Nextdoor Marketing for Contractors: The Local Referral Engine for Plumbing, HVAC & Home Services

We're talking about the girl next door. And really what I mean by that, I mean Nextdoor, the platform.

I counted the amount of times that someone asked for a recommendation by trade, 3 or 4 for a plumber and like 1 or 2 for HVAC. That's a lot.

I've got clients that swear by it. They're like, this is like one of our best marketing channels. When I've talked to people, they said that the things that felt less salesy did better. They're looking for recommendations. They're looking for something that has like a high level of social proof.

It reminds me a lot of the people don't buy from businesses, People buy from people.

It doesn't really matter who you are right now. You should go claim or, or set up your Nextdoor business profile. It doesn't hurt you at all. It can only help you.

Welcome back. Welcome back to Owned and Operated. I'm on with Sam Preston, CEO of Service Scalers, and today we're talking marketing. What do we have up for us? What do we have cooking?

We were talking about the girl next door and really what I mean by that, I mean Nextdoor.

Nextdoor, yes.

The platform. And so how can you market on Nextdoor, drive phone calls and leads that drive you revenue? And how can we maximize that platform to get the most out of it?

Yeah, Nextdoor is an annoying platform, I think, for a number of reasons, but from like a home service entrepreneur's perspective, It feels like it should work, right? Like it's, it's one of those, like literally every customer I have is on this platform. They're constantly asking for recommendations and it still feels like it's hard to get to function. So this'll be fun. I've got some thoughts. I'm, I feel like I'm just here gonna learn 'cause I don't know that we've cracked the code. I see what other people are doing though. Yeah.

I mean, if you don't know what Nextdoor is, Nextdoor is an app that people sign up for in specific neighborhoods. And it's nextdoor.com.

Yeah. It's like, yeah.

Nextdoor.com. And you can only be a part of that group if you live in that neighborhood.

Yeah, they like send you a postcard to verify your address. And yeah.

My wife and I were both a part of our own, and people are talking about all different types of things. Like—

I lost my dog.

Like kids that are—

Why didn't they clean their beds?

Riding their bikes.

This morning. Yeah.

Yeah.

Someone broke my window. Yeah.

Exactly. You know, the youngins are driving way too fast or, you know, we're in an HOA. So, you know, people are always complaining about some nonsense.

It's roughly as petty as you think it would be.

Like, it really is.

Yeah. Nextdoor and Facebook groups, I feel like, have really opened my eyes as to like who the people are that live near me. And I wish that my eyes weren't opened.

You could either sit down and watch Love Is Blind or— Or you can just get on Facebook groups or Nextdoor.

For sure.

And just as much drama either way.

You could be entertained, yeah.

Yeah. But also included in all that drama, there's a way to make money. And that's what we like to do is find those money honeypots. And so, and that is the recommendations. Karen, my Nextdoor neighbor, will post something like, which her name really is Karen.

That's nice.

Hey, my plumbing's out. Anybody know a good plumber around here?

Yeah.

So we get asked.

I would say often. Yeah, often. So I did this thing in 2022 or '23, and I haven't done it since, but I opened up Nextdoor and I counted the amount of times that someone Asked for a recommendation by trade. So it was like there was 11 requests for a painter in a it was a week, like a seven-day time period. Four or five requests for an electrician. I think there was around that for a handyman too. Three or four for a plumber and like one or two for HVAC. And that's a lot for a week. Like that's a lot of just like and that's just the neighborhood that I could see, which is like not a big neighborhood. So yeah, it was it was really interesting. Like people are actively on there looking for you or me or whoever, which is pretty cool. Are you tired of paying money on leads that don't convert? With papercall.io, you only pay for a lead when your phone rings. No junk leads, no bots, and no guesswork. Just real calls from real customers. papercall.io helped our company achieve a 5x ROI in just 60 days. If you're ready for marketing that actually delivers, Head to paypercall.io and book a free demo today. That's paypercall.io. Get more calls, not excuses. Click the link in the description to get started.

