← To The Point - Home Services VIP Room Podcast
To The Point - Home Services VIP Room Podcast
TTP Micro Episode: Why Most Home Services Marketing Strategies Fail
00:18:50
Loading summary
Transcript2 lines
- [00:02]
A
This is to the Point a Rhino Experience, fully one of the top home services, marketing and operations podcasts. Cutting through the and getting to the point.
- [00:17]
B
Hey, what's up to the Point listeners? Chad Peterman here. Did I fool you? I didn't think so. Mostly because you know that the odds of Chad making this are probably pretty slim. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Chad, I know you're listening to this, buddy. I'm just giving you a hard time. Yeah, I'm excited to do this little episode for you guys. It's another little micro episode, you know, and again, it just gives me the opportunity to share some things with you that I get asked frequently from, whether it's our, our customers at Rhino or just people in general. Like a perfect example is we just came off of Rhino X and I get asked this question by a few different people, which, by the way, Renault X was an amazing event. If you were there, then you got to experience it. If not again, don't worry because we're going to roll out some of these episodes for you guys to hear from some of the speakers. It was, in my opinion, this was the best of the best year. It was our fifth one. So good. So much great information you'll be able to see from the upcoming episodes. But this is a few questions I got. And again, once the event is over and I'm sitting at my house, you know, people will get home, they message me and they ask me these questions, you know, or they text me and ask me these questions because they're going home and they're implementing things from their business. And from implementing them, they're learning, you know, they're learning what questions they need to ask, or they're learning where they have blind spots in their business, especially as it relates to marketing, their marketing campaigns, because this stuff is getting expensive. So this one's going to be around. Why most home services marketing strategies fail. I don't necessarily mean that your agency is failing you. I just mean how, why it's failing in general. Because it could be. It could be your agency, but it also could be you and the lack of you paying attention to some specific information like that you know, you need to be looking at, or maybe you don't know what you need to be looking at, and that's half the battle, too. So I want to be able to share with you just a few ways of how you can even tell if it's a, an agency problem or if it's a you problem. I think that's going to Be something that's helpful. This is the stuff that I'm looking at constantly, right? I mean, this is my 17th year of being a home services digital marketing agency. And, you know, when somebody reaches out to me and says, hey, Chris, you know, I don't feel like I'm, you know, getting the results that we should be getting. I always go back and look at the same set of metrics to look and see. Or if they say, hey, Chris, this is going really good, you know, again, same thing. I don't assume anything. I go back and I look at the metrics. I want to see what was their cost per lead. I want to see what their booking rate is, what's their conversion rate. I just want to see you, you know, what are they actually closing? If I bring in a lead, are you closing it or are you not closing it? And at what percent? You know, that kind of gives us a lot of information. So I just want to talk a little bit about that. And then, you know, what are. You know what, what kind of communication should you expect from your agency and what kind of communication should you expect from your team, your internal team? Because you can't just receive the information, you know, and then look at your CRM, like your service height and house call pro, whatever it is you're using and determine the success of this campaign. Is it a metric? Yeah, but you actually have to dig a little deeper into it. You know, you've heard Chad and I talk about that before. Sometimes you have to chase this stuff down. But why most home services marketing strategies fail is it's the lack. It's the lack of effort to chase down. Is this working or is it not working based on your own numbers? Okay, so let me just go ahead and kick this thing off. Number one, you have to be, you know, you have to make sure that you understand what your marketing company is reporting to you. A lead isn't just a lead, Right? Like to me, a lead is. And what you're paying an agency like mine to do is bring in brand new customers. Okay? That's the job I have to do, is bring in brand new customers. So just because a call comes through for a repair job, you know, for. For an installation or for a drain cleaning job or whatever, doesn't necessarily mean that it was a new customer that came from your marketing agency. So how do you find those things out? Well, if you have tracking numbers, that's certainly a helpful way to do it. Right? But it might be a repeat customer. It could be a referral customer, right? And you're not paying an agency for those. You know, technically I've heard arguments already. But a repeat customer that came in three years, three months later from a customer that was originally from your marketing agency, there's an argument for that, right? Because you wouldn't have had that customer in the first place if it wasn't for your agency. So I think you can give a little bit of credit to that. That. But month over month, man, my job is to bring in new business, right? So I want to be able to track every single lead that, that came in from which source, you know, using your tracking numbers, whether it's pay per pay per click, have its own tracking number and it goes to the specific tracking number in Service Titan or your, your, you know, your CRM, if it's SEO, same thing has its own tracking number that goes to a specific tracking number in your CRM. If it's branded traffic, right? Which is usually a shitload of what you get is, you know, branded traffic or repeat customers, it can have its own tracking number, right? But plenty of shit sneaks through on the actual agency's tracking lines. That would appear, you know, a high level, that it's a brand new customer, when really it's not. And why this matters. You've heard me talk about this before. But you're making big decisions for your business based on those numbers being accurate. But you're only putting in a certain amount of effort to make sure it's accurate on your end, you see, because a lot of agencies will just take advantage of the situation that you're not paying