Bob Sheehan - Ep. 34 - Manage Your Marketing for Predictable and Reliable Growth

This is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast brought to you by G4 Marketing. Interviews with today's top home improvement entrepreneurs about marketing, sales, money, mindset, and lifestyle. Now here's your host, Brian Kaskavalciyan. Welcome to this episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. This is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing. Marketing Group, and in today's episode, I'm going to introduce you to my friend Bob Sheehan. Now, I've probably known Bob 7 or 8 years, and he's one of those guys that really understands and gets home improvement marketing. In the time that I've known him, I've always been very impressed by his results-focused marketing. Him and I come from the same school of direct response marketing, so we talk the same language. It's all about results, and and in this episode we're going to talk about how to create predictable, profitable marketing for your home improvement company. Now, Bob is with a company called SureFire Local, so a lot of what we're going to talk about today is on the internet. One thing to keep in mind as we're having the conversation is that the internet is just another form of media, meaning it's just like a newspaper or a TV or radio. It's like any other any other type of media in that there are certain basic principles that need to be met in order for the advertising to be effective and profitable. Bob really is a master at this game, so I know you're going to get a lot out of this episode. So let's get to it. All right, everybody, I have got a great guest today, Bob Sheehan. Bob, welcome.

Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here.

Yeah, so, um, Bob, let's, let's kind of jump right into it. Tell everybody a little bit about your background. You have a very impressive background, so, um, let's talk a little bit about that and then we can get into the internet marketing stuff.

Well, sure. So, so, you know, going back, if you, if you look at the kind of the early part of my career, I did a lot of different things, things that are much different than what I do now. I actually originally started in retail, and it was there that I got experience in handling large budgets. I used to manage an advertising budget for a retailer that was in excess of $50 million, and learned how to buy media, learned how to kind of manage that whole kind of attribution model of, you know, here we spent some money and what did we get for it, and kind of tying all that ROI together. Learned that in a very big way in my, in my 20s. Spent a lot of time in the late '90s in a newspaper up here, learned media in that place. And so, you know, kind of I worked that end of the formula where, you know, instead of being on the retail side buying the media, I was then selling the media, right? And learned a lot about, you know, TV, radio, newspaper, all of the things that that eventually came to be part of the programs that I ran when I had my own business. In the, in the early 2000s, I worked at a home improvement retailer here. It was a window company, in excess of $20 million a year window company. I was the director of marketing, handled all of the lead generation for that, as well as worked with the phone room and, you know, kind of learned that whole model of You know, spend a dollar, get a lead, try to figure out, you know, how to get more of them, and turn that whole thing into a math problem so that we could learn how to model that and how to predict it, right? And then after I did that, I had my own business for a while where I was a marketing company where what I did was I worked with a lot of home improvement companies, a lot of home services companies that were looking for lead gen, and I was in the lead generation end of their businesses. Around about 2009, I met Chris Morentes, and Chris is the CEO of SureFire Social, and I became involved in the early stages of that business where we were serving the home improvement industry, literally one client at a time, you know, trying to help people like that grow business on the internet, right? How to become better online. And that was the early days of, you know, kind of what was going on in the internet, the kind of the professionalization of all of that and the ability to, you know, connect the building of a website and all the activities that you do online and all of the different things that matter and kind of put them into a program which we developed over the first several years of the business to where, you know, we've created a, you know, kind of a predictable model around what needs to be done to help a business succeed online. Somewhere in the middle of that, after a few years of doing that, it got big enough where we needed to scale it, we needed to bring the activities into a place where they could be done by teams, and we needed to do a lot of it because we had several hundred clients. And so we began building a platform that we call the Surefire Local Marketing Cloud now, And that helps us to run the business. We basically run the business on that cloud between the clients and what we call the account managers and coaches who work with those people. And so we're now, we've evolved from originally a website building kind of SEO company into what now is more of a technology company that uses technology and leverages technology into helping people in the home services business get leads. Right, and ROI for their online media spend.