Yeah, and another— and it's, it's kind of like Google in the sense that you can find intent, whereas there's not a lot of other places that you can find intent like that. Yeah, uh, from an ad space perspective. So, um, it is one that You know, you absolutely can drive it. And everyone's different in every area, right? Like some people are way more active in it in certain areas. Some— I've got clients that swear by it. They're like, this is like one of our best marketing channels there is.

Yeah.

And others that hate it and won't go touch it because it's the devil. So you have to figure out what it is for your, for your market.

So right now we use it primarily for like reputational Like monitoring, because if someone's gonna complain about your business, they're gonna complain about it on Nextdoor or in a Facebook group or in a Google review, but like more likely than not, Nextdoor or a Facebook group. So you wanna make sure you're like monitoring your reputation on these platforms because like someone can mention you and like it might not be good. So then you wanna respond and like make sure you handle that. What I see people doing well, and this is not what we're doing well, is a very like narrative, interactive, almost like storytelling marketing.

Mm-hmm.

There's this guy and he's like a 1 or 2 truck plumbing operation. And every day, I think Nextdoor is his primary marketing channel. Every day he's like treating it like his like public Instagram. You know, he's like, hey, here's a job I did today. It's a toilet or it's a shower replacement or it's whatever. And dude, people eat it up. It's kind of wild. It's just this like, here's what I'm doing. It's crazy to read the comments. Everyone's like, oh my God, come on out to my house. Like, do that here. And like, it's a really interesting style of marketing versus like, we've tried paying for it. I'm curious what you think about this. We've tried paying and it's never been that good.

Yeah. I mean, it's extreme home makeover except the, you know, reverse, you know, exclude the extreme part. It's like literally people love seeing it anyways. So yeah, you— the— when I think of marketing on Nextdoor, I really see it in the 3 different places. One is posting, um, 2 is outreach via posts, uh, AKA you did what you did. You, you search in the search bar for plumbing and you see all the time people are asking for plumbing and you, you, you, uh, you know, comment your profile or Better yet, use somebody else. I saw this guy who was like, his wife would always comment his handyman business and you know, that's how he would get so much business. And you're right, they're like one truck handyman company. And then the third is ads. So those are the 3. From an ad perspective, I have not run ads on this platform, so I can't come in and say like, this is like how successful the ROI is.

Mm-hmm.

But I've talked to people that have preparing for this podcast. I wanted to make sure I was able to bring something. And the thing that they were saying is, one, you have to make sure it goes, that you're getting clicks back to your website. Obviously you have to make sure you're tracking and that tracking goes in not just from how many leads and phone calls and clicks am I getting to my website, but is this turning to actual revenue and can you tie it back to a, you know, an ROI that makes sense? But then you are going to get a lot of people that are unqualified because it's not as targeted as something like PPC. And so you are going to have to sift through those people that are coming through ads and make sure that that cost per lead actually makes sense for what you're doing.

Were they doing highly visual? I don't know much about the ad platform. So I think about TikTok where, hey, it has to be a video, it has to be It doesn't have to be that amazing, but the hook has to be good. By amazing, I mean video quality. The hook and all that has to be really good. What about Nextdoor? Is it very photo-based? Is it text-based? What is it?

Yeah, I think it's both. I think you can go in and do visual. I think it's much more set up like Facebook than it is Google from a visual standpoint. When I've talked to people, they said that the things that felt less salesy did better. So just like, you know, the before and after pictures type of things.

Yeah.

For one, somebody that's looking for your services, like just showing them what it was and what it is now, like I think that works really well. And things that felt more like an organic post, like you're talking about, like the narrative story, I think that's going to work out better for you in this instant because of the intent that somebody has on that group. Like they're looking for recommendations. They're looking for something that has like a high level of social proof. They don't want to be sold. That's why they went to Nextdoor. They went out of their way to avoid something like Google.

Yeah.

You know, 'cause they wanted to find that local, oh, my neighbor had a really good experience with them. Let's do this again.

