Roofing Company Digital Marketing: How To Get Found Online, Get Leads, & Convert Calls to Appts.

Hey, roof strategist fans. Welcome back to a new video. Now, I have had a ton of questions from roofing company owners, sales guys and gals that are starting their own company and people that are kind of pushing the boundaries on whether or not they want to make the leap on their own. And obviously, the big question goes, what do I do online? How do I get leads? What's important? What's my high ROI platforms for marketing? Because as we all know, mistakes get expensive. So today, I have the privilege and honor of being joined by Bradley Benner. And Bradley is an absolute stud with online marketing. In fact, I got an opportunity to meet with him in person here in Denver. What was that, Bradley? A couple weeks ago?

It was in October, early part of.

October, two months ago. So without further ado, Bradley Benner, he is the owner of Big Bamboo Marketing, but most importantly, he's been in the game since 2010. Former electrical contractor. Now he kicks ass for contractors online, specifically rent a leads. We're gonna talk digital marketing for all you. So without further ado, welcome Bradley Benner, and thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Adam.

Awesome. So, Bradley, before we jump in, tell me a story. I'd love to hear about some big wins you've helped with roofing companies, and then we're dive into how those wins happen. So off the top of your head, what kind of results, what kind of magic have you worked for people?

Well, all right, so I'll tell you, I can't give up, give out the brand names because I didn't get permission from my clients to do this. But I've got two clients in the Northern Virginia area, that Northern Virginia D.C. southern Maryland area that they're Twitter. They're identical twin brothers. Okay.

And they.

They each have their own separate roofing business, and they're both clients of mine. So what's really interesting is it's a really funny dynamic with them because they both work in the same areas. They both have their own companies. They're identical twins.

So.

So they're competitive by nature anyways. But then they hired the same SEO guy, the same marketing consultant to manage their marketing. And it's funny because anytime, like, they're always looking at each other's rankings and all that kind of stuff, and when one of them moves over top the other one, I get a call from the other brother saying, hey, man, how come you like him more than me? It's really funny, but I've been working with them since I want to say, 2012, you know, I started off in 2010 actually learning how to do this kind of stuff to generate leads for my own electrical contracting business. And so I started learning about digital marketing primarily, or specifically how to manipulate Google to get my website to show up so that I could receive the leads from people looking for electrical services where I in my service area. And, you know, I got really good at doing that. So much so that I started building lead generation websites for some of the other contractors that I worked with, plumbers, H vac guys, that kind of stuff. And then in 2012, I started my agency because I had really. I was still doing electrical work at the time, but I had started to develop a pretty good revenue from selling leads or leasing digital assets that I had built to contractors. And by 2012 I had gotten to a point where I live in Virginia, like I mentioned, and during our winters it slowed. The construction industry slows down enough to where my revenue from my lead generation business would fall considerably throughout the winter months. And I wanted to have a more stable income. So I started my own agency. By that time, I developed enough of a portfolio of digital marketing assets that I could prove that I knew what the hell I was doing. And so in 2012, in March, I started my agency, Big Bamboo Marketing, so that I could go out and start retaining clients and build more of a monthly residual revenue. And I met with one of these roofing guys right out. I mean, it had to been June or July of that year. So right after I had really started my own agency, which is the same time I went full time in the digital marketing, I actually closed my electrical business down, other than just small jobs on the side because I started making as much money from digital marketing as I ever did as an electrical contractor. So when I met with this first roofer, it was like I said, I think in July of that year, you know, after a consultation, like a meeting with him and all that, he hired me. And within, I think three or four weeks, his brother came to me too, and he hired me as well. And so it's been like seven years that I've been with these guys, and it's just a really fun relationship with them, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that's awesome. Brothers, Brothers, brothers. Just reminds me of the whole Manning football deal. I can't imagine being that competitive with my brother in the same space. That'd be. Oh man, I'd get. So I'd have such an unhealthy relationship with my brother if that was the case. So you mentioned something I want to touch on and before we do, I just want to put a little teaser on everyone who's watching. At the end of this, we're going to share a couple ways for you to get involved, some free content from Bradley and his gang and also some other ways to get involved to bring your digital marketing to the next level. But before we get into all that, Bradley, there's a couple things I remember vividly from our conversation. When we met, you did a presentation on direct mail and I remember taking notes on your presentation on direct mail and the correlation between direct mail and higher Google search, things like that. In my roofing sales accelerator marketing pack, a lot of folks in my audience are using it inside our direct mail pieces that we use. Very, very hyper focused. So we'll drive, drive by a home, notice it's not built, maybe it's a gated community. We can't knock the door since, you know, most of us are canvassing. So we hit that home with direct mail that's super precise, hand addressed, hand stamped and really focused and producing really great results. So I'm curious because you talked about direct mail and I love what you talked about by blending direct mail in with the digital strategy. Can you talk a little bit about kind of your secrets behind blending those offline marketing with your online marketing to get that really strong ROI and generate some really powerful leads?

