first video we talked about get your actual EIN number from the federal government. Get your state docs because you cannot get a Google Business page without supplying them that. What a Google Business page does, it makes you show up on Google Maps. That's where like 80-something percent of Google search traffic goes to now. It's not like the old school SEO where you scroll down past the ads, past the maps, and all that jazz. That used to be super important. It's still important, but if you're starting out from scratch or where your business is going, it's not going to like change your life going from there. So, Google Maps is where you're going to want all that emphasis in. So, I'm going to show you a screenshot on this video of what a Google Maps pin looks like, and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about. You need to get that approved, and you need to get a bunch of reviews on that Google Maps page. This will get you free phone calls. So, yard signs cost money. Facebook ads cost money. This is completely free. Last year, just phone calls alone over two months, we got 144 free phone calls from just our Google Maps page. That is worth a lot of money. That is not counting how many people clicked our website from our Google Maps page and went there. That is just Google Maps. Like that's it. Like they just called the phone number on Google Maps. You absolutely have to have that in your business.
So now that's step four. Now after that, those are pretty much the only things you need to do on marketing. But I'm going to give you step five if you have a little bit more money. Step five would be you can run Google Pay-Per-Click ads. That's the thing you see when you Google something and it says "Sponsored" on the top left. You can run Google PPC or Google Pay-Per-Click ads. I highly recommend using an agency for this. This is really technical. You can set a lot of money on fire doing this. If you don't know what you're doing, this requires an expert. So, for my guys that have a little bit more bread, you should do that.
Now, if you're watching this thinking like, "Okay, I don't want to do pay-per-click. I don't want to do everything else. I want to do yard signs and Facebook ads." I told you to order a hundred. Once you go through that hundred, I recommend dropping like 25 a weekend. So go or 30 a weekend. So go Thursday, Friday, Saturday, do 10 each on those nights. Then you have all the weekend calls. Then the next week, do it again.
When you start getting phone calls, you're going to obviously want to know how to sell the jobs. So in this next video, we're going to talk specifically about selling these jobs, how to actually build a quote, all of that jazz. So, if you watch this, this is the basics of marketing a home service, specifically Christmas light business. In this next video, we're going to talk about the sales process and all that jazz. So, make sure you watch this thoroughly, you've got everything done. I recommend ordering your signage and all that jazz now. And then on this next video, we're going to talk about the sales. So see you there.