It's the elevated yard sign. Okay. If I was starting on Nextdoor, I think I would probably, so actually we started doing this on Facebook. Where we started doing this, and we're using a, like a, I don't even know what they call themselves, like a narrative storytelling agency or something like that. But they're just posting every day on Facebook. And it's like a very personal, like you can see it. We're like, hey, it's me, I'm John, I'm Brandon. Here's my family. We run a plumbing company. Here's the different services that we have. And it's like just pure organic posting into Facebook groups. Which is a— I think Facebook groups and Nextdoor are like really similar. It's ridiculous. Like we're getting 1 to 2, 3 leads a day. And people are like, hey, like, yeah, my electrical panel needs switched. And that's like a big job, right? But yeah, so it's working, this organic storytelling and like personal storytelling. And I think Nextdoor and Facebook groups are kind of a— it reminds me a lot of the people don't buy from businesses, people buy from people. So this like, hey, here's me, here's my wife, here's my kids. Like, we run this plumbing company. Like, here's the services that we offer and here's some pictures of like us as human beings. It's hilarious how much it's working. Like, we're having to figure out like, what do we do with these Facebook DMs? Which isn't a problem that we really thought we were gonna have, but like, we have it.

Nextdoor really feels like Facebook groups and Google My Business profile.

Oh yeah.

Had a baby called Nextdoor.

100%.

Because it has like the big like social element of groups.

Yeah.

But then you also get your business profile.

Well, and you get rated. Like we've been the Nextdoor top rated for 5 or 6 years now. So like they rate you and there's this award system and you put it on the window of your business and yeah, no, totally. Yeah, that's a great comparison.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first off, it doesn't really matter who you are right now, you should go claim or set up your Nextdoor business profile. It doesn't hurt you at all. It can only help you to have that profile set up. And then the second thing I would say is I would treat it like its own platform, similar to that you do to your GMB, and focus on posting to it on a regular basis. You could probably post the same stuff that you do to your GBP to your Nextdoor. But then also, if you really are seeing a good number of leads and you want to focus, like John's talking about—

Yeah.

Starting to come up with that narrative basis type of post. I saw a guy who, who did a post where he did a lawn for free from this older lady who had a lot of health issues, and he posted about it and it blew up.

Oh yeah.

Like viral type of posting, right? And I was just talking to a friend who did something similar with roofs. I would try to play that game if you're going that route of doing some, you know, you know, just socially good narrative, Good Samaritan type of, you know, things in your neighborhood and try to get that to go viral.

I think that makes a lot of sense. All right. So really showcasing your work, pretty narrative, a lot of photo, as personal as you can get, which I think is harder for larger businesses. And yeah, definitely reputation monitoring because that's important. It reminds me a little bit of Reddit. Where like Reddit, like, no, I don't know. Like if someone's listening and they market successfully on Nextdoor, let me know, 'cause I would love to hear about it. I feel like I would love to understand how it works, 'cause again, it feels like it should work. Like all my customers are on there, right? But it feels like Reddit where like Reddit as a culture, Reddit hates advertising and it's really hard to advertise on Reddit because they're all like anti-capitalist. Like they don't wanna see it, they don't want anything to do with it. So you have to be like very narrative and storytelling in order to drive Reddit, which we don't drive Reddit successfully, but like, that's just what I— how I understand that platform to work. So maybe that's the case with all these social platforms is it's a lot less, it's a lot less like, here's my coupon and a lot more, here's my story. A lot of home service companies rely on referrals and they just don't have a great way to manage them. Most customers are pretty happy to recommend you, but without reminders or tracking, those referrals kind of disappear. So ReferPro helps keep that from happening. It automates referral collection, attribution, and payouts so your customers actually follow through and you can focus on the work that matters. Referral leads convert faster, cost less, and help your business grow without buying more ads. You can see how it works and book a demo at referpro.com or through the link in our show notes. Mention Owned and Operated for 20% off and a discounted onboarding. Because most people are willing to refer you. They just need a little help remembering.

And I think there's a lot of these platforms, right? You have so many now that are very much like that. You've got TikTok, you have your Facebook groups, you have your Nextdoor, you have your, you know, maybe Snapchat, I don't know. But you have a lot of these places that are, or Instagram would be another one, that are looking for that narrative-based communications on like why we should work with this this company. And I think if you're big enough, it like, there's like an awkward stage where you're like, when you're small enough, you should absolutely be taking advantage of that because bigger companies can't. It's hard to pay somebody and to get them to do it well.

Yeah.