Sure. And that's a great question because, you know, as you know from when we, when we spoke earlier this year, I kind of fell into real. I kind of realized by accident how much of an effect proper offline or traditional marketing can have an effect on your digital marketing presence or your overall digital presence. And it's funny because for years I had, I've been doing digital marketing since 2010. Again, I started my agency in 2012. And so all of my clients, I've been telling them for years, like, I don't know why you're bothering with, you know, traditional marketing, print stuff and direct mail because everybody's online now. Well, earlier this year I started another side business of mine in real estate and I didn't really have the time because I'm running my agency. I also, you know, teach marketing and that kind of stuff. I didn't really have time to build it out the way that I wanted to. The typical website with all the SEO bells and whistles and all the stuff that I would normally do for a client that's paying me. I was just trying to get my website, my new business basically launched and I planned on driving traffic to the website through direct Mail anyways, because it was real estate. So it just, that's a really effective method for marketing to property owners, is doing direct mail. And so I started sending direct mail to vacant landowners because that's the business that I'm in, is buying and selling vacant land. And within a matter of like six weeks, my landing page, which wasn't even a full blown website, it was literally just a one page website that I could send people to to capture their information about their property. Within about six weeks that one page website started to rank for my primary keywords and like for the entire state of Virginia. And I was outranking other land investors and real estate investors and such. And it wasn't because of any SEO magic that I did. It was literally what I discovered later, after I started digging into it was because of direct mail. A lot of people, when they get direct mail now from, you know, solicitation with a strong call to action on it, they'll, they might not respond to whatever your conversion goal is or your call to action is, like to call and to become a lead, but a lot or, and they might not go directly to the website. If you've got your web page or website listed on the direct mail piece. Lot of times what they'll do is they'll go to Google and search for the company name, brand name, say like, you know, just to find out who the, who they are, what's online about the business. That's what I mean. It's, it's like 60% of people that get exposed to a brand will do a brand search in Google for that, for that brand name. And what happens is that's a huge signal for search engine optimization.

Can I pause you for a second? Just clarify two terms I want to keep, I want you to keep going. But for anyone that's unfamiliar, keywords are words that someone might search. So let's say they're looking for roofer in Austin or Dallas or Houston, say roofing contractor or maybe hail damage repair. So those are the keywords that Bradley's talking about on a Google search ranking. Meaning you're going to show up on page one of Google above your competitors or at the top. And I know some folks will even sometimes their competitors are going to show up higher than them on their own search. Right? They might search like, you know, my company, the roof strategist. If they search like the roof strategist in Austin, but there's another company of the similar name, they might show up higher. So that's why that's so important. But anyway, I just wanted to pause to make sure everyone knew we were on the same page. So continue.

Sure. And I apologize if I use industry jargon too often.

It's just not good.

So. Yeah, so what happens is when a company, when a Google user, a searcher, an Internet user, goes to Google and searches for a brand name and then clicks through from the search results to one of those brands, digital assets, which could be their primary website, we call that a money site. It could be their Google My business listing or their Google Maps listing. It could be one of their social media profiles, like their Facebook page, for example. It could be a business directory listing, like their Yelp page, anything like that. Those are huge signals for search engine optimization that Google will actually take note of for that particular brand. Because as Adam just mentioned, you know, a generic keyword search would be something like Roofing contractor, Austin, Texas, or Austin.

Right.

Or Austin Roof Repair or something like that. That's a generic keyword search. But if somebody searches for Austin Roofing pros, and that's a, you know, that's your brand, and then they click through one of the search results to one of your entity assets, as they're called, then that's a huge signal that Google recognizes. Google understands what people are doing. They track everything. Google tracks what searchers do in Google plus, what they click through to. And then depending on what kind of browser the person the searcher is using, or if it's an Android device or something like that, or if they're using Chrome, Google tracks exactly what they're doing from the moment they get online until they complete whatever it is that they're trying to do. And so those types of signals are really, really important because it helps to build brand authority. And that's what Google is rewarding now more than anything. Five years ago, keyword searches, generic keywords, it was enough to just get ranked for your generic keyword searches. Now that's no longer enough. Now it's better to have built brand authority. And Google actually rewards those brands that have proven themselves to be authoritative and relevant. Yeah, that makes sense. And so direct mail is a great way to drive traffic to kind of social engineer those types of signals. It's very difficult to spam those types of signals as a, as a search engine optimization specialist or a spammer. Most people would call me a spammer. Right. I mean, that's what SEOs are usually labeled as because we've always been able to figure out how to manipulate search.

Sure.

But it's getting harder now because Google's putting in these sort of things. So there's, you know, again, I kind of stumbled into this, but by using direct mail and some other offline methods, you can actually socially engineer people to go online and perform these types of signals, these behaviors that produce these signals that will help to build brand authority.

