4 Must-Do Marketing Strategies for Moving Companies

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It's Luis Massaro. And welcome to another episode of the Moving Mastery Podcast.

This podcast is all about helping you reach that next level in your moving company. And we do that by sharing with you processes and strategies and ideas that get you thinking bigger on what's possible. You know, I grew my business from working out of a truck rental yard all the way to $20 million a year. And I want to help share those strategies with you so that you could reach that next level in your business, whatever that is for you. And, you know, it's not all about just making more money. It's about profiting in your business and thriving in your life. And we do that by, you know, being able to set up those systems, set up those processes so we could step away and work on our business and not be every single day stuck in the grind so that we have some time to enjoy with our families and just enjoy life and the fruits of our labor. And today, I am just so excited to talk to you about something that is gonna help you reach that next level in your business. And it's called Smart Moving Software. This is a company that I co founded with an amazing partner and group of programmers that have just built an amazing platform. You know, this is a software that runs your entire moving business. Not only runs it, but truly optimizes it. You know, one of the things that I the most is that you have just ultimate clarity into your numbers. I mean, as soon as you log in, you've got a dashboard right there that just tells you everything that's going on. You know, one of the things that I've realized over the years that helps moving companies really get to that next level of success is being able to know their numbers. And, you know, without a system that pulls everything together, it could be really, really challenging. And Smart Moving just has all the reports and all the information dialed in the way that you need it to be. And I'm just so excited to tell you about it today. Go check it out, get a demo, go to smartmoving.com, sign up for a free demo, check it out, and listen. If you don't have a CRM in this modern day of moving, you need a CRM. If you've already got a CRM and you're just looking for an upgrade, something that's more streamlined, something that gives you all the tools that actually matter, go to smartmoving.com, check it out. It's gonna help you do everything from the minute you get leads to your sales process, to customer service. To dispatch, to following up with your crews, to handling your numbers and your books and reports. Everything you need is there in a streamlined, systematic, automated process. And I'm just so excited to be a part of it. I'm so excited to finally have a solution to offer to moving company owners that for years were asking me, Louis, what platforms did you use? What softwares did you use? And the truth is, I used a lot of different stuff that I had to tie together because there wasn't something like smart moving that allowed me to just do everything in one place. And now that we have that, I mean, we've got customers at all different levels using this software. You know, companies that, you know, maybe they're just starting out, companies that have been in business for 10 years, they've got 10, 15 trucks, we've got nationwide franchises that are running their entire operation off of smart moving. So I want you to go check it out today because I'm so excited about it. It's called Smart Moving Software. Get your free demo@smartmoving.com and without further ado, let's jump into this episode of the Moving Mastery podcast.

All right, what's up, everybody? And welcome back to the Moving CEO Scaling series. I'm Louis Massaro, founder and CEO of Moving Mastery, where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes in their business to increase profits, reduce stress, and live a better quality of life. We've been going, this is the fifth day in this 14 day series to scale your moving company, take what's working and increase it and expand it, right? But before we scale, we need to do a couple of things. First, those of you that have been with us, you already know, first thing we need to do is we need to stabilize, right? Take what's there now and just get it stabilized right now we're coming out of moving season. The wheels might feel like they're falling off the bus and we need to stabilize all that. We need to get things smooth. Then we need to systematize, which we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about systematizing your lead generation, your marketing, so that it's systematic. It doesn't have to be something that's up and down and up and down, right? Then once we have that stuff in place, then we can scale. And the reason and why I'm doing this is because I know coming out of moving season, people are on that high of like, wow, man, I'm so busy. We're crushing it. Let's go and expand and do this in multiple locations. Let's start franchising, let's scale up, which is great, right? I help companies do that all day long, but we just need to make sure we hit those first two steps first. Right? We need to stabilize, we need to systematize, then we're going to scale. So right now we're still in the systematized portion of this series, this 14 day series. This week we're going to be getting into systematizing your marketing, your sales, your operations, customer service, accounting. Then we'll start to get into scaling, what it takes to actually grow open multiple locations, become a hometown dominator, get into different lines of moving, different types of moving.