At a certain size. And then suddenly you get big enough to where you probably should be paying somebody to create that narrative because what you wanna do is you want to be the first person that people think of when they're in your specific area. So I think it's at some point you do get to that size where you are, hey, we're actively going to go after all these social platforms and we are actively going to be paying somebody whose job is to post and create narratives and create content for them.

Yeah. I mean, I wonder if there's a way to do it internally where, because so we have content creators and they're on the marketing team, but as I'm thinking about this, I think the personal side of it is interesting. And I bet a lot of the fast-paced time-lapse type content would be interesting, which we do. But I bet you could just incentivize your field team to do this. So like, hey, if you— I bet you could find— I bet there's one guy or girl in every department that we have that would love— they would think it's super fun to take videos every day. And I think that that would probably do way better than sort of like a controlled thing, 'cause I think that that's the stuff that probably works is like, hey, here's what I did today. And like, just take a picture and like, you could probably, I don't know what the comp plan is to set that up, but like, that would be sweet.

100%. Yeah. Or maybe just like create, you know, some sort of an award for the person that did the best that month. or something to that effect. But yeah, I think the organic, it doesn't have to be perfect, specifically with the younger generation as we are getting older, John. It's going on. That younger generation's not worried about as much of perfection and they're worried about more of volume and something that looks real because AI can do, AI can give you perfect, you know?

Yeah.

And so they want to see the real thing. So yeah, I'm seeing, I think that would work really well.

Yeah, I just wrote that down 'cause I think I like that. Idea a lot. Um, and I think it could be as easy as like an extra like incentive if you're a content creator on the team or, um, I don't know. I, I, I feel like there's like a way to do it where people would be into it. Yeah, this is a funny idea. I, okay, I like this a lot. All right, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm, I'm gonna run with this, but you know, I've, I've followed some of those. We'll report back. Yeah, we'll report back. But I mean, those channels get humongous, like the Direct Tradesperson channel, like There's some Instagrams where there's these like electricians, and it's literally just them doing their job, or like septic pumping. Like that one, those ones always go big. And obviously, I think that's an easy way, similar to the whole roofing thing that you said, or the lawn care thing. Like if you can just make content a part of like not the marketing team, but a part of the actual field operations, I think that's the ticket for Nextdoor. Facebook groups, Reddit, where it's like just, it's pure content creation and not really paid ads.

Yeah, 'cause, you know, like any other organic strategy, you have to be posting content on a regular basis for it to work.

Yeah.

And so you have to have enough content to make it work.

All right, so people wanna do Nextdoor, what do they do? Like, what's the things that people are like typically messing up on?

Yeah, so first off, again, just to take it back, there are the 3 different ways that you can, win at Nextdoor or market at Nextdoor. One is going to be ads, 2 is going to be posting organically, and 3 is going to be posting or commenting on other people's posts about your business profile or having others comment about your business profile, right? So those are the 3 things. One mistake that we've seen is obviously running ads without a business profile.

Yeah.

Or running ads and not posting organically. Again, this, this community is about being real.

Yeah.

It's not about ads as much. So that seems to be something that I keep seeing there. When you are running ads, making sure that you are testing creatives, right? And so we run lots of ads for ourself, but we also run it for our clients. And that ad copy always has to be changed. And we always have to test new ad copy to see what is going to get us the best click-through rate and what's gonna get us the best conversions, what's gonna get us the best quality leads. quality clients or customers. So you have to be able to change those.

You're guys not doing Nextdoor, right? Nextdoor is a self-managed platform.

It is, but it is relatively close to GBP. And so I wonder if we could. So what we couldn't do is that narrative-based stuff. That's hard.

Yeah, that's hard. I mean, it has to be good. And I think that's what makes I think that's what makes it high ROI is like the narrative-based, like, 'cause it's hard, it's hard to do. And because it's hard to do, I bet it works better.

Yeah, it would be hard and very expensive for me to do for other people. And so, and honestly, like even at that point, we probably still wouldn't do as good of a job as someone on your internal team or like your tech actually making content about something. Yeah, no, I agree.

And I think even the smaller the business, like the better, like that one guy would probably kick my butt. The guy who's like the plumber, he would eat my lunch all day on Nextdoor.