Yes, I love that. Now you bring up something because in my, the way I train salespeople to drum up business is always multitouch. You can't expect that you're going to just have some miracle cure where you're going to throw knock on a door one time and no one's home and expect them to call you back because you left something on the door. You can't expect that 100 out of 100 direct mail letters, you're going to get a call back. Right? So layering on the showing up at the door, sending the direct mail, that homeowner may go search you people. Homeowners now in shoppers in general are very smart. They know, they know how the business world works and they're often vetting companies. So speaking of which, whether you're using the marketing that's available in my roofing sales accelerator marketing pack or you're spending money with someone like Bradley to do pay per click advertising, there are a few key essentials to getting that traffic. So the eyeballs, the attention that you gather to convert, meaning that they're going to exchange, they're going to say, hey, I'm interested in potentially working together. So they're going to call you, they're going to fill out a form on your website. I want to see if we can nail down like three key takeaways for any company. Like if you can kind of lock in this strategy, you're going to move the needle substantially. So one of those which tell me if I'm wrong, you called it a lead generating website. Now I'm assuming you mean a landing page or a squeeze page, is that right?

Correct.

So for anyone who's not familiar with that language, you may have a website for your roofing company that's like five pages right? Home about services, contact testimonials, things like that. What happens is someone might land on that page, but they're gonna click around and they're like, okay, I got sidetracked by Facebook or dinner or whatever it is. So the idea of that landing page is to give them two options. You either enter your information and ask for more or you leave and you're not for me. Is that, am I describing it right? For the essence of a landing Page? Yes.

So it's a page set up convert, it's optimized specifically for converting that visitor into a lead.

Exactly. And I have found, and I'm very curious on your thoughts on this. When I've been hired by companies to help them grow to the next level, and whether that's from hiring sales teams, trainings, operational things, any type of consulting to help them scale, I'll often do a quick look at what they're doing online. And people are spending buku bucks on Google and they're sending traffic to their website. Have you ever seen that work?

Yeah, well, the only time I've seen that work is if it's a landing page on the website that is set up, that is, you know, optimized for conversions. So essentially a landing page within the website, it's okay sometimes to allow navigational options for them to go to other pages on the site. But yeah, I mean, I agree it should be a page that is really dedicated to converting that visitor into a lead, not your general homepage, if that makes sense.

Yep. So what elements might be on that? On that, as we call it a lead generating website, which is a one page website without navigation or what key elements do you like to build for your clients?

Very short, succinct, strong call to action, which is, you know, and again it should be optimized for however they entered, like whatever the entry point was to that landing page. Fortunately, with ads, with, with Google Ads or even search engine optimization, the ad that you create or the meta description, when you are titling a page on a website, for example, that you're going to drive traffic through, you can kind of optimize it for the specific query that people will be searching Google for and that stands out. But you also want to make sure that you have compelling description, a compelling ad copy essentially to encourage or entice people to click yours as opposed to the one above or below.

Yes.

So you know, you've got to treat the descriptions of a page that you're going to do SEO work on, a search engine optimization work on, you got to treat the description of that page as ad copy, as if you're paying Google Ads to be listed.

Right.

Likewise, if you're running Google Ads, you want to make sure that you are, you have very compelling copy. You want to try to use the same search query that the searcher is using that makes it relevant. And then when they land on that page, that page should also reference the same type of search query. That's number one. Number two, you want to make sure that the phone number, depending on what your conversion goal is, typically on a landing page. For contractors, it's going to be either submitting a contract request form or making a phone call from, you know, so you want to make sure the phone number is real big with a strong call to action, to call, call for free estimate, call for consultation, whatever it is. And you also want to have that opt in form, the contact request form above the fold, which means people don't have to scroll to submit their contact information. It should be right there and it should be present on both. Above the scroll on both laptops and desktops as well as mobile devices.

Gotcha.

So you gotta make sure that you have a mobile optimized. Remember, 60% of all. 60 to 70% of all searches with local intent occur on a mobile device now.

Yep.

So you got to make sure that they're all optimized for mobile devices.

