#212 Local Lead Generation Strategies That Actually Work (Home Service Marketing Tips)

This should be kind of fun. It's sort of like, what are the weird ways that we get leads locally and maybe trends? My current favorite trend is this local newsletter to home service business. So people are building these like media business funnels. I think it's a fun trend. I think it's like a different take. And I think as like people are trying to figure out, well, how do we drive leads in like a, in a challenging environment or like what are all the different ways? I think it's like an, Unique funnel. Welcome back to Owned and Operated. I'm supposed to start doing this at the very beginning, and I keep forgetting. Make sure you go to ownedandoperated.com, sign up for the newsletter. We're really growing the list. We're excited about it. We're at 40,000, and we're aiming for 100,000. So help me out. Sign up. We we honestly give away good information for for totally free. So like it's it's pretty easy. Anyways, what's up? Good to see you, Jack.

What's going on? How you doing?

Good, good. Yeah, I'm, I'm excited for this one. This should be kind of fun. It's sort of like, uh, what are the weird ways that we get leads locally? Or like, how are we driving leads locally? Or, and maybe trends in local leads, which I think would be kind of fun.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of, uh, strategies in this, uh, kind of realm that are really fun because it, it like scratches a secondary itch. And that secondary itch is like, hey, squirrel, go do this and go do that. And then it ends up being—

But it helps the core business.

It helps the core business.

It's a great driver.

And that's the key.

Yeah. At Wilson, we've saved a stupid amount of money by having AI help out with our call center. And the best tool out there that's making that happen is Avoca. So look, you've probably heard the buzz about AI CSRs. They seem to be everywhere, but not all AI CSRs are created equal. And Avoca seems to rise to the top every time. They answer every call on the first ring. They sound just like a real person, and they don't take breaks. But here's what makes Avoca really interesting in the real world. If a caller's getting heated, like they're getting frustrated or annoyed, Avoca knows. It hears the tone, emotion, and hands the call to a real human so you can still save that call. And this has been huge for us here at Wilson. There's no more churn or people yelling representative into the phone, and the backend is tight. It directly integrates into ServiceTitan at the gold tier level. That means it can handle reschedules, check tech arrival times, and look up customer info. It even helps with capacity planning. It's basically a CSR with perfect memory. On top of all that, it consistently makes our team better. We get post-call analytics, auto-tagging, and coaching tools so that no matter who's on shift, we deliver for our customers. If you're curious, go to avoca.ai. A-V-O-C-A. OCA.ai. Book a demo and tell them Owned and Operated sent you. My favorite trend that I've seen that I just think has been a lot of fun, I have a couple examples of it. I think it's been fun to witness. So it's this local newsletter trend. So Ryan Sneddon, I think that's how you pronounce it, Ryan Sneddon, He's on Twitter, and he he built this local newsletter called the Nap Town Scoop. He's in Annapolis, Maryland. There's 50,000 people that live in Annapolis, Maryland, and his newsletter has 22,000 emails.

It's like 50%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's crazy. It's crazy. And then I was listening to a podcast the other day, and it was this guy. I don't remember the guy's name, but he was building a local newsletter in. Just outside of New York, in some county outside New York, there's a million people in that population, and he had a power washing business. He who's that franchise? It's Aaron's franchise.

It's Rolling Suds.

Rolling Suds. So he has a Rolling Suds franchise, and he's building this local news publication as like here's what's happening in the town. Here's the new restaurant. Here's the whatever, and he's using that to drive leads to his home service business, which I just thought was like kind of interesting. So like. My current favorite trend is this local newsletter to home service business.

How does that— how is the actual driving mechanism work on that? Is it just at the bottom it says sponsored by X or what? Are they just like, put a little—

Yeah, I think so. Actually, I do have one more example. I'm sure there's a ton of them, but I do have one more example. There's a guy— oh, I'm forgetting his name. He's on Twitter, but he buys houses like he flips houses and that's like his thing. And he has a local newsletter on like, sell us your house basically is the ad. And he, I think he's in Denver.

Okay.

So yeah, so people are building these like media business funnels. And I have a friend named Justin, he actually built out the studio, but he's here in Kent and he has a property inspection business and he has this list of real estate agents, email list. It's like 3,000 real estate agents. And I'm like, you know, I have this trend in my head and I'm like, dude, like what are you doing with that list of 3? 'Cause like if you could harness that properly, like you could triple your, the business, like just off of driving more and more leads through this like media platform. So yeah, favorite current trend.