You know, whatever it is scaling is for you, it's different for everybody. There's many paths. We'll talk about that. There's many paths and ways to do it and make money. A lot of people say, Louis, what's the best way to make money? And it depends, right? We'll talk about some of that later on in the week or possibly into next week. So today we're talking about systematizing your lead generation. This is so important because, you know, a lot of times people will start with some leads and then things get busy and then they pull back on some leads, or worse, things get slow. And in order to help with cash flow, they pull back on their marketing dollars, which is one of the biggest mistakes you could possibly make. Right. In other words, if you're running out of fuel, Right. You don't stop getting fuel. You need more fuel to keep going. Right. The problem is we don't know what's working and what's not working. That's the biggest obstacle, right? That was my biggest obstacle. You know, when I started marketing was pretty easy. You know, I put a yellow page ad in and the phone rang, did some direct mail, did some other things, started to build up and it was pretty easy.

But then 2007, 2008 comes around, you know, and the smartphone comes out. That's how I remember it. That's kind of the time frame the smartphone comes out. More people start shifting and doing their searches for services online, less people are going to the yellow Pages, you know, and at that time, I was spending about $250,000 a month. $250,000 a month between all my low cages, all my locations, just in yellow pages. And now it's not working as well as it was. Right. The calls aren't coming in the way that they were because not everybody's going there. And so in that Time period, I had to go on a mad dash scramble to really learn marketing, right? To learn what it's all about. I had to learn about SEO, I had to learn about leads. I had to learn about pay per click. I had to learn about direct response, everything about marketing. Because I had this business that I had built, locations nationwide. At that point, we were doing long distance.

And storage in all of those locations. And it was kind of do or die at that point. It was like, wow, we're spending this money. We're not getting the results we need to make something happen. So I literally took myself to school and learned everything I could about marketing. I hired companies, I went to seminars, I read books. I did everything that I could possibly do. And, you know, in that time, it allowed me to diversify my marketing. It allowed me to pull back the money that was being spent all in one place. My eggs were all in one basket. And from that, it really left me in a vulnerable spot, right? So I had to start diversifying. And some of the things I'm going to share with you today, these are real principles behind moving. You know, a lot of times people will say, you know, Louis, what's the hot lead source? What should I be using right now? What's that hot lead source? And for me to give you that and not give you the principles behind.

Marketing is like, you know, me just giving you a stock tip here and there. Maybe some win, maybe some lose, maybe they go up, maybe they go down, but you have no idea about the game of investing. And so today I want to teach you the foundation and how to systematize your marketing. Because lead sources are going to come, and lead sources are going to go, meaning there'll be something really hot today, but tomorrow it might not be that hot. But unless you know these principles, you won't know for a long time that it's starting to fizzle out, right? It's starting to not be good. Or you might have a lead source that's working really, really well, and you don't realize it because something in sales is off, right? It's all interconnected. And so, you know, my philosophy with this whole thing is sales is what makes it happen. Marketing is the fuel for sales, right? Marketing is what just gets them to the door. Then you need to take them from there, provide them that estimate, lead them by the hand to do business with your company. And too many times I see people blame the marketing. Those leads suck. Those leads suck. I tried those. They don't work. Do the leads not work or Is there a broken sales process? Tomorrow we're going to talk about your sales process. So this all ties together. But today I want to give you what you need to do to systematize your marketing so there's no more ups and downs, there's no more guesswork, there's no more feeling like I'm not a marketer, I need to hire a marketing company.

Once you understand these principles, maybe you hire a marketing company the same way that you hire a dispatcher to do something that you know how to do, but you're choosing to delegate that out. But you're not hiring a marketing company because you're like, I have no idea what's going on. Please save me, please rescue me. That's the worst feeling to be in. The worst feeling. So today we're going to talk about systematizing your marketing, what you need to do. Hope you guys got your pen paper ready to go. Alright, so let's get into this first thing, right? The first, first foundational piece of all your marketing.

