Transcript excerpt from a January 2025 YouTube conversation where Bill Brown describes a neighborhood-level, hyper-focused marketing strategy for HVAC (implicit) business growth. He explains starting with a very small geographic area (neighborhoods), mapping households by AC age, targeting homes without new AC units with repeated direct-mail and local advertising until saturation, then expanding to nearby suburbs.
When we first started, I had no money, right? No money. I said, I need to narrow down my marketing area. And I narrowed it down to neighborhoods. There's a thousand people in this neighborhood. The homes are 10 to 12 years old. I drove around the neighborhoods and looked at the air conditioners, and I had a map drawn on a piece of paper, and I xed off the homes that had new ACs. I said, look, if I need to spend $10 at each one of these houses over the next year through direct mail, a local magazine in the neighborhood, I want to be as surgical as possible. And 25% of them or so had new ACs. So we hit the 75% that didn't over and over again with direct mail. And then our trucks were in that neighborhood, and we would get. People would say, yeah, I saw your truck, or we read your reviews. So we were able to dominate just neighborhoods. And then we spread out to just suburbs. So our company was in New Albany, worked for 32% of the homes in New Albany. I never thought it would get that high. But all of our marketing went to just that suburb until we felt that we were to the point where we had reached saturation. So if you want to really dominate, shrink down your market size. Yeah, it worked well for us.
I love that. So there you go. You heard what Bill said. Start small, own your backyard, then own your neighbor's backyard, then you can go to the next neighborhood, downs backyard. But you have to start small and get hyper focused. And I think that's a big problem. I don't think it's a problem that's probably talked about enough.