Yeah, and you guys are very good at it. You know, you, you brought something up, and we're gonna get— we'll get to the internet marketing, but I, you know, I've known Bob for a long time, for those of you that are listening, and I first met Bob when he had his own business and he was working with home improvement companies to help them with their marketing and lead generation. And this is a guy that really understands the business. I know there were some unhappy people that, you know, that when Bob kind of shifted into the internet marketing space because he did such a good job for them. And you're a big direct marketing guy too. You're not you know, you're not into the whole brand building thing and, you know, putting out these pretty ads and hoping that the phone rings. One thing that you just, you just said a minute ago, and this is how I look at it too, is you said that when you were doing the marketing, it was a math problem.

Correct. Yeah.

Can you talk about that a little bit more? Because a lot of people don't look at marketing in that way. And I kind of know where you're going with that. But I I think it would be good to talk a little bit more about that.

Sure. If you're a business with a marketing budget, and I believe every business should have a marketing budget, you want to be able to predict what you're going to get from that budget. And, you know, in the home improvement business, typically you want a 10-to-1 return or something like that. So the way I was trained, really going back into retail and then, you know, through my activities in the home improvement business and now you know, in what I'm doing here is we like to build that up from all the different components, right? So if you, if you can predict the return, for instance, on your direct mail budget and you can plug that in and bring that to the end, what the ROI is going to be, and then you layer on, okay, here's what my TV is likely to do, here's what my internet is likely to do. And I always took the point of view of, of I want to be able to prove that budget out by the expected returns and build it up from the bottom rather than just trying to guess, right? If you're trying to go month to month and, you know, I think something worked and therefore I'm gonna do a little more of it, you're inevitably gonna be wrong and you're never gonna get to your goals. So it was always for me about measuring the things that we did in the smallest amount, you know, in the smallest buckets we possibly could, you know, the most definable, you know, elements, and then build it up from there so that we could, we could get to the end. And we were, when I was in the retail business, we were required to do that. We had to make that presentation literally item by item, product by product, business by business. And then, you know, so that's, that's how I came up. And then I just migrated that into everything I've been doing since then.

So you said predictable. And one of the things that I think that that is a word that people would love to associate with their marketing, but so many people cannot. So how did you, or how do you make your marketing more predictable?

The number one way to do that is to measure what you're doing, right? So the first thing is you have to do enough of it to make it measurable, right? You have to have fairly significant budgets, not millions of dollars, but you've gotta be spending some money. And when you're doing that and you measure it right, when you actually know what's going on and you do that over a period of time, it gets predictable for you, right? You literally, you see it over a period, you know, a longer period of time, and you kind of know what you're gonna get, right? The longer the period of time is that you measure it, the more predictable it becomes because now you have year-over-year comparisons, month-over-month comparisons. Seasonality in this business is a big deal. So a dollar spent in December is not the same as a dollar spent in May. And so you need to know that, right? And where I come from, we would measure that, right? I wanna look at all the spending I do by month, by year, by medium, and the more of that I measure, the more easy it is for me to predict what's gonna happen next time I do it.

What are some strategies that you share with your clients about marketing their business? And I know we're gonna talk specifically about internet marketing, and I promise we're gonna get to that, everybody, but internet is just a media. It's one component of a, of a total marketing package. And to me, the philosophy and the psychology of marketing is critically important. And I would, I would not be doing you a service if I had a guy like Bob Sheehan on the phone and I did, or on, or interviewing a guy like Bob Sheehan and not asking him about philosophy and psychology as well. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. Probably the biggest thing that runs through the recommendations that I make to people today, as well as, you know, many years in the past, is that this is about and, and, not about and/or, right? That doing many things and doing them well is a much better strategy than trying to do more of one thing, right? And, and I run into a lot of people in, in this business who, who will say, well, this worked better than that, therefore I'm gonna kill that, I'm gonna do more of this. And what I say is you should do both of them. You should continue to do both of them because you need more leads. And, you know, some leads are gonna be more expensive than others, but in the end, if you measure correctly and bring it down to the bottom line and understand how the whole picture is working then you can do and, and, and you can make that work for you. And that's a much easier way to get to the promised land than it is to try to, try to ride one horse and get there.