attention to it. They get all the credit, really, you're wondering like, well, why the hell isn't. Doesn't this feel like in my financials, that it's as successful as it is? That's why there's usually a miss right there. So we call that the gap, okay? And I, and I live, I've lived quite a bit of time in that space, right? It's what is showing as a lead on the front end versus what is showing as a lead in the CRM, right? So again, the. One of the first things I look at, somebody says, Chris, you know, I feel like something's off immediately. What I go and look at in the report is the cost per lead again, because I know that lead, in Rhino terms, is a net new customer. No repeat business, no referrals, none of that shit. A straight up net new customer. I can trust that that cost per lead number is legit. This is how much it cost me to Get a brand new potential customer who's looking, who doesn't have any other business name in mind, but chose me and went through my website and called me or, or sent me a text or whatever. So a legit cost per lead. The next thing I'm going to look at is booking rate. You know, did you book the call, did you book the lead or not booked lead, and at what rate? Because if you're booking, let me just give you an average across all Rhino clients. 800, 900. Somewhere in that number, you know, the average booking rate for net new customers, not your overall booking booking rate, which hopefully is in the high 80s, low 90s, but overall booking rate for net new customers. The average across all Rhino clients is in that 41, 42% mark. Okay, so 42% of the brand new customers that we're bringing in are getting booked on average across all Rhino clients. Okay, that's number one. Well, that means 60, you know, 66, 68, whatever, 69 or 60. Some odd percent of the customers that are coming in. Excuse me, should be 58% or you're not booking. So. So maybe that's a problem. Right? You need to make sure you go back and look at. Well, is there, is there a problem there? Is it a specific csr? Can I change that up? Should I? Do I need to add some coaching to fix that? It could also be that maybe that there is some validity to like, hey, the lead came in and yes, it was a legit opportunity, but it wasn't the right type of customer. But there's no way, no way that it's that large of a percentage. It's just not. So usually there's a breakdown somewhere. Okay, so cost per lead needs to be a good number and your booking rate needs to be, in my opinion, at least 41 or 42% on net new customers. Important metric. Most are not reporting to you right now, that number. All right? They're just not. So the other piece is, are you converting it? Meaning what's your close rate? Like I said, if you booked it, that's half the battle. Right? Okay, we're booking the client. We sent that, we sent the technician out to their house, but we didn't close it. Right. So you need to understand your close rate, which will take you to a cost per customer acquisition cost. Right, because you'll know. Hey, okay, to get to an actual closed customer, I know that that number is X. That number is $412. That number is $110, whatever the number is, depending on the type of business you have. And of course you want to look at the average sale. So you know, you know, what's, what's it actually worth to you to the bottom line right now? Yes, it takes a little bit of chasing down to do this, But Rhino Tracks 2.0 does that for you automatically. And you know, if you heard the other one of the other episodes where we rolled out Call Intelligence, the Call Intelligence piece that we've rolled out actually captures all this shit for you. And most importantly, the biggest pain in my ass these last few years has been trying to figure out if you're someone internally at your business is with the lead attribution, right? Because it happens so much where people are actually changing. It's crystal clear this is a brand new customer that came in. Yet whoever internally at your place will change the lead attribution which skews the numbers. And again, you heard me say right at the beginning, we're making big decisions banking on these numbers being correct if they're incorrect. And we're making big decisions while we're making big decisions on false information, which is bound to hurt the business. Happens all the time. You just hope it doesn't happen at scale. So the days of just like letting this shit ride and just hopefully making sure you're marketing, even the marketing managers I'm talking to aren't getting it right because we're all trained or they're all trained to look at things a certain way. Well, those days aren't the same. You have to chase these things all the way through. That's part of the job of being a marketing manager. You're responsible. You're responsible for the success of marketing campaigns, right? And ultimately the revenue it brings into the business. So you have to make sure that you demand this type of service internally from your own, from whomever's taking lead on it. They have to spend the time with the agencies. I can't tell you still how many people don't even make the reporting calls, but yet you'll want to complain. You know, when, when it's been three months you have made a reporting call and you say, oh, well, you know, we're starting to see a dip here. Well, you know, had you made the call, we would have made this suggestion to you that we were going to make XYZ change. But you never made the. So we couldn't make the change without your authority. So we didn't make the change yet. You're going to be pissed at your, at us or your marketing agency because you know Even if you're not working with Rhino, you're working with a different agency, the same shit happens. So, like, you have to look at your own, you know, your own accountability on this. But one of the things that's my biggest pet fee is just making sure, like, are we all reporting the same thing to you? Transparency is key. I've heard somebody tell me one time or a couple different times, and my competitors love to use this. I just heard a competitor of mine, I had a customer send me a screenshot of what the owner of one of these smaller competitive agencies has done, one that just recently sold and said, Rhino now uses bots to write all of our content. That is a hundred percent bullshit. And that's how you know that those fucking losers aren't professionals. Right? Who still competes like that? Come on, man, we you talking shit like, it's so old school. All right, it's not true. But at the end of the day, point is, is like, that's who you're gonna believe. If they're gonna, they're willing to talk like that, what are they willing to do to you to make sure