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Welcome to the Win with Paid Ads podcast for small business owners, entrepreneurs and really anyone who has anything you want more people to find. Whether you're starting from ground zero or scaling an eight figure business, you are exactly who this podcast was created for. Because you being the best kept secret helps no one, right? You may be the best at what you do, but if you aren't the best at advertising what you do, then you're leaving money on the table. That's why in every episode I'll show you how you can use paid ads to you help to hit your goals 10 times sooner. It's time you finally learn how to win with paid ads. You or someone on your team can do this. I'll show you how to score and be known by more. Let's get started. If you're trying to figure out the best way to advertise your local service business, you are in the right place. And today we're going to talk all about what can you do to actually really advertise your business really well. And especially because you probably feel like there's so many other people in your area that do exactly what you do. How can you stand out and how can you be the business that they want to choose right? And I bet you feel like you are some of the best, if not the best at what you do. How can people choose and find you? How can you advertise it? Welcome. You are about to love this episode of the Win with Paid Ads podcast. And speaking of winning, if you haven't joined the Win with Paid Ads challenge, absolutely do that. Click the link below this video or this podcast or go to ashleybright.comchallenge because you will be challenged to think about how you can win with paid ads differently than you ever have before. And this these little nuggets that I'm about to give you are just a drop in the bucket of what you'll get when you sign up and get in the VIP room of the Win with Paid Ads challenge. So let's get started. So obviously if you're a local service provider, you already know what a local service provider business is. But I do have seven main categories so I want to share those with you here. So for a local service based business, these are the seven categories I put them into with clients that I've worked with specifically. So number one is home home and maintenance services. So think roofers and handymen and pest control and house cleaners, garage door repair, plumbers, electricians, that is home and maintenance services. Second category is health and wellness services. So that's the chiropractors, the dentist, the physical therapist, the massage therapist, acupuncture, personal trainer, med spas, et cetera. The third category is beauty and grooming services. So that can be a hair salon, nail salon, barbershop, lash tech, spray tans, mobile makeup artists. That is what I categorize in the beauty and grooming, grooming for local services. The fourth category is education. And so that's going to be tutoring or driving schools, dance studios, martial arts, music lessons, childcare centers. That is an education service. Then there's pets, right? We all love our pets. My husband recently brought home a kitten, so I am now a pet owner and pet mom. So that category includes dog groomers, pet boarding and daycares, mobile vet clinics, dog trainers, et cetera, even pet watchers. The sixth category is automotive services. So I've had clients that are mechanics, auto detailing, washing, tire shops, towing services. And then last, the seventh category is professional services. So that could be a attorney. Actually, actually categorize interior designers here. But I guess we could put, put that in the home bucket. But professional services would be local attorneys, accountants, tax preparation, real estate agents, insurance agents, notaries. So those are the seven core buckets of when I think local service provider. And the great news is I've worked with hundreds of local service providers over the past 10 years of doing ads all day, every day. And I found there's some hang ups that local service providers have about ads. And honestly, some ways that you think about ads and some places that you're spending money right now that I really feel like you shouldn't. And I'm going to share those with you for this episode. It'll be short and sweet. So the two things we're going to think about or the main thing that we're gonna think about is why does visibility matter? And so here's how I want you to think about it, all right? I want you to close your eyes. I want you to imagine that you are standing there with all you're holding your hands out side by side, okay? And there's a left side and a right side. You're holding your hands out and like your hands are getting heavy because you're stacking all your experience and skill. And it's heavy because there's just so much of it. So you've got all this experience, all the years, all the schooling, all the certifications, all the hard work, all of the clients, all of the reviews. You have all of this and your hands are heavy because you're holding just so Much weight of how good you are, right? And you're standing in a dark room and no one can see you. Now, I want you to envision your competitor. You know that one. And they think they're so good and they're not great. Their reviews are not as great as yours. Their experience is not as great as yours. And. And they're standing there with their one little hand, with one little stack of skill, but they have a flashlight on them. And so your prospects, the people that should be choosing you, are choosing them because they can't see you. They can see them. And