Is ROI based marketing. ROI based marketing. ROI stands for return on investment. Return on investment. We need to shift marketing in our minds from thinking social media, commercials, you know, billboards, to. No, no, no, no. Marketing all boils down to numbers on a report, to a spreadsheet, to numbers in your CRM. It all boils down to what's the return on the investment If I spend $10,000 with this company for leads or for marketing or whatever marketing services, what's my return for the money that I spent? If I spent 10,000 and I get back a hundred thousand, okay, what did I, what percentage of my revenue of the hundred thousand did I spend to get that business? In this case it would be 10%, right? The amount that you spend in order to get business is the magic metric that you need to be looking at for marketing. Okay, so if you did, you know, 100,000 in business and you spent, you know, $7,000 to get that business from a particular lead source, you spent 7%, right? Your goal is to keep all your marketing under 10%. Now that's obviously it's a little bit different for everybody. You know, some people could afford to go a little bit more, some people can't afford to go more than that because, you know, they have other fixed costs in their business. You know, we only have 100% of the pie. And some people have got a really expensive warehouse lease without the storage revenue unfortunately to cover it. Right? Or they've got, you know, three extra employees in the office that maybe they don't really need.

Others. Keep it really lean, right? Really, really lean. Their expenses are low. And so rule of thumb, without me looking at your, you know, your P and L, keep it under 10%. Okay? So you could do this with a spreadsheet. You could do this. You know, my software, Smart Moving, gives you this report every month, looks at exactly each individual lead source and exactly how it's working for you, right? Everything in your marketing needs to be based on this. So before you go and start calling for. Because maybe you cut off some marketing because it was so busy in the summer, right? And now you're gonna start looking to bring on more lead sources, more opportunities to generate business.

Make this your first priority, okay? Figuring out how to get the ROI number for each individual marketing source. Once you have that down, that's the foundation. That's it. That's the baseline right here. Everything without this, it's, you know.

Listen, you might hear from someone else, oh, I use this lead source. It works. I use that lead source. It works. Different lead sources work better than others in different cities and at different times. Meaning, you know, somebody might be in Cincinnati and somebody might be in San Diego.

This guy tells this guy, hey, I'm using this lead source. And he tries it out and it doesn't work for him.

Or somebody's using that lead source for local moves. Somebody's using it for long distance. It works in one, it doesn't work in the other. Or, you know, these lead companies, when I say lead company, it could be any, it could be third, third party lead providers all the way to Yelp, all the way to direct mail, all the way in between, okay? Anything to generate leads. They can work differently at different times of the year and they could be really good and then lose their effectiveness. Because all a lead company that's selling you leads is doing is they're out there trying to get eyeballs on them from people that are moving so they can capture that lead and sell it to you. So sometimes they're doing a really good job of it. Sometimes Google changes some algorithms. They dip down. There's a lot that goes into that, but if you're not watching this number, you're not gonna know. You may get a lead and lead source in the first month. You're like, man, this thing is killing it, right? And then your, your mind, it's like, that's the best lead source. And you don't look at it again. But meanwhile, a few months later.

Starts going down, right? And you wonder what's happening. Takes a while to catch up to that. Takes a while to, you know, by the time a lead comes in, jobs don't get booked, your cash flow is affected. You know, you could be way down the line before you really start to go. Something's up here. Something's wrong. And even if you could sense something's wrong, without this, you've got nowhere to go. Figure it out. You've got nowhere to go. Look, all right, this starts everything. You need an ROI report, marketing. ROI report.

Hey, my friend, it's Louis, and I'm just hopping in really quick to remind you to go get your free demo.

Of smart moving software.

Smart Moving Software is a company that I co founded that is quickly becoming the leading moving software in the moving industry. And I'm super excited for you to check it out. So go get your free demo today. Just go to smartmoving.com, that's smartmoving.com and sign up for your free demo and check it out today.

Now, how do we manage the marketing? Remember, I want to break this down and kill the stigma of I need to be a marketer, right? I need to know how to design something for social media, and I know how to like. No, you don't. You need to understand the numbers and then understand what to do about those numbers. That's it. That's it, right? All your marketing, all you're trying to do is build trust and capture leads. Build trust with what you're putting out there, capture leads and make sure that it's being done in a profitable way. Okay? So once you've got that report, your next thing to do is test, track and tweak.

Everything.

Test, track and tweak everything. So what does that mean? That means that when you have ROI reports to run stuff through.

Right, to go, is it good or is it not good? And you could identify that quick.

Everything changes, right? Everything changes. So what you do now is you test everything. If there's a lead source that you've heard of that you know about, test it, try it out, right? Because now you have a method for identifying if it works or if it doesn't work. Okay?

So you're going to test it out, then you're going to make sure. By the way, your method for knowing if it works or doesn't work is your ROI report. Okay? So now you've also got to make sure that you're tracking all of this. Okay? You need a CRM. You know, I would love for you to be on smart moving software, but you want to track all this meaning two things.