Exactly, exactly. But some of the basic stuff like just posting, because people are pushing their photos into their CRM, we're able to grab those CRM photos and post that to Nextdoor, not a problem. And then if we can monitor the ads and posting, I bet you that's something we could do. But I guess this is a— what is it, foreshadowing to what could happen?

Yeah.

But going on some of the basic stuff, this is pretty much everywhere. But if you're not responding to comments fast enough or if you're not responding to leads fast enough, it doesn't matter what platform you are on, you're not going to win. So if you're running ads on Nextdoor but you aren't watching for those leads coming in, you're just wasting money. So don't do it. Yeah. And I think that obviously the last one would probably be breaking the rules. Don't get kicked off of Nextdoor because you've broken some sort of community guideline. That would suck and be wasteful. So yeah, I think those are the common mistakes we're seeing and hopefully that's helpful.

No, I think it is. And I think that one guy's probably doing $1 million off Nextdoor, literally just posting pictures of what he did that day. Which that seems really powerful. So I think the juice is worth the squeeze if you can figure out how to make good content. And the way we've historically approached it, I just think is fundamentally wrong. It's like, hey, here's a coupon, here's a whatever. I don't think anybody gives a shit about it. I don't even give a shit about that. And I'm the ones running the ads.

Yeah.

I think the best way to do it is this organic content creation. So Yeah, this was helpful. I think my big takeaways that I'm gonna work on after this is like, can I incentivize techs to be content creators? Like pay them extra an hour or like come up with a way to do that so I can get better content? Can I post regularly? And you just brought up a good idea of like, yeah, posting photos, like pulling photos from the CRM and just doing before-afters. That's what that one guy's doing. And like—

Yeah.

Honestly, like we do that with our GBP all day. It's like automated where it's like pulls stuff and puts it onto the Google. Why couldn't I do that with Nextdoor? That makes a lot of sense. And that's literally all that guy's doing. So I think those are my big takeaways here. So yeah, this was helpful. This was helpful. I think I'm gonna go wreck some Nextdoor, see if I can eat somebody's lunch.

Do it. All right, so if you had to rank Nextdoor in your current status, not this dream status of you doing it and wrecking it, but like currently—

Well, yeah, I mean, for us it's like a—

What is it for you?

It's like a 0 or like a 1. Like it's important. We get a lot of leads from it, but we can't control it. We get a lot of leads 'cause the neighborhood recommends us, which like that part's really good, but like I can't grow it or scale it. And it's more like monitoring. I see what it could be, but the lift is high to get there. And so like we don't do it, but like obviously we should do it. So I wanna say it's a 1, I think, but it's 'cause we're doing it badly. I think it's 1 because like we're not executing well.

Yeah.

Whereas I think, you know, like I have friends that are absolutely delivering on like TikTok right now or direct mail.

Yeah.

And like, we're not. So like, we're also doing that really badly, but like, you know, we deliver in other areas. So I think if you could do good organic content, my guess is it's like a 7 or 8. Like it's a very like high potential for viral, deep, like direct interaction with customers or potential customers. Like, it's really good.

Yeah, I would probably agree. I would probably rank it higher, at the very least higher than you are, mostly because of the community factor. I think those leads that come through are actually going to close at a better clip.

Oh yeah.

Because it feels like a referral. So now the reason why I'm going to bring it down, I'm going to give it a 4. The reason why I'm going to bring it down is because it's so situational. So it's not just about your location because your location and your community will matter whether they use Facebook groups or whether they use this, you know, Nextdoor. But it's also about your size because there's a certain small enough size where it matters and it can crush for you. But then there's like that middle side where like it's not actually worth your time to go do it until you are big enough to where it's worth your time to pay somebody else to go do it. So I'm gonna give it a 4, but like for the right person, this could be like the entire enchilada if you want it to be.

Yeah, I mean, I think for that one plumber, like this is all he does and it's probably a million-dollar business. Yeah, I'm like actively documenting this 'cause I feel like this is exactly what I'm gonna go work on. This is gonna be dope. Good episode. If you like what you heard, hit like, hit subscribe, and give us a 5-star review wherever it is that you listen to podcasts.

Thanks.