that is because visibility beats ability. Even if you have all this ability, if no one can find you, the person who is most visible will be the one that they move forward with. Because visibility beats ability. And when you have ability and you pair that with visibility, I'm going to just make up a rhyme and say, it's tranquility, okay? It is everything that you want. It's so peaceful. It's so wonderful. And so that is why it's so important that you are not just keeping all this skill and then all this, like, stuff that you have to yourself that everybody who is near you can find you. All right, so there's five pieces of really succeeding with profitable ads for local service providers. So first is messaging, which is what you say. Two is setting, which is where you say it. Which I feel like local service providers often get this wrong. I'll explain that in a second. Three is setting, which is where you are. Sorry. One is messaging. Two is setting. Three is targeting, which is who you get in front of. Four is testing, which is how you improve those ads. And five is scaling and profiting, which is ultimately what you really want. And fun fact, every single one of those pieces are step by step, exactly in the five days of the Win with Paid Ads challenge, exactly what I talk about. So there's only so much I'm going to talk about here because I could go on in this episode forever. But I just want you to know if you want more in depth and you should just join the challenge and get so much value there. So let me talk to you about what I've. I've seen many of my local service provider clients kind of stress about when it comes to ads. And I'll share with you what I've seen work really well. One of the mistakes that I feel like small local service providers make in their messaging is they overthink it. It's so simple. Like, it's just like, so straightforward. Someone's searching For Christmas light installation companies. And you're trying to be like, well, I want to really make sure where they communicate all these things about our family and all this stuff, it's like, no, they just want to know you're the best at Christmas lights. So you actually have an advantage of being able to be really clear with your messaging and the setting that I feel like most people who have a local service based business get wrong is you actually start with Instagram and Facebook first instead of starting with Google. And for all of my local service based clients, Google outperforms meta 90% of the time. And what's cool is the way that I teach ads is that Google and meta or TikTok or YouTube or Pinterest or whatever, they all pair really well together. But your primary source and where the majority of your money should be spending or where you should spend the majority of your money, if you are a local service provider, should be Google, in my opinion. And so let's walk through for a local service provider business, kind of the five different thoughts you might have about ads and how we can really give you some new tools and some new ideas to be really successful. So one thing you might be worried about if you're a local service provider business and you're trying to figure out how to advertise is how to stand out, right? So you have all these other people in your area that do what you do or do something similar to you. And so I want you to consider that you don't have to stand out, you might just have to pay out. You might just have to pay money for you to be the one that people can find. And then the moment they find you, they will see that you stand out from the competition because of the brand and the presence and the reviews and how you communicate about what you do. I think a lot of times we're like just trying to do all these things to stand out for free. And you have a business, you have to pay money to invest in your business. And most of you who are listening to this, you know that. But I just want to give you that gift that you can just pay to have a payout, to have a quick standout so that when people are searching, they find you. The second thing you might be thinking about is that you are so good at what you do. And so you're thinking, oh, I need to spend my time and energy on my specific craft or running the company because you're so good at that. Instead of. And so you might be thinking, well, I should just outsource my advertising and tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like one of the reasons you might be considering outsourcing your ads is simply because you don't understand them. One of the podcast episodes we just had was actually a photographer, Amber DeSantis. And one of the things that she said is, is in about a month and a half, she was able to get her ads rolling really well. And now it's been six months since she's been doing her own ads and she feels like she's an ad expert. Do you know why she feels like she's an ad expert? As a local service provider who's great at photography, she learned from an expert. Like, she literally saved herself time and said, someone just tell me exactly what to do and why to do it and how to do it and I'll do it. And so could you imagine if six months from now you truly felt like you were an ad ads expert? She went from going from crickets to getting multiple leads a day and at minimum, daily leads. How cool would that be if that could happen for you? And so you can do your own ads or have someone on your team be trained, like I can train them for you, honestly. And it is faster and cheaper than you waiting. I don't even like the word cheap. It is less expensive for you to to outsource