Yeah. Because looking at something on the screen, oh, look at that, it actually shows up. That's me and my dog ride my bike. When someone does a search on their phone, the format is different. So in the digital marketing world, they call it responsive, meaning it will respond to a mobile platform. So that is, that's huge because I see a lot of contractors doing that wrong other thing to the phone number. Man, that's important. So many people like, oh, I don't answer my phone or I'm running around. Guys, these people want to give you money. If they're looking at your site, they're not saying, oh, I want to learn what these guys do. They're like, hey, I need someone like you. And I'm looking for the best option. And I always use the example because I see this a lot. When I was running our company, I audited all our leads and I thought our closing rate was like 70%. Audited all our leads. We had a 30% close rate. And I was like, what the hell? This was in the days before CRMs, before everything was online. Right. So all of our lead form, these are my notes for the call, but all of our lead forms are on paper. And I found that all my salesmen would the notes and the lead request because it was like carbon copy that we put on their desk. And then they'd call up and the results were called left message. It costs like $200 to get a phone to ring, $300 to get the phone to ring, and that's it. You call once. And I learned how stupid I was because we would. We didn't have a system to Patch calls to sales reps in the field. So they'd call and be like hey, let me take your phone number and name, we'll call you back within 24 hours of schedule appointment. And I always like to use the analogy of like if you go to a barber, imagine calling a barber, it's like hey thanks, we're really busy, we'll call you back within a day to then schedule appointment. What's the first thing you do? Dial the next guy. Yeah, he's want the friggin appointment. So it's so important. If you have the phone number on your page, you answer the phone and you set the appointment. Right. Then I use the cable guy method by the way, I'll do a whole other video on this. But give them a three hour window, doesn't matter what sales rep it's going to be assigned to book it, find the rep that can take it, have them call and confirm the appointment time. Or they can reschedule and say it's snafu. But in the prospects mind they booked. So phone number is huge. The other thing you mentioned was a headline and then the contact form. When someone is seeing that page, it's really important that they see this headline. Right. Like that's very clear. Who are you? What do you offer? But what about the contact form? What information? Because it's a balance obviously from the contractor standpoint, from the roofer, they want all the info they can. How great would it be? Like 60 square roof designer shingles already paid for by the insurance company. You know, here's my insurance policy number. But ultimately there's a balance, what we call in the digital marketing world of friction which means like it's too hard to give the information so we want to make it easy. So what, what's the bare bones information that you're going to want someone to submit that will give you a qualified lead but won't turn people away because it's too hard.

So for me, and I've tested this too, you're right, the more info you ask for somebody to submit via contact form, the less leads you will generate from that form. So it's best to get the bare minimum. But enough to where as you just mentioned, it qualifies the lead as well. Yeah, you're still obviously sometimes going to get leads that come through a contact form that aren't really relevant. That's just the nature of the game. But for the most part what I asked for is name, phone, email and then either a text area where they can type in a brief description of the job or it will have a drop down menu with the services that are available listed and it will tell them to select one. And then sometimes depending on if, you know, if it's a contractor that deals with a large service area, I might have a city field so that they can select which or enter in which city that they're in. So it gives the contractor a better idea of where the lead came from without having to return the call. If it's a tight service area, then it's, you know, that's unnecessary. But if I may add one thing really quickly about the phone number, because I think I know from my lead generation business 100%, you're 100% correct in that I used to send my, the digital assets that I would build and then I would have my own tracking phone numbers on those assets. And what I would do is just, I used to just redirect those to the, the contractors that I would be selling leads to or leasing the sites to. And way back in 2012, I think it was when I realized that a lot of the calls were getting missed. We're going to voicemail. And so I wasn't generating as much money from the leads as I could have been. So I decided to set up a call center, an answering service, so that all calls that went to any of my lead generation sites would get answered right away by a human that would take and qualify the lead like you just said, so that they ask a series of questions. Name, phone number, email address, property address, nature of the job that you're inquiring about, you know, that kind of stuff. And as soon as I did that, even though it was a, you know, at the time it was like a $600 a month expense, I spend more than that now. But my, the closing rate of the leads that I was selling went up like 30% overnight. And it was because, because those calls that were being abandoned before by the caller because of non answer or voicemail, now we're getting answered and the contractors could call back. And so I totally agree with you. Even your audience now as roofing contractors, if you guys don't have a receptionist that answers the phone during business hours, if the business calls go directly to you as the contractor or one of your field technicians, I would recommend that you set up an answering service. The answering service I use is answerconnect.com. i've been using them since 2012. There's other ones like Ruby Receptionist, they're a dime a dozen. You can go out and find an Answering service. But I would recommend that you do that so that you're not missing out on potential leads. As Adam said, that want to give you money.

