Transcription
Stop lighting your money on fire. These are the five best marketing cheat codes that you can implement in your business to absolutely print money in your home service and blue-collar business in 2024 and 2025.
Just because you've used a marketing tactic before and you didn't get good results doesn't mean that that marketing tactic doesn't work. There's potential that you did it wrong. Sometimes it's the execution that's the problem and not the vehicle. I also own two home service businesses, and these are exactly the things I'm using to crank our sales.
So, number one: Referral nurturing. Referral nurturing is the most slept-on advertising tool you can use in 2024 and 2025. It's because the majority of your competitors do a bad job if you're in the home service space. So, if you set up an ecosystem that actually facilitates referral nurturing, you will stand out way more than your competitors.
Few things you can do is gift card campaigns. You can do referral nurtures in your CRM where you give them a discount on a service for using you. You do a monthly email drip telling them if they refer their friends, they get blah blah blah. But if you're not keeping customer data, you're never going to do that. So, referral nurturing is the key. And why I put it at number one is referrals cost zero money in customer acquisition costs zero money. That is why they're the most overpowered. I will not hear anything else. There's no better type of job than a free job.
Number two: Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram). Now, I used to be anti-Facebook and Instagram ads for a long time. The thing that changed it for me is I was doing it wrong and I was hiring agencies wrong. My number one paid customer acquisition marketing source now is Facebook and Instagram, but it's how you execute on it. You don't go in a 50-mile radius in your city. You don't do still images. Don't do anything like that. You do video-style ads that tell the story and actually convert. Because what happens with Facebook and Instagram ads is it's the only paid marketing avenue right now that is digital that will also build brand while you're doing it. Google Ads, Thumbtack, Angi's, none of those ones build brand. The video of you as the owner running the ad builds brand and acts as a lead generation source, and it's harder for your competitors to emulate because your competitors are idiots and they don't want to get in front of a camera.
Number three: Organic Google Maps. Your Google Maps listing is an absolute cheat code because again, it is what? Free. It is free. It costs nothing to get Google reviews and rank higher on Google Maps pack. You go on Google, you can see that Google is prioritizing Maps listings now when people Google stuff. All you do is in your day-to-day system, you need to get one of those tap cards that you have on you that you put on the person's phone, and they leave a review. And then you also need to automate email review nurtures through your CRM or anything else you're using. Google reviews, Google reviews, Google reviews. I get two to three calls a day in one of my businesses right now completely for free off of Google Maps. It is an absolute cheat code.
Number four: Branded vehicles and signage. This was one that I had to come to grips with. Branded vehicles are expensive, especially when you get a wrap or something like that. But the difference between just a few decals on your vehicle and actually having a whole wrap is the difference between having a yard sign on your truck and having a full mobile billboard. For me, it's one of the first things I'm doing with this new fleet of trucks I got for my Christmas business is we're wrapping all of them. It's about $3 to $4,000 a truck, but we know we'll get the money back from that faster than any other form of marketing. It's also a really strong trust and brand builder because it makes you look the part.
The other side is signage. One of the things that we implement with almost all of our customers is we put branded yard signs in everybody's front yard after we do the job. And so we ask our customers if we can do it. Nine out of 10 say yes. And so when we complete a job, we put a branded yard sign in their yard and just say, "Hey, can we keep this up for two weeks, three weeks, whatever else until your landscapers come?" 99% of the time, people say yes.
And then the fifth one is retargeting. Retargeting, retargeting, retargeting ads are how you build the snowball in your business to where you're not just chasing your tail, hoping your schedule gets busy every time. And so all four of these generate leads, right? And what you do with them is you retarget them via email and SMS. So every single month, sometimes twice a month, everyone who has ever gotten a quote from you, booked or didn't book, or had anything done from you in the past needs to be on an email drip. You have to stay top of mind. Let's say you gave somebody a quote on November 1st and you didn't hear back from them, and now it's November 30th. That opportunity is not dead. Every time, sometimes people just aren't in the mood to buy right now. But what most people do is they give the quote, they get ghosted, they get butt-hurt, and then they never reach out to the customer again. If you just retarget people, what you'll see is some of these opportunities that you booked and you got quotes out on two, three, four, five months ago, well, you'll stay top of mind. You'll stay top of mind. They'll see your other advertisements like your Facebook ads or something else. They'll circle back. They'll get them on the email, and then eventually they'll start closing. And again, you've already paid for the leads once with all of these different things. Now you can actually maximize it by retargeting them.
These are the five things that if you commit to and you systemize your business around, will absolutely change the game. I used to run my entire business off of Google pay-per-click ads. I don't even run Google pay-per-click in either of my businesses anymore. The customer acquisition cost between 2022 and 2024 has doubled, if not tripled, in most trades. Google Local Service Ads and Google pay-per-click are becoming more and more obsolete because more and more people are trying to take the easy way out, which is just paying for the clicks. But the issue with those platforms is they do not build your brand at all. And I don't care if you're a one-man operation or a 10, 20, 100,000-person operation, you have a brand, even if you're small and you don't even realize it. Your brand matters.
So, if you want to see more stuff like this and you want to see more info about this, I have a 30-minute video that outlines step-by-step, piece-by-piece, actionable items on how to implement half of this stuff and then a bunch of other stuff as well. Feel free to follow the channel here. Feel free to find me on Instagram, Facebook, everything else, and there's plenty more of this.