to an agency and you don't have to wait. And you don't have to wait on delay. You don't have to have them figure out your messaging. You already know it. Someone on your team can do it and you develop an asset. And I really want you to think about it like renting versus owning a house. You know how when you own your own house, you're like building up your own equity. Like, every payment you make is making towards like buying or having more equity in the home. That is what happens when someone on your team is the one that is doing ads in house. You're building all this experience and all this equity within your own company. There's no distraction. They're not distracted by the other 17 ad accounts that they have to put ads up for today. They're not making mistakes because they're not doing 900 other things. They are literally just doing your ads and learning from an expert. So even though you are really good at what you do, you can also be really good at advertising what you do. And it's the thing you're probably going to spend the most money on that will make you the most money, period. One thing you might be thinking about and I am going to get to like, literally, logistically, what can you do as a local service provider to have good ads? I'm about to jump right into that. But, but I just want to, I want to get on the same page as we think about these last few things and you might be thinking, I don't have time to learn. You're like, no, I have this project, I have this, I have that. I have all these other things that are taking up your time. And so I want you to think about and write down what are you actually spending your time on Because I really believe that you don't need more time, you need a better return on your time that you're already spending right now. So here's how you might be spending your hours. These are some of the ways that I've found that my clients that own a local service based business are spending. They are responding to tire kicker leads that will never convert. They are reposting on social media or spending 20 minutes making a reel when they could have spent 20 minutes learning an ad, learning ad so they can make that reel work for them for years or for months at least. They are spending time asking clients to refer them and relying solely on word of mouth. They are just actually doing the work in their business and never working on the actual lead generation of the business. They're going to local networking events. They are just doing all these other things with their time that could be used and repurposed to like make them and save them so much time later. So if you're already spending five to ten hours a week chasing inconsistent leads, imagine what could happen if you just took one of those hours to create a system that brings in qualified people daily. That is one of what I have to offer for you and why I'm going to give you some tips on how to do that in this episode. And just know you don't have to become an expert. You literally just need to figure out how to have a repeatable message, a map and a method because you can learn this once and benefit week after week after week, month after month after month. Last two things you might be thinking if you have a local service based business is that you've tried ads before and they didn't work. So I want to, I want to ask you this, is there someone maybe on your team or someone who does what you do and like they're just not as good as you are. They just don't have the experience that you do. And it really could be that the ads that you've done before. They just weren't done the right way and they weren't done by an expert. They were done by a really nice person that had all the intention and not all the skill and the depth. And maybe you've actually had people come to your business saying, hey, I got chiropractor down the road and I just felt worse after. And or maybe it's like, hey, I had, you know, a plumber come, but like it's still leaking. Or I had a mechanic fix my car, but it broke when I pulled out of the driveway. Literally. I'll never forget in college, we had no money, we had negative money. And we pulled out of this car repair shop because my husband owned a Dodge neon from like 1963. I swear it was not 1963, but it felt like it. I just wanted to remind you really quickly that if you haven't joined the win with PayDad's challenge, the doors are closing soon. And just as a refresher, this is five days of you and or someone on your team learning my five part strategy to scale your paid ads. So day one is messaging, which is what you say and how you say it. Day two is setting, which is all the different places you can place your ads. Think Google Ads versus YouTube meta or TikTok. Day three is targeting, which is how you can get in front of your exact right person. Day four is testing so you can know what to test and how to improve your ads. And day five is scaling and profiting and how you can 10x whatever you're spending on your ads now so that you can have more profit and return and impact which is ultimately what you want, right? So click the link below and I cannot wait to see you in the Win with paid ads challenge. So he had this really, really old car and when we pulled out of the mechanic shop, he the car broke down like right after like. And then I saw something like spinning going down the road and I'm like, oh my gosh. We just spent every bit I think he had on his credit card to be able to pay for this. And now it's broken again. It was insane. And it's just because that person did not have a great level of skill and not great attention