Yeah. You know, Bradley, I want to riff on that for a minute because that's. The answering service is huge. I'm glad you brought that up. And one of the most costly mistakes I see is not having the ability to convert an inbound call to a lead or set appointment on the spot. Because everybody's been stuck in the voicemail loop, right? They call up, you call them back. It's a different number. They don't know who it is. They screen their calls. You leave a voicemail, they don't call you back. You call again. It's just. It's a nightmare. And where most people fall short to get this phone to ring, there's a dollar value. You take all your marketing efforts, divide it by the number of phone calls. That's how much it costs to make the phone ring, period. That simple. Now, you can then divide that number again from the appoint the call ends to appointments. So there's really two metrics that I look at when I work with roofing companies. What's your conversion rate from inquiry? Someone that calls you or fills out a contact request form on your website, makes contact with you somehow. How many of those people do you book in a sales appointment? That's a roof inspection, an estimate, whatever it is. And then of this. How many people do you actually talk to that turn into business? And if you have those key metrics, so on average, say, 70% of people that call in are going to turn in an appointment, and then you know that you're going to close 70% of those. It's super easy to put together a growth projection for the. For the company and to figure out the budget, because that's another big question. Well, what should my budget be that's insignificant? Your budget is going to depend. I mean, if I get. If I had a machine that every time you put 30 bucks in it spatial, you know, $200 out, would you stop feeding it? Hell no. I would just sit there like a. Like a slot machine. Right. But the problem is that conversion point. So I want to. I want to leave with my tip here. If you have that call service, have them book the appointment. Give them three hour windows. That's what I do. So starting at 8 to 11. Wait, right? 8, 9. Yeah. I suck at math. Everyone on this channel knows it's like a math. 11 to 2, 2 to 5, and then 5 to 7. I know, it's a two hour window, but maybe 5 to 8. Some people run late in the summers and my way of handling it is call folks answer and they say, hey, we book our appointments in three hour windows and once you're assigned to your field technician or representative, they're going to call you back within the next two hours to confirm the appointment time so you're not sitting around. And that sets the service standpoint up like grand slam. Because then they're like, hey, the appointments set, they're already expecting that next phone call. And all you need to do as a company owner is figure out what salesperson or yourself can run the lead and then you assign it. Because that's what I say I would. When I made that shift, by the way, my office admin refused to book calls that way. I took that. I literally forwarded the phone from the officer, didn't ring her anymore. I was so pissed. And I had it come to me, said, fine, I'll do it. And remember I told you we had a 30% close rate. Once we changed that, we had a 90% increase inbound call to appointment conversion. I think our close rate was like 70 to 80% on average. Wow, massive shift. I mean, it just turned up the volume. So if you do that and everyone says, oh, what if we can't run the appointment? Who cares? Call back. Hey, I just got your information. We were scheduled for Tuesday from 9 to noon. There was a little bit of a scheduling snafu. How does two. How does Wednesday look instead? Right. Boom. They already in their mind have an appointment. They're going to work with you versus getting. Exactly. And then they're not going to be caught in the voicemail loop. So I'm so glad you hit that.

I also want to briefly mention you said a great. You said if you had $30 and every time you put $30 in a machine, it spit out 200 guys. That's what marketing. Too many times I talk to contractors especially and they think of marketing as an expense. And it's not an expense, it's an investment and it should provide a return on that investment. Yeah. So if you think of it as a slot machine where I'm going to throw put money into this machine and pull the handle and hope and pray that it's going to spit out more than I put in. That's not how marketing should be. Marketing should be a known quantity. Like you should know, for every dollar I'm going to spend, I'm going to get back a $30 or $1.50 or $3 or whatever. So instead of it being a slot machine, it's a vending machine. I know I'm going to put this much money in and I know I'm going to press the button and this much is going to come back out. You know what I mean?

Exactly. And it's so important. And I know roofing companies, it's hard to get a handle on your numbers, we're so busy. But if you know those numbers, the sky's the limit. And then you can make a wise investment versus a guessing game. Because Gamb marketing, without having some numbers or at least projections, knowing roughly what your costs are. And I have a company coming out for an on site with me here in January, doing a really deep dive together. And I said, hey, I want to know your numbers beforehand. I worked with another company a while back and after working together, they said, hey, well, what's the most I should pay my sales team on commission, which is also a marketing investment. Right? Because. Or sales investment because you're investing in them to go make sales and they get a percentage of it. And after we ran the numbers, I'm like, you guys are paying too much. You're gonna go bankrupt. Because people don't know their numbers. And then marketing becomes a gambling game as opposed to a calculated investment. If you knew the stock market was going to return 12% this year, you know, you'd be like, whoa, where can I find some extra cash to dump in that? You know? So it is super important. I'm going to do a shameless plug on my products for a minute. My roofing sales seller marketing pack is cheap. Hundreds of dollars. One sale that it helps someone make on an average commission of a thousand bucks is a five times return on investment. So every time if you have five bucks, you put it in a machine and you got $25 out. Let's talk bigger numbers. If you put in 100 bucks, you're getting $500 back. Put in 500 bucks, you're getting $2,500 back. And that's on the first goal round. It's not even a residual thing. It's like one and done. And I've had some people, oh, your products are a little expensive. I was like, first of all, look at my competitors. And I'm thousands cheaper, literally. And one sale, you made back your money five times. And for me, I know I would do anything to not knock the door. So anyway, just in the mindset, because that's how I, that's why I priced it. The way today I said I wanted to be affordable. So it's not just an owner. So an average salesperson who's doing okay, that wants to do great, can afford it and it's not going to be a limiting factor to not have those resources. So anyway, shameless plug done. If you want to check it out, you can click the link in the description. So we covered what we call lead generation websites, which is a single standalone website. So if you are running any paid advertising to any part of your website, it is an absolute no no. To send it to your regular website, it needs to be what's called a landing page, also known as a squeeze page, also known as an opt in page, also known as a micro site. There's all these different names marketers have thrown at it, but all you need to know is it's one page. You can't do anything but just like scroll and enter your info or call. So that's super important. We covered the importance of converting calls by answering them. So if you can't answer them or you don't have a receptionist or admin, get a call center. One thing that's. There's two more things I'd love to hit on if we can, Bradley. One is local listings. Most people don't know the in most roofers, most people in general don't know like the map pack, the three pack, just like bare bones. What do you need for a local listing? You need a Google my business listing. What information needs to be on there? Because from what, and I'm a rookie, I know the concepts, but I know that when I set up our Google local listing when I was roofing, it's a pain in the butt because you have to like submit information to Google and then they like mail you a card because you have to verify your address. But then once it's set up, you can set up certain keywords. So if someone searches roofer in Atlanta, roofer Austin, I'm thinking roofer in Dallas, those little listings at the top of the Google search for all the people who are, you know, have used Google, should be everybody here. That's the local Google my business listing.