So with that, that said, which we could talk about that for another hour, and maybe we can come back to that in another episode at another time, but today let's talk about internet marketing and what do we, what do we need to know about internet marketing today to be successful?

Well, probably the biggest thing that's changed in the last 2 years has been location. And, and, you know, it used to be, and we talk about this when we do webinars in SureFire and when we talk about the evolution of the internet, it used to be all about keywords. Right? You would put 12 keywords on a page. The more important ones, you might put them on there 5 times. And, you know, the search engines would notice that the keyword was there a lot, and they would rank that page highly. That kind of linear approach to, you know, keywords and content on pages is gone. Google doesn't think that way anymore. Google's a language machine now. It's looking for quality content, and it's looking for it in a natural way. So the kind of gaming approach that we used to use with the internet just no longer is effective. It's a waste of time. So there are much more, it's a much more natural and normal kind of an approach that involves recency, right, recency of content, relevance of content, right, is the content relevant to the person who's looking for it, you know, whatever the query might be in Google, they're going to compare that query to the content on the page in a natural language way, and they're going to match that page up with that query, and that helps to determine how the page will rank. And the other big thing that's relatively new because of the fact that, you know, everybody now has a smartphone in their hand that has location services engaged on it, The relatively new thing that's been getting a lot of attention and really there's a lot of need to understand is location. So not only does Google care about, you know, can I find a page that is the best page for this particular query that a customer might be putting into Google, but I want to find the one that's closest to them. Because in their world and really in everybody's world, if I'm searching for something, I want it to be close because if I want to buy it, I need to be able to get there. So, so it's become much more hyperlocal. The use of location signals and the coding of websites and the, and the, the writing of content has all revolved around how do we tell the search engines where we are in a reliable and natural way so that they can match up the closest and best content to that, to that visitor.

So that's all That's really interesting. So you, you just said location signals. So let's take a, take a, a window company or a roofing company that is in a market, let's say, I don't know, your market, they're in Boston.

Yep.

So can you tell me kind of more specifically What does that all look like? What do they need to be doing?

The big thing that everybody does, and I think most of your visitors here will know about this, is directories, right? The more directories that you can have that register your location on the internet, and the more complete that ecosystem is, and the more accurate it is, and the more consistent it is, the more that Google will trust that. And ultimately that trust results in better rankings for your website. So we think about directory listings as a location signal that ties to your website, right? And then you've got the same information from those directories that's built into the website. We do a thing we call schema, we wrap it in schema. And schema is a way to kind of tell Google that, hey, this is the address we want you to pay attention to. and then that ties to the directories and, and helps that site to rank. Mostly it's about, it's about exposing to Google where does this website do business.

So can you give me an example of directories?

Well, Google My Business is a directory. MapQuest is a directory. Yellow Pages, Yellow Book Online, all of those kinds of things are directories. We, we have a package of 74 directories that we put people into. Among which we're pretty confident the top 50 that Google cares about are part of that 74. And, but Google, Google kind of will let you know that there's about 50 that they care about and, and they trust them and they rely on them. And, you know, so we want to make sure that we're covered in that area.

Can people, is that something that somebody can do on their own or? Do they need to hire? And look, I, I don't think anybody should be doing this stuff on their own. Leave it in the hands of professionals to do. Um, but is this stuff that they could do on their own if they had to?

It is. Yep. You can, you can buy this on the internet, um, as a, as a package from 3 or 4 different places, or you can do it yourself. You can literally go out there and, and open up accounts in all of these places and stand them up yourself. But getting back to the original thing I was talking about 10 minutes ago about and, and, yeah, that, and, you know, the way that we think about this is it's not about, you know, just doing the directories and making that work. It's about how does that work with everything else that you're doing, right? So what's the, what's the overall approach to this thing? How can I make all of these things work together? So how can I have content that is relevant and recent and location-specific? How do I tie that together with what I'm doing on my directories? How do I tie it together with the website and the signals that I, that I tie the website together with the, you know, with the directories and with the content and with the maybe my mobile phone, you know, and the location services that I'm using in my mobile phone and How do I take photographs from my mobile phone, for instance, and move them to my website with location data embedded in them? Right? So to me, it's, it's not about isolated efforts. It's about bringing the whole thing together. And, and that's why over the last few years, we've focused on not only, not only making this program work, right, coordinating all of these signals and all of this kind of data that's happening among all the things that we do, but bringing them together into a platform so that you can see it all and manage it all in one place, right? We manage something like 60 different data sources in this thing, and I can tell you that that's a lot more than we used to, and part of the reason for that is it's possible. When you put it all in one place and put it all behind one password, It is manageable that way, whereas most small businesses trying to do that on their own would have a very difficult time doing it.