to detail. And the person who did your ads or you might have tried and you just don't have the level of skill or the attention to detail that someone who's a professional does, right? So if your ads didn't work before, it could have just been because they were done poorly. And last but not least number five, if you feel like you don't have the budget, here are some things that I have seen local service providers spend their money on that you know could be considered to reallocate for ad spend. So you're boosting posts on social media, having no idea what you're doing, how you're doing it. You are doing printed mailers with no way to track your return and hoping that people read mail in 2005. Wait, it's not 2005, but. But that feels like mailers are so 2005. Listen, I've totally have clients that have done mailers and they've worked in some capacity. So I'm not saying they can't. I'm just saying you could do that or you could do something that's tracked, that is in real time. When someone is literally raising their hand saying, I'm looking for an interior designer right now, versus sending a mailer out hoping people are looking for interior designers. Other local service providers are spending time and money creating yard signs or local newspaper ads, sponsoring events or organizations, going to networking events, sitting out in the sun all day talking to 900 people when you really don't want to. They're putting. They're paying listing feeds to be on directories that nobody's looking at. And they're being scammed by people who are coming to them saying, let's do geofencing. I swear I am telling you, if I hear one more person say, yeah, I had some kind of my business and they can do geofencing. And geofencing is where they like put this, like fence geographically and say, I'm gonna make sure your ads are only for people that are right here by the store. It's geofencing. If I hear that again, I might vomit because that just want you to know you're not crazy. If you've fallen for geofencing and doing geofencing projects and have something to sell you that they're gonna do geofencing, I can't. All that means is we will serve your ads around a certain location. Every ad that you can run online has geo targeting. It's just saying you're targeting a geographic region. So when someone says geofencing, they're just meaning, hey, we're gonna serve your ads in this location. Yeah. So is every other ad. You can do that with Google Ads, YouTube Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Pinterest Ads. Any ad you can put a radius or a city or all these details around to like serve in your local area. It is not a new Thing and it's not something that's like a huge deal that should be charged thousands of dollars. I'm sorry. If you're a company that owns a geofencing and you walk door to door to local businesses and say you can put a geofence, I just think it's a scam. Like it sounds so cool, but it's like exactly what you do with any local business ads. You say, hey, if they live in, if their city is downtown Canton, what we won't do is put a radius in Kansas. That would be dumb. Of course we're gonna geotarget your ads if you're a local service provider. But I'm telling you, like so much money, local service providers put in a magazine or in local mail or in the newspaper or doing local networking events or doing geofencing things and they're, I'm doing all this advertising. Nothing's works. I'm like, right, you're not doing it 20, 25, 6, 7, 8, 20, 30 way. You are doing it a little bit of an outdated way and there's a better way where people are raising your hands looking for you and I would just rather you do that instead. So imagine if you took all of your money and time to like do all of that and instead of wasting hours on low quality leads, instead of hiring a bunch of random freelancers or marketing agencies, instead of putting listing fees and sponsoring leagues and doing yard signs and printed mailers and boosted posts and all these things, what if you saved your time and money and just did paid advertising on Google and that was it? What if that was the one thing where it's like, oh, I just needed to spend money and pay a couple dollars per person that's actually searching for precisely what I do right now, right here, right? So if you are probably already spending 300 to $1,000 a month on that, on things that are untrackable and unscalable with that same budget, it could be redelected into local paid advertising with the right way and could bring in double, triple or quad the leads without having to guess and hope. And so I want to share with you how you can do that. And I want you to think about how even if you feel like your business grows solely from referrals, maybe you're like, hey, I'm not even doing that. My, my business, you know, runs solely on referrals. Ads don't replace referrals, they multiply them. You want more referrals, get more people through ads that can continue to refer you like if you're that good at what you do, then let's just get you some more referrals. And so here's what you can do and what I've seen work so well with local service providers. Do Google first and meta second. I think we're often doing it in the opposite order. Google is for the hand raisers, the people looking right now in your area. So start with Google first and be very specific. Like one of my clients, she owns a cold, like it's a wellness haven wellness center and they have cold plunges, they have red light therapy, they have spas and saunas, they have all these things that really like help your body regulate. And it's just a