Yeah, I mean it's smart because you end up, I would assume that you end up selling advertising at some point, which covers the cost of running the program. Yeah, what's called negative CAC.

So like that philosophy is called negative CAC. So you actually get paid to acquire a customer. So you have a negative customer acquisition cost.

And then so you're getting paid to acquire customers, you're providing value, you have one person who's running the newsletter who's a good copywriter, you can do some graphic design. And then I'm still confused the mechanism on the backend though that would really draw, I mean, I'm sure it's there.

Sponsorships, like I haven't popped any of these open, but you know the guy from Nap Town Scoop, like I think he built like a porta potty rental business on the back of Nap Town Scoop. So like he built. So you know all these people are building these like publications and then building this like a business on the back. So this localized business like painting would probably kill, and you could do. Like a, here's the, like a design-centric local newsletter interviewing local designers and like touring distinct homes in your area or like showing them on Zillow and like giving feedback. I feel like there's a fun and like an interesting way to do it. Definitely. But you could be like saucy with like tearing apart house decor.

Yeah. Yeah, no, that's cool. I, I, I do really like that. I heard of that as like a business model a while back with Andrew from TinyCo. He was buying and building newsletters a long time, like 20—

Oh, totally.

20, 2019.

He built like Victoria, I don't remember what it's called. Victoria something or other.

Yeah.

And it, yeah, I think he spent a lot more on it 'cause it's print. So it was $250,000 was what he had into that project.

Yeah. But still, I mean, the point being is like this local newsletter has quite a bit of draw.

Yeah.

And then, I remember looking at a business back in 2021, 2022. It was 3 newsletters that were Houston, Austin, Dallas.

Interesting.

And they all had, I want to say, about 300,000 subs each.

Whoa, that's a big list.

Yeah, it was a huge list. And they were focused around the hotspots and the cool restaurants and that that was the value. And what do you think that—

What were they trying to sell for?

I was gonna say, what, what's your guess?

$10 million.

Nope. It was $2.1 or $3.1.

Okay.

So it was like within SBA range. 'Cause I remember being like, this would be really interesting, but I don't trust myself on the copy side enough to do it. But it was really cool. I remember seeing that and going, wow, this is, This is wild 'cause they were just using it for, you know, advertising. But you could theoretically run your own business on the back and send the same people to—

Yeah, you could, you could have sponsors plus your own business. You could use it for job posts. Like there was one, the Charlotte Observer. And the reason I thought $10 million is 'cause I was listening to a podcast the other day and they, they had 50,000 subs and they sold for 5. And which like I was like, holy smokes, that's kind of crazy. I think that was the— I think that was the business though. I don't think they had like a home service. That's why I didn't use it as an example. But they were doing like job posts. So like you could use it for recruiting, you could use it for a bunch of different stuff. But yeah, yeah, like I think it's a— I think it's a fun trend. I think it's like a different take. And I think as like people are trying to figure out, well, how do we drive leads in like a— in a challenging environment or like what are all the different ways that we can drive leads? I think it's like an, a unique funnel.

I think an easier version too, which, which now that you're mentioning it is something that we've paid for in the past is we've paid for sponsorship posts on a quote unquote new to Nashville Facebook group.

Yeah.

And so, and it's driven, it didn't drive a huge ROAS, but if you owned it, you wouldn't really need to drive any ROAS because You're not investing anything. If it's paying for itself through sponsorships, then, you know, if you did have a 2 or 3x, like, who cares? You have a 2 or 3x on zero. So yeah.

Facebook groups are like wild and you can buy them for almost nothing. But like John Matzner, obviously he's not home service related, but I feel like this totally applies for home service still. But he bought— he's got that, the recruiting thing. And he bought a bunch of Facebook groups around it, and that's what he was using to draw recruits from. And I think he bought them for like a couple thousand bucks. Like, it wasn't that big of a thing. And like, that's paid for itself a million times over because he would've, you know, had to like source those from different ways. So it was a fixed— it was top of funnel for him.

Nobody starts a Facebook group with the idea that they're gonna sell it for $100,000 2 years from now. But I mean, you know, from a distribution angle, it's a great opportunity because, right, you're providing value for new people that are heading into a, your location, b, your location. And then from a home service specifically on the HVAC or plumbing side, you're able to hit, you know, it's the same strategy what you do with mailers, right? You hit all the new people who moved into town with mailers and then they convert to you. You put them on membership, they never go anywhere. They're your customer forever. It's the same thing with that Facebook group is you drive people to new to Dallas and anybody who moves there and clicks that and goes, oh, I'm new to Dallas, let me see what's on, provide great value. And then on the backend, right, you post, hey, this is, this is a great company that we use. Here's a discount. They switch over and boom, you got a lifelong customer for next, next to nothing. I mean, Facebook groups are even easier. You just, There's no publication, there's no, um, like, come over here and subscribe. You just run up a group and yeah, have people start joining it.