So the map pack.

The map pack, exactly. And then how you set that listing up will impact how you're going to show up. So if you never update it and it doesn't even say you're a roofing contractor or that you do siding or windows or gutters, you're going to lose those opportunities. So what are some essentials, some easy tips that anyone could use to make sure that they're one, they have a Google listing, and two, that the basic elements are set up properly.

Okay, that's a good question. Number one, if you haven't already claimed and verified your Google my business profile, go do it. You should, because you know they should be, you should, you should have control over that. Okay, so that's number one. Number two is the data that you enter when either setting it up or if you get control of it, if you, if you haven't verified it yet and, or claimed and verified it yet. And you do that. Now, once you verified it, which as Adam said they will typically sometimes you can get phone verification, but it's very rare. So it's usually when you go to either set it up for the first time or to claim an existing listing that's never been claimed, it will prompt you first of all, do it from the owner's Gmail account, Google account. Whoever the owner of the business is should really be the one that does this. You can always assign managers to also manage the listing or the profile, but the owner of the business should truly be the one that actually claims it and verifies it. But then when you go through and it's by the way, to figure out whether it's been claimed or verified, just go to business.google.com and you can search for the company name and it will come up and if it says is this your business? That means it's been unclaimed. And then you can go through the claims process, which is a very simple process. Anyways, what you're going to, what will happen is it'll ask, it'll prompt you to put in the business name. And then if it's not claimed, it'll say, you know, do you want to claim this business? And then you type in the business address or where you want it has to match what the address is on file for Google for that business. And then they'll send you a postcard or it's a, it's like a little postcard that has a pin, an identifying number, like a code that then you enter when you go back to business.google.com and it will prompt you to enter in the PIN to show that you've claimed that you verified it. Because you do, your business does indeed exist at that. Once you have access to you verified it, that's when you can edit the listing or if it's the first time that you've set it up. Like if you go do a search in Google for your brand name or go to business.google.com then it'll allow you to set the listing up, but it won't publish it. It won't go live and be found on the web until it's been verified. In either case, when you are either editing an existing listing or creating a new listing, you want to make sure that your data, your details that you enter is 100% accurate.

Not your cell phone, the office?

No. If you've got a if you've got a valid like business office line number, use that. If you're if your Joe's Roofing Pros Inc. Is your official business name, put Joe's Roofing Pros Inc. Don't put Joe's Roofing Pros Nothing. And then on other other places it says Joe's Roofing Pro Inc. Or don't put Incorporated spelled out put Inc. What I'm trying to get at is you want to have the same data. It's got to be a hundred percent accurate everywhere that it's published, starting with your Google My business profile if it comes if you're on 123 Main St don't type in 1 2, 3 Main St, type in ST or better yet, go to the USPS.com so United States Postal and type in your business address. For there's an address formatting option that you like. It's essentially you can go type in your address and hit Enter and it will show you the proper way that your address should be displayed on mail. Enter that in and from that point forward, every time you get listed on or published anywhere online, make sure that all of your nap name, address and phone number, also your website, make sure that they're always listed the exact same. So that. And again, that means if you're at 123 Main St and your Google My Business listing shows it as 1, 2, 3 Main St, then everywhere you get published, you want to make sure it's the same way. Don't spell street out. If it was ST in your Google My business listing, make sure the phone numbers are same, the punctuation should be the same. And I know that seems like we're splitting hairs, but remember, Google is nothing other than a math. It's an algorithm, right? It's a math program. So you have to feed it the same data over and over and over again because if there's any discrepancies, it's called ambiguation. It ambiguates the data and that makes it harder for Google to determine where to place you in the search results.

Gotcha. So the key takeaway consistency and accuracy. However your business is registered, the name, keep it the same phone number, use the office phone and make sure it's on all platforms, including Yelp, wherever else you might be listed, Home Advisor, anything that might be crawling for data. So last thing and then we're coming right up against time. How much do reviews impact local search rankings?