wellness center, it's really cool. And she was like, I want people searching for like wellness center. And I said yes, we can, but how cool would it be if we could just get people that are searching for cold plunge near me? And what we found is that works way better. You can still have money allocated towards like the more general thing of what you do. But what I found is people are looking for something specific and when they find that through ads, it typically performs so well. So Google first with specificity. Second is you need to get more testimonials. Remember for your gbp, your Google business profile, number one, you need that if you're a local service provider business that matters so much. And there's three things that matter for your Google business profile because Google is looking at this. Okay, so one is recency. How recent are those reviews that you're getting for the business? Two is quality. How quality are those reviews you're getting for the business? Recency, frequency and quality. So recency, how recently? Frequency, how often and quality, how good are those reviews? Those are the three things that Google is looking at and why Your Google business profile, if you have a local service business is a must. You have to prioritize it. Make sure you're getting reviews, make sure you're using all the fields and that GBP to put your location in there to make sure you've got pictures updated. And encourage the people that work with you to lead your review. Don't just encourage it, like remind them of it. Don't just tell them once, like I asked people for a review, they didn't give it. You have not because you asked. Not over and over and over again. Right? So be consistent, ask for those reviews. People are happy to give you a review when you help them. So testimonials pay back big time. And you honestly need to be Better at getting video testimonials too. I had this. I saw this dental office. Their ads were freaking lights out and people are like, this is the best dental office I've ever had. My kids love coming to the dentist, if you can believe it. And I'm like, how did they get these people on camera? This is amazing. Like, offer a free cleaning, do whatever you have to do. Get the testimonials and on video. It's just gold. It is money for your ads. Some of my best performing ads are my testimonials. Next thing is proximity. Yeah, Geo fencing, what I like to call geotargeting. So, yes, being able to target specifically locally is such an advantage to you. It is such an advantage versus having to do the whole US. Now, for those of you that have a business over the whole US you still have an advantage there because you've got more people. Those of you with a local one, you've got fewer people with specificity that can only buy there, which is also an advantage. So proximity is an advantage. Make sure you are geo targeting. I already talked about what I just don't love mailers. But I did want to give you this encouragement. If you are going to do a mailer, at least put a QR code on it and make sure you don't just put a QR code that's on everything, right? Do a different QR code so that that specific mailer is trackable. So that if you do send out mail, you're like, oh, people signed up for this service or got a quote from that specific one mailer that only went out to this area. So just make sure that you're gonna track it the right way, not just be like, you know, I wonder if they came from the mailer, if the mailer worked. You can also use coupon codes that are exclusive to the mailer. There's all these things that you can do to really have a smart strategy around that if you are gonna use it. Last two things that I see work really well for local service providers is you having like a connection point and a credibility point on your website. So there was this H Vac company in Athens, Georgia. I went to college in Athens at uga and I was working on this client that was an H Vac client and they had a videographer come in and get incredible video of the team and the company and their process. And they shared why they're the best H VAC company gold. The way we sent ads to that company's like, page with a video and people were like quote, quote, quote is amazing. So good. So like just having that connection point because most people are like not going to get behind a video. Get someone you or someone on your team needs to get on video, get on camera and show the facility. Talk about why you're different. Because they want to connect with you. Because they are. It's a local service. Like we want to work with someone that we want to work with. Right. Last but not least is y' all gotta be better at nurturing. Someone gets on your list or they follow you and then you're not staying top of mind with retargeting or you don't have a good email nurture or text follow up system. That automation piece in your business is so important. So make sure that you have a system that is not from 2002 that is really good at nurturing and sending text messages and emails and reminders to your audience. So I could go on and on and on. But that is exactly why I created the Win with Paid Ads challenge. So you can come in and ask your questions. Ask let's look at your ads. I can give you feedback. We can talk strategy. We'll talk a messaging, setting, testing, targeting and scaling and profiting and knowing when to do that. That is exactly why I created the Win Win Pay Dads challenge for you. I would love to get to see you. So click the link below this video or podcast or go to ashleybrock. Com Challenge and I cannot wait to see you on the next episode.