You mentioned content, and you know, the first place that I think most of our heads go to is blog content. Is that what you mean by content, or is there more?

Well, that could be— that's one part of content, and that's the part of content that we think about in terms of recency. Right, so we publish a lot of blogging, like many of our packages have a blog a week being published, right? A relevant keyword-oriented article about something that you do that gets published weekly. But there's content that is related to other things, like there's social media content, Facebook, Twitter, all the, and those are all different because the medium drives them to be different. You only get 144 characters in Twitter and you can, say a limited amount of things, but you can create, you know, links back to your site. You can, you can drive people to different places by, by using that, right? And so content's a lot of different things. And what we try to do is to, is to publish a lot of different kinds of content in a lot of different places, but tie them together into a coherent approach to how, you know, how we manage this ecosystem.

Are reviews considered content?

They are. It's third-party content. It's, you know, it's customers saying things about you. I think it's a really important component now of ranking. So there's the— you've got two kinds of impact from that. One of them is, you know, the search engines count that stuff. They really, really care about it. But customers care about it too. And We've noticed things like customers will not put in leads or they'll put in fewer leads. Your conversion rates drop when your star rating drops, right? So we try to keep everybody's star rating as high as possible, keep their review count as high as possible in as many different places as possible so that you've got that kind of social proof from customers that you're actually competent. And when you do that, Google trusts you more, right? When that— so we see a positive impact in traffic and rankings when people do, you know, the right thing with, with their customers, and that's reflected in positive reviews.

Yeah, you know, you mentioned Facebook and Twitter, you mentioned social media. Are you, are you guys having much success with actually being able to generate leads through Facebook, through social media?

Facebook more so than other social media, and it depends on, you know, what you're trying to accomplish, but we do get goal conversions, if you will. We get positive actions happening inside Google. It's not so much, you know, I'd like to have my roof replaced next week kind of goal completions, but, you know, sweepstakes and you know, driving people to pages and kind of getting people to interact with things, we definitely see that. And we think that that helps, not necessarily from a, you know, lowering my lead cost approach, but more interaction, more expanding, you know, of the reach of that company. And Facebook is the kind of medium that personalizes a company and makes it more friendly. And I think that lowers the barrier to people putting in leads. So we try to take the things that we do on the website and extend them into social media and make those, make the representation of that company much more personable and friendly and neighborly. And, you know, people like to do business with people who are, you know, friends and neighbors. So we like to make it look like that.

What do you think about pay-per-click? Particularly Google pay-per-click. How do you see that, how do you see that shaping up now?

Getting back to and, and rather than and/or, we think a successful internet marketing program includes approaches to all of the different possibilities. So you can have paid programs on social media, you can have free programs on social media where you're just posting content, right? You can boost that content on a paid level. You can organically optimize your website and your digital footprint by, you know, doing lots of these activities over a period of time, and you'll see impact from that. And then at the same time, having a component of paid on top of all of that with AdWords, I think, is a is a necessity. I mean, I think it's a really, really good idea. It helps you to fill in the gaps, right? If you can't rank on certain kinds of words, or maybe, maybe you're really strong in windows and not that strong in, in roofing, you know, you can run a paid program on roofing that will help you to not leave some of that behind. Or maybe you're not that strong in a particular area and you'd like to be. Paid is a good way to help you get there. So we use paid strategically. In order to do those things. And we also think that, you know, when you look at a search engine results page where the top 4 slots are paid slots, then you got the maps, and then you got organic, I'd like to be in all 3 of those places. Right. I think that having, having 3 shots on goal is a better way to go than putting all my eggs in one basket. Not only does it give me 3 opportunities for a customer to click on me, but it's 2 extra slots that won't be occupied by a competitor. So I think that's, that's a really important way to think about this.