they keep you even when shit's, you know, not going great? Well, they might manipulate something, right? So how do we keep all this even? All right, as long as you track everything with these tracking numbers, you know exactly what metrics to look at every single month, and you look at those same metrics month over month. What's my pay per click cost per lead? What's my SEO cost per lead? If you're doing social media campaigns, what's my social media cost per lead? How is my team performing on it? What's my booking rate on the PPC cost per lead? What's my conversion rate on the PPC cost per lead? What's my average sale on the cost per lead? That's the shit you got to know. If you know that number and it's going good, you can scale these businesses as long as you got a good recruiting plan in place, you know, to keep staffing to support it. So it. You have to have, you have to have a marketing partner who can support you in these things. Because I get you might be saying, well, Chris, that's a load of work. And I don't have a marketing manager. Well, this is where having an agency who can, who can scale with you is why you choose agencies. And I'm going to lean, lean on Rhino because that's what I built here. That's what we've built here. The whole reason I brought on a Private equity partner is for, not for my competitors to use it against me to say, oh, Chris sold the business, now they suck. No, motherfucker, what I did was I brought on a private equity partner so I could scale this thing to be able to keep up with exactly what you all need, you know, in the home services space. So I could set the, set the tone for, hey, man, there's the bar set. Everybody else catch up to that bar because that's what this industry deserves. These are the people that I love, industry that I love. This is what they need from us. Because most don't get it now we're all playing on equal playing field. So that's the reasoning for doing all these things. And you think about this, you know, I'll wrap this little tangent up. So think about the human beings impacted by the decisions by these decisions. And marketing agencies might say, oh, I really care about growing this company, but they really care more about protecting themselves if shit goes south. What does that do to you? Impacts your business. Human beings in your business, maybe you directly impacts you, especially if you're small, just trying to like figure out, you know, when cash flow's tight and you're banking on that month's marketing working and you only got like a few months to, you might, you know, be able to shit the bed, but you need to make some money. So, you know, my, my hope here is if from listening to this episode, if you take nothing else away from this, that you have great communication with your agency. I mean, great, don't half ass it, great communication. Okay? You trust them and how you build that trust is through great communication and believing the data that they give you. The cost per lead is accurate, the booking rate is accurate, the conversion rate is accurate. The average sale per lead source, ppc, SEO, whatever you fill in the blank is accurate. So you know how your agency is performing month over month and you know how you are performing month over month and you know exactly to the revenue dollar how that's impacting your business. And I promise you, it sound, might sound like a pain in the ass, but once you kind of get in the, in the habit of doing it, it becomes very easy. It was very simple, you know, and when I think about this, you know, Tommy, you know, texting with Tommy Mellow earlier today, I was just talking about a different business. I'm looking at buying. And we were talking about those exact same four things that he looks at, you know, from the marketing perspective in these businesses, this is the same shit. Like this isn't revolutionary it's just doing it. So hopefully this is a, just a little reminder for you, like, hey, it's, you know, it's the beginning of the year still. We're still in Q1. Plenty of time to get this shit squared away. I know how it goes, man. Especially if you're going to all these different meetings, you know, or these different conferences and stuff and you're learning a bunch of shit, you're trying to implement it and you're like, fuck, this isn't something I, you know, I can implement now too. I'm working on X, Y, Z. I understand, but an agency, if you let them know, hey, this is what I'm trying to get to. This is what Chris said. Can you get me there? Do that. Use me. I'll be your scapegoat. I don't mind doing it. So take control of your marketing accountability. Take control of it, okay? Because all these agencies need to be stepping up and doing this on your behalf. And listen, I don't give a shit how many people say, oh, I'm exclude, I have an exclusive partnership with Service Titan. All the, that you need, all of us agencies need, we can get from Service Titan. I don't care what anybody says, as long as I can get into Service Titan and get an API feedback that can connect the revenue and your, the revenue and close rates to your sales back to the lead channel. I can give you everything. I just said I wanted you, that I wanted you to get everything. Not difficult. So having full integration, even though I have it, like, what does that mean? I don't fucking care. I just. That's the information I need to know how to scale these businesses. Now some of you might argue, oh, there's so much more in there too, like rehash and like that. Not saying it's not important. I'm just talking about when you hire an agency, the job is to bring in net new customers and track it all the way through. So that way, you know, even if you don't have somebody in a marketing manager role, exactly how it's performing from every single lead source. Got it? So hopefully this is helpful. My rant is over. I'm going to go ahead and get my ass back to work on figuring more out for you, but hopefully that helps. And I always appreciate you guys listening. And listen again, we still have three, three, three more quarters to go in a month. You know, the month of March. And you know, I'm all praying for you H vac guys too, for the, you know, the heat to come quick we hit our 90, our first 90 degree day already here in Phoenix, Arizona, which meant we were off to the races. We saw installs come in all kinds of. I hope the same thing happens to you. And for all the plumbers out there, hope there's a lot of clogged drains. For all you electricians, I hope there's a lot of sub panels. I keep going. But I appreciate all you guys and all you always listening. You don't got to do everything, but you gots to do something. No zero days.