Quite a bit actually now more so than they used to for several reasons. And let me give a couple pointers here on this. Number one is you should be soliciting reviews from your customers. You should, that should be one of your primary functions and it should be just part of your standard operating procedure. After closing a job out with a client, a customer, you should have your technicians, or if it's you or whatever, whoever's out in the field interacting with that customer, you should ask them to leave you a review. Don't tell them, leave me a good review. Don't incentivize good reviews, just ask them to leave you a review. Obviously, if you had a crappy time, a hard time with a particular customer, you conveniently forget to ask them to leave your review. But if the communication and everything went fairly well with that customer and the work came out well and all that, they paid you on time and all that kind of stuff, that's a really good time to ask. And you should also implement some follow up strategies to try to, you know, pull that, that review from them without being, you know, too aggressive. But you should, because a lot of times people will have good intentions to leave a review, but they just won't get around to it. They get busy. So anyways, there should be some sort of follow up to that. But here's the thing. Reviews, something I see a lot of contractors don't do is they'll solicit reviews, but they never reply to them. Inside of Google my business, when you get a review, like most, most of the time I see contractors or companies, period, businesses, period, only reply to reviews if it was a negative review. But you're missing an opportunity here because every review that you get, you have the opportunity to reply to. So even if it's a good review, you should go in there and reply, number one, because it shows people that are viewing your listing, that are seeing others reviews, that you're replying to them. So it shows that you're engaging with your audience or your customers. Number two, it gives you the opportunity to inject additional keywords and or location names into the response to the review. So let's say that Adam Benzeman has just hired Just left a review because you guys did. Your company did a roof repair job and he's really happy about it. He says, hey, thanks Joe's roofing pros for, you know, repairing my leaky roof, especially during the storm. You know, I really appreciate the work that you guys did in the way that you cleaned it up. That's it. Well, then you as the business owner can go back in and say, hey Adam, thanks so much for the kind words. We really enjoyed repairing your roof in. And it mentioned a suburb of Dallas or Austin or whatever. Now you've injected a specific location that's part of your service area into that review. So that's adding location relevancy. Then you can say, we're so happy to be able to provide emergency roof repair. Right. So now you've got a keyword in there and so you're adding more content, you're injecting keyword and location relevancy and you're engaging with your audience, all of which Google will reward you for. So it's very, very important.

Yeah. And people, people look at that stuff and that's why in the expansion pack, which I think by the time we publish this video should be available as part of the roofing sales accelerator marketing pack, there's a bunch of templates to use to help you get reviews as well. And those reviews help you show up more in Google search. So just as a fun game, while you're listening, grab your phone or open your computer, whatever you're using, search for roofing company. Just type in roofing company in the city you're in and you're going to see all those results above all the websites, Google local listings, your Google my business listings. And put yourself in the mind of a shopper you're going to call who has good reviews and who has a lot of reviews. If you have like four reviews, you can expect. It's like four of his best friends. Right. And everyone's got to get started. One of the clients I worked with, we got up to like 12005 star reviews. It's wild. And you do that with due diligence, asking, following up. And do make sure to stay up to date on what Google allows because you can't say, write me a review and I'll give you 50 bucks. If Google catches wind of that, they're going to shut your account down. I saw it happen. We had a huge spike with a client of mine on reviews and they like all got erased. They were all legit too. It was like it took for. It was A nightmare, long and short of it. We got them resumed because they were legit. But if anyone blows a whistle on you, you're sol. So that brings us nearly to a wrap. Sure, there's folks listening, Bradley, that want to either check you out with Big Bamboo Marketing or maybe join you on some other avenues to learn more about how they can market their business. So why don't you share a little bit about how people can find you and how they can join the conversation.

Sure. And just so you know, I could spend another two hours with you talking about this.

We could start an entire channel on digital marketing, I'm sure.

I'm telling you, we just scratched the surface. Barely scratched the surface service. So, yeah, you know, I've been providing marketing and lead generation services for contractors primarily. My biggest industry that I deal with is tree service contractors. But if anybody's interested in, you know, learning more about what I do, just go to bigbambo marketing.com. you know, I'm located in Virginia. I provide mostly SEO services, but also pay per click and branding. And now I'm doing more holistic and traditional marketing like mailing campaigns and, and such things like that. But also if you just have questions about digital marketing for your own business. I answer questions every single week with my coaching and consulting company where I teach digital marketing called Semantic Mastery. And we have a weekly webinar series. It's free, 100% free. It's a question and answer webinar series. On Wednesdays we call it Hump Day Hangouts. We actually just completed our, I think 267th episode this week, I think.

Wow.

So we're, you know, we've been doing it for many, many years. But you can just go to Semantic Mastery. That's S E M A N T I C mastery. So semantic mastery.com HD questions, which stands for Hump Day Questions. And that'll take you over to our page where you can post your questions and then you can come watch the webinar live at 4pm Eastern on Friday or excuse me, on Wednesdays, it's only an hour long and get the answers to your questions. Or if you can't make the live webinar because you're a business owner and you're running your business at that time. All of our replays of the webinars are on our YouTube channel, YouTube.com semantic mastery. And so you can always get your answers to your questions watching the replay.