Yeah, that's great. So how could— what's the best way for people to find out more about what you guys are doing at SureFire?

Well, they, they can send me an email. It's bob@surefirelocal.com is my email address. We have a website, SureFireLocal.com, that's got all the typical lead generation kinds of mechanisms on it. There's phone numbers there and form submissions, and that would go into the company and somebody would contact anybody and, you know, take you through a demonstration of what we do. However, right, if they wanted to come to you and, you know, you and I know each other, I'm sure you would pass them on and we could you know, take care of any interest at that point.

I'll make sure and put a link in with the show notes.

Sure.

At least check you guys out. I mean, I, you know, I remember 2009 is when I met Chris also for the first time, and I heard him speak at an event, and I thought, oh shit, finally a guy that makes sense when he talks about internet. And, uh, yeah, Chris is a good guy and, and, uh, built a good company. And, uh, he was very smart to, to grab you as quickly as, as he did.

Um, he saw, he saw where this was going. Yeah, in 2009 it was, it was not where it is today, but it was headed here. And he predicted that. And, and he predicted it because he understood that that there were so many of these companies coming along, Internet options, right? We call them Web 2.0, but these companies that were doing web services, right? And the need to leverage all of that stuff was something that he understood and that a small business that's focused in a very small local area could actually outperform the national players if they leverage these activities right, right? So what What we did in the first couple of years was really to just kind of figure that out, right? Spend some time understanding how to put all that together. And then as we did that, and as we, you know, we started literally with one client, and then we had two clients, then we had 10 clients, then we had 20 clients. And then once you get up to about 50 clients, it's really hard to kind of manage all of that. And that's when we started building the cloud and trying to put it all together into a to a place where we could manage it, make it more predictable and reliable, and get better outcomes for clients by using the information that we gather in that process, the data that we gather that helps to inform what our next steps will be with somebody. So it's been an evolution, and we've done that, you know, that same thing that small businesses have to do in order to kind of manage all of this stuff. We've been through that evolution ourselves, and that's why we are where we are.

Yeah. So, um, we've gone over just a little bit, but I want to ask you one last question, and that is, what is the number one thing, just one thing, that somebody looking for an internet marketing partner needs to look out for?

I think the biggest thing they need to look out for is when a company will not show you what they're doing. We see that a lot where, you know, I get customers come to me and they— and I say, well, let me take a look at your analytics so I can find out how things are working for you. And they go, I don't have my passwords, my company has that. Okay, if they won't give you a password, you need to get rid of them. They need to be able to show you what they're doing and how it relates to what you're getting. That's normal. There's nothing wrong with that. We've been doing it since the beginning. We expose everything to customers. You want to see how the sausage is made, we're more than willing to let you in and take a look at it. In fact, when we went to the cloud, one of the primary purposes of that was to expose all that work to the customer so that they could see that we were working on their behalf and how it was working. And, you know, so if they— if somebody won't do that for you, That's a bad thing.

Yeah, I agree. All right, well, Bob, thank you. I appreciate you joining us on the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. And until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing.

Thank you, Brian.

All right, so that's it for today's episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Let me ask you, Did it help you look at your business in a new way? Did it spark an idea or ideas you hadn't thought of before? Do you have a list of action items that you can take and implement into your business or your life today? I really hope so. Now, before you go, make sure you subscribe to the Wealthy Contractor Podcast so you get access to the latest episodes as soon as they're available. We're always striving to provide you with great content, so you don't want to miss what's coming up. And a favor, I'd really appreciate it if you'd go to iTunes and post a review of this podcast. Let us know how we're doing. And finally, we started The Wealthy Contractor as a resource to help you, the home improvement entrepreneur, regardless of where you are on the wealthy scale, get where you want to go. We want to provide you with the motivation, the confidence, the resources, and the tools so you too can live the life of the wealthy contractor. Now, the wealthy contractor is a place where it's okay for you to want it all. In fact, it's not only okay, it's encouraged. So until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group.