Have you, have you ever looked into like, have you ever looked into buying one? I can't find out. I think you just have to like join 'em and then DM the moderator, be like, hey, you wanna, you wanna sell it for like $2?

That's what I did for—

that's what I did. Supposedly it's like 10 cents a per— it's like very cheap to buy these things.

It depends the person, right? So I tried to buy an HVAC one for, for like this podcast, like, hey, can we do an HVAC owners group? Yeah. That has 20,000, 30,000 people in it, buy it. But the guy was eccentric. He was an interesting individual and he just had a number to say. He's just like $120,000 for it. I was like, ah, no, I'm gonna pass on $3 on that person. 'Cause I don't, the problem when you buy 'em though, which with, Which I, what I think is it's probably a quick way to scale it. But starting from ground, what you get is you get to moderate who comes in.

Yes.

So less of an issue in like a new newsletter style.

I think that's the benefit of Asheville.

Yeah.

Is like, it's very curated.

Super curated.

So it's a smaller group than some of the larger ones, but like we don't have half the group being spammy people. It's like 1,000 contractors, which I think is just like better. And like the moment somebody spams, they get kicked out. So yeah, I like, I like our setup.

No, and that's my point is like you can do that, have less people but higher value groups. Yeah. Without dealing with, you know, spam and, and other people coming in. And so same with like the, if you did a New to Nashville or you did the Nashville Updates group, that's just news about Nashville or anything. You could really run with it. Best Contractors of Nashville. I tried to buy them as well, like Contractors of Nashville groups, just because there's a lot of referrals in there.

Totally.

And so if you could moderate the referrals, it was a dead group that had a bunch of spam posts, but it still had 20,000 people in it. Couldn't get ahold of the owner though.

That sucks. Well, yeah, I don't understand Facebook groups because it, I feel like I don't know how they get so big because they can get big. Like there's local Facebook groups with like 50,000 people and I'm like, literally, how? Like, I don't understand the alg. I think I don't understand the algorithm behind them, but I've listened to a podcast on this before because I thought about this for Wilson. I was like, oh, let's go buy like 10 local Facebook groups and like set up— there's a bunch of AI automation tools that you can use on Facebook groups specifically. That like notify you if someone says plumbing, electric, HVAC, and you can actually rip leads out of them. And like you can auto respond or you can auto DM. There's a bunch of stuff you can do. Like it's not that complicated. Yeah. With Reddit too, you can similar— you can do it with Reddit too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen the Reddit ones. Yeah. Or Reddit bots. There was a guy going around a while back that was selling Reddit bots that would Go into the Nashville Reddit group and anytime someone said anything about HVAC or plumbing, it would just—

Yep. Hey, ping. Use these guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I never did it because when I looked into it, it was a lot of like, hey, you know, my thing broke. I'm looking for some help or somebody like, not like help, like as in like a job, but, or that's actually even a better example. It'd be like, hey, I'm looking for an HVAC job. I don't have one. And then it would just like auto DM. There was no, It was long enough ago that AI wasn't where it's at today. So it was just like, yeah, couldn't pick a context. It had one message.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so I was like, oh, I'm, now I'm gonna post.

Call them.

Yeah. And I was like, I don't wanna get called by a bunch of random people for random things.

But no, I, I kind of, I'm into that. I'm into that idea too. This very like community driven, like own the list. You know, I, I think that's what's been kind of fun is like, uh, finding out what are the random unique way. It's almost community. You know, there's a quote from— I always loved the show 30 Rock. Did you ever watch that?

No.

It was so good. So I always loved that show. And there's a quote that I think about all the time when I'm thinking about like stuff like this, like, you know, newsletters, Facebook groups, whatever. And it's like, I think the show was struggling and they were like, what if we turned it into a magazine? And, and, but I think about that all the time because I keep seeing people basically doing that, like launching a newsletter, but then like the actual monetization backend is a power washing company. Or like roofing. I know someone who's thinking about doing it for roofing. Yeah, yes, it's an interesting thing.