Cool. And I'll drop all those links in the description for everybody as well. I was writing them down, so I have them there. So that's semanticmastery.com HD like heavy duty HD questions. I know it stands for Hump Day Hangouts, but I was thinking of a Chevy HD Duramax. I don't know why I never drove a Chevy. Yeah, there was a Ford guy. Oh, I hope I didn't lose fans on this channel.

So am I, I should say.

I know. Yeah, I've had them all. My favorite was an old 90s or late 2000 early Ford F150 that I had to get because we were so busy between two different states working storms. I drove my F150 out there was flying back and forth, driving back and forth from Montana to Wisconsin and I ended up having to buy another truck and I missed that thing. Red velour. Oh man, it was great.

Well, just. Just so your audience knows, I'll still talk to Dodge and Chevy owners as well.

That's funny. So will I. I did a video not long ago that was a big hit called what the truck? Because so many roofers put so much emphasis on what you're driving. My whole thing is you could show up in a rotted Miata for all you care because people are buying you and your personality and how you treat people, not the vehicle you drive. So. But anyway, hey everybody, thank you for joining us. If you haven't done so already, click like subscribe. Drop any comments or questions here. As you've seen, I respond to those very, very quickly. And yeah, if you haven't checked out the roofing accelerator and marketing pack, there's a link below if you want to learn my three tricks to get to the kitchen table. You'll find a link to the ebook down in the description as well. And Bradley is going to have all his links to find him on Big Bamboo Marketing and for the hump Day hangouts. And I will catch you guys on the next one to either check you out with Big Bamboo Marketing or maybe join you on some other avenues to learn more about how they can market their business. So why don't you share a little bit about how people can find you and how they can join the conversation?

Sure. And just so you know, I could spend another two hours with you talking about this stuff.

We could start an entire channel on digital marketing, I'm sure.

I'm telling you, we just scratched the surface. Barely scratch the surface. So yeah, you know, I've been providing marketing and lead generation services for contractors primarily. My biggest industry that I deal with is tree service contractors. But if anybody's Interested in learning more about what I do? Just go to bigbamboomarketing.com I'm located in Virginia. I provide mostly SEO services, but also pay per click and branding. And now I'm doing more holistic and traditional marketing like mailing campaigns and such things like that. But also if you just have questions about digital marketing for your own business. I answer questions every single week with my coaching and consulting company where I teach digital marketing called Semantic Mastery. And we have a weekly webinar series. It's free, 100% free. It's a question and answer webinar series. On Wednesdays. We call it Hump Day Hangouts. We actually just completed our, I think 267th episode this week, I think. So we're, you know, we've been doing it for many, many years. But you can just go to semantic mastery. That's SEM A N T I C mastery. So semantic mastery.com HD questions, which stands for Hump Day Questions. That'll take you over to our page where you can post your questions and then you can come watch the webinar live at 4pm Eastern on Friday or, excuse me, on Wednesdays, it's only an hour long. And get the answers to your questions. Or if you can't make the live webinar because you're a business owner and you're running your business at that time. All of our replays of the webinars are on our YouTube channel, YouTube.com semantic mastery. And so you can always get your answers to your questions watching the replay.

Well, and I'll drop all those links in the description for everybody as well. I was writing them down so I have them there. So that's semantic mastery.com HD like heavy duty HD questions. I know that stands for Hump Day Hangouts, but I was thinking of a Chevy HD Duramax. I don't know why I never drove a Chevy. Yeah, there was a Ford guy. Oh, I hope I didn't lose fans on this channel.

So am I, I should say.

I know. Yeah, I've had them all. My favorite was an old 90s or late 2000 early Ford F150 that I had to get because we were so busy between two different states working storms. I drove my F150 out there, was flying back and forth, driving back and forth from Montana to Wisconsin and I ended up having to buy another truck and I missed that thing, red velour. Oh man, it was great.

Well, just, just so your audience knows, I'll still talk to Dodge and Chevy owners as well.

That's funny. So I did a video not long ago that was a big hit called what the Truck? Because so many roofers put so much emphasis on what you're driving. My whole thing is you can show up in a rotted Miata for all you care because people are buying you and your personality and how you treat people, not the vehicle you drive. So but anyway, hey everybody, thank you for joining us. If you haven't done so already, click like subscribe. Drop any comments or questions here. As you've seen, I respond to those very, very quickly. And yeah, if you haven't checked out the Roofing Sales Accelerator and Marketing pack, there's a link below. If you want to learn my three tricks to get to the Kitchen table. You'll find a link to the ebook down in the description as well. And Bradley's going to have all his links to find him on Big Bamboo Marketing and for the Hump Day hangouts. And I will catch you guys on the next one.