You know what'd be really cool? And this is really off of left field; has nothing to do with us or this podcast.

Let's go. I'm here for it.

That would be a badass service in general. It's like you just hey Facebook group, local Facebook groups as a service, or local newsletters as a service.

There's a guy that does that. His name's TJ. I don't remember his last name, but like, no, that's a thing. So, so he's helping these guys launch these local newsletters for their home service business. Like, that's a thing right now. I think he's on his like 5th or 6th one. He tweets about it constantly and he's a cool guy. Like, I like him.

It's an amazing idea because honestly, the different— there's, there's no difference in them. The framework for one is gonna be almost the same framework for the other.

Yep.

The type of this for one is going to be this type of this for the other. You could probably write programs and automations that would make them all somewhat similar to an extent that—

And you know what's crazy is like the CAC, if we go over like CAC arbitrage, the emails are less than a dollar. So like it costs me $87 for a lead right now or $100 for a lead. Let's just say $100. So if it costs me $100 for a lead and I get an email for $1, Can I convert 1% of that list into a customer for Wilson or a customer for my power washing company or roofing company or whatever? But like, it's the same thing. It's cocktail TV. So like, am I better off doing this or am I better off going and buying that lead? And maybe the answer is both. But like, if I can convert 1 out of 100, then I'm ahead on my lead cost.

Honestly, it's better than that too, because it's negative CAC to LTV, wouldn't it be? Because you're actually—

If you get sponsors, yeah.

If you get one sponsor, right, which is significantly easy at scale. If you have 50,000 newsletter subscribers, there's someone who understands that CAC equation and pays you to also be a sponsor. And then now it's like a negative CAC to LTV, which just is ridiculous. I think the end-all be-all is like, What kind of volume do they receive from that?

Yeah.

Because then that's where the worth is.

I would assume it can't be much. I mean, I would assume it can't be like, you know, I'm gonna build a $100 million thing off of a local newsletter. I don't think, but I do think it's different. Well, and certainly less competitive. It's an owned, the same as Facebook group. Like what we both just came up with is like our obsessed was these are owned. Like we own a Facebook group, we own this email list, and like that means we can manipulate it differently than like I go to the radio station and advertise, maybe cover the same amount of eyeballs, but like one I own and totally control, which I feel like there's something to that.

I think it's huge. I mean, you've talked about getting off Google for a long time too, or separation, not getting off Google, but separation from our Google overlords.

Yeah, we want to be able to like if what happens if your GMB breaks, what happens if your LSA breaks?

Yeah.

And like a lot of companies would just like, that would be it. Like that would literally be it. I think it would damage us today, but it's not anything like what it would've done 2 years ago. Like today we have enough other things going on. We could still figure it out.

And then my last one that I think that we talked about this a really long time ago, we haven't been able to implement it fully yet, but I think a local community manager or a local community specialist. Somebody that just goes around to community events and pitches would absolutely—

that's our in-person marketing team. Yeah, the ROAS is good. It's, it's, uh, like, it's good. We— our ROAS last month was poor, like 4 times, so that's obviously not good. Um, we want to see 6 to 7, but that's— it's been 6 to 7 from January through April. May was 4. Same amount of leads, sales were down on it. We only sold, what, 140? But you know what's crazy is our field marketing team is responsible for 8% of our revenue year to date.

8. Field meaning that?

Like, that's canvassing and events. Yeah. The local people. Yeah. Like boots on the ground, like 8% of our freaking revenue.

That's huge.

That's insane. That's like a crazy number to me.

I think it's also an important part of like, what I've been obsessing about recently, and I still continue to obsess about it very heavily all day, every day, is the idea of going deeper in the community, not wider. So going wider, going into the market— Yeah.

Well, you have that one guy as an example that like no one can get into that community.

I looked at it again actually recently, 'cause I had that tool that we were talking about that lets me view competitors and their GMBs and everything like that. And I'm looking at them again, I'm going, damn, there's nobody in that market. But the reason there's nobody in that market is because they're in that market and they kill it. And how do you, like, how do you own a community like that? It's just so beautiful. It really is.

Yeah, that is solid.

And the ability to continue that, you know, and so community surveyor or whatever you were calling them, like, I think that is a huge portion, like the ability to go And sponsor for $500 a pool party at an HOA.

Yep.

That has, you know, a huge amount of that only has homeowners there in that location.

Yeah.

You bring a bunch of stuff, you can give a bunch of goodies away and drives. It drives because I do it in ours, but I would love to do it in every single HOA across.

Yeah.

Our city.

Yeah. Yeah. These were good, man. So like owning audiences, owning communities, my Current obsession. I'm yeah, big fan of like how do we figure out what are all the other ways to drive leads aside from just like PPC, LSA? I think it's probably on everyone's brain. The more like hey, we don't know what's going on with AI and search. Like I don't know. Like we don't know, and we don't know what's going on with Google. Like Google does have like a trillion reasons to figure it out, which is their market cap. But like you just don't know how they're them figuring out it's going to impact your business.

So.

Yeah, we've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out what are all the other ways that we can still win regardless of like leads.

Just answer the phone is one of those phrases that's always easier said than done. I know it was hard for me in my business because the phone always rings while you're out in the field trying to get something done, or it's 8 PM and you're trying to get your kids to bed. Well, I have the solution for you. I'm extremely excited today to announce Quick Staffers, your go-to solution for building a high-performing, cost-effective, customer service team. We are placing CSRs who have been pre-trained on proven home service SOPs and scripts, the same ones that Wilson and I use in our business. For a limited time, we're offering $500 off your initial placement costs for the first 10 signups. See link in the description below or head over to quickstaffers.com for more information. Yeah, especially in a changing market, right? AI and everything. Um, the supposed pendulum is going to swing back into a person-first onsite becomes more valuable. Who actually knows if that happens? I don't know. But if that does swing that way, having somebody already ready and locked up as a community manager—

I think it'll be novel. Yeah, I think it'll be novel. More valuable. I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

Like the American people have tended to optimize for the cheapest solution. Yeah. Over, you know, history.

That, that's very true. I, I definitely agree with that.

So, but I do think it'll help you connect. I do think it'll help you connect. It, it'll be a differentiator.

It'll definitely interesting. I, you know, I might, I'm probably gonna go down a rabbit hole today on this, so I appreciate all the, the help, John, on, on bringing this up.

Yeah. Well, I wonder if it becomes like Uber where that I saw a picture the other day.

Which part?

The Uber, or I, I don't know if Uber's in China or if they have their own thing. I assume it's like a white-labeled version or China-labeled version. But I saw this picture the other day of a Chinese— what do they call that? Rideshare driver, whatever. But he had like 20 phones on his dashboard, like 20 phones.

It's insane.

Because it's so competitive, you have to get your next ride as fast as you can. Humanly possible. And it— I feel like it kind of feels like it's moving that direction because the— like, what I'm imagining happens next is more and more AI, more and more enablement, which means faster and faster speed. So, you know, the games will be, well, whose AI can go faster? And then how do I have 20 phones set up to like— you know, we're gonna turn into like Chinese, you know, clickbait farmers, just like clicking on leads and getting it all done. So Fast. I, I could see it happening honestly kind of fast. Yeah. Because I, I think that it's, that's not that far off from what we're already doing.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Real estate creators are like that. They go out, they go to market, they find leads. Yeah. On market through advertising.

Yep.

And information. Then they take those leads and they direct them to contractors. Simple.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I could see it too.

Yep.

Changing, man. Changing. Gotta grow.

It's changing fast. Yeah, it's changing fast. It's pretty interesting.

It'll be fun. But, um, yep, that's sweet. I do love those ideas. I'm probably going to start one of those ideas now just because I'm curious and it doesn't feel like a huge amount of lift. So yeah, putting my— putting someone on that for my business.

Putting your hat in the ring. If you like what you heard, check out ownedandoperated.com. Sign up for the newsletter. There should be a link below. And thanks for joining us. Tune in next week.

Do we wanna talk about the workshop or not yet?

Oh yeah. John tells us we're supposed to talk about it. I think we just make that a, a reentry. So that's the end of the episode. We'll do the workshop real quick. Oh, and this would go as an ad break.

This is too clean. You know, this is probably an episode. I hope they keep all this. It's just me like sad that you're not making it this like dirty and terrible. Oh, we're—

John just corrected me, so we're now we're doing it. Okay. Workshop's coming up. Make sure you check it out. Ownedandoperated.com/workshop. I think tickets went live yesterday or the day before. Yeah, yeah. Yesterday or the day before. I think we already have like 10 busted seats. Yeah. Yeah. I almost want to like stop there. Like that feels like a great group size. Yeah. But check it out. Ownedandoperated.com/workshop. And the dates are August 19th.

August 19th.

Plus 3 days.

So yeah, awesome guys. Appreciate you.

Cool.