Every call and every lead that comes in to your company, you need to know where it came from, okay? And the days of saying, where'd you hear about us? Over, okay? Because what happens is, you know, people will, you know, people will, I heard about you on Google. And your sales team will say, okay, and they'll put down Google. But what's on Google? When somebody goes to Google, okay, when somebody goes to Google, they can end up in so many places, right? And so where did they really find you? Did they go to Google and end up on your AdWords campaign? Did they go to Google and end up on your Google my business? Did they go to Google and end up on your organic. Did they go to Google and end up on Yelp? Did they go to Google and end up on a lead provider? You see what I'm saying? Like, we need to know exactly where they came from. So by tracking, you do this two ways. You make sure that every website that you have, like, hopefully when you're running your main website, you have your website. And then when you're doing any AdWords or Bing ads or Facebook ads, any type of pay per click marketing, you've got a landing page separate. That landing page is unique to that campaign, right? And on that page, you've got a tracking phone number that you know that phone number. The only people that ever call that phone number called from that page.

When they submit a request for a quote. Get a free estimate like you have on your website. When it comes into your CRM, your software, it says that it came from that page so you could link what came in from that page to what you paid to get that page seen and what your cost per lead was to identify what your ROI is for that particular lead source, right? So you want to have tracking on all of your sites. You want to have track tracking phone numbers, right? You want a different phone number on the side of your truck than you do on brochures that you're leaving at apartment complexes. Why? Because when the phone rings, you know where they came from. You're not counting on your sales team to say, oh, where'd you hear about us? That's great.

At the beginning, right? But if you want us, we're talking about systematizing, right? We're talking about creating a machine that you can like operate, right? It's like, how do I set up a marketing machine that's, that's automated and simple? This dump. This is it. This is how. This is how we're doing it right now, right? You get your ROI based marketing, you test stuff out, you run it through the. Is it, Is it profitable? Yes. Great. Spend some more money there, is it not? Nope. We need to now tweak it. Okay. We need to now tweak it.

And so what does tweak it mean? So tweak it means, you know, there's a lot there. There's. It's not black and white with the marketing, right? So you, maybe you get.

You know, maybe you're buying leads, you're in a big metropolitan area, right? Let's say you're in, in South Florida. You're. You're covering Miami, you're covering Fort Lauderdale, you're covering West Palm beach, and you're buying leads. And in your system, maybe you see that those leads are coming in and you know, they're not really working the way that you would hope, right? They're not meeting your metric number that you need them to meet. And so you might be quick to just cut them off. But before you do that, maybe you need to separate out.

The three different counties because maybe one's working really good and the other one's not working really good. Or maybe you're buying local and long distance leads. They're all mixed together and.

You'Re judging them and basing it on everything. You might need to separate that. Or maybe you've got a postcard campaign. Maybe your postcard needs to be tweaked. Maybe the copy on it, what's written on it, needs to be updated. Maybe the pictures need to be updated. Maybe your calls to action need to be updated, right? Maybe you've got pay per click campaigns going to landing pages, and maybe you need to update those and do some A B testing to kind of see what's going on with that. Right? We're talking about systematizing here so you could scale. So if anybody's like, Louis, this is. This seems like a lot. Okay? You know.

There'S work involved, but I'm telling you the steps to do it. But once it's set up, that's it. Like, once it's set up, every. Listen, everything that we learn, when we first learn it sounds overwhelming.

To go back to riding a bike, right? How many times do you fall, scrape your knee, bump your head, do all that when you're riding a bike. Felt super scared to do it.

Now you know it's nothing. Think about all the stuff when you first started your business. Oh, man. How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? You figure it out, right? You figure it out. It's having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset of saying, man, that's hard. I'm not going to do it. It's. No, I haven't learned how to do that yet.

Once I learn how to do that and I do it a few times, right, I'll get more competent at doing it. As I get more competent, I'm going to get more confident, right? Psychology. It's called the competence confidence loop. You get more competent, you get better at something, you become more confident. If you become more confident, you'll go and learn how to do it more. It's like, oh, yeah, I'm good at this. I'm good at this. We all like doing stuff that we're good at, all right? You learn and implement this stuff, you'll never have to worry again about. Oh, man. There's this new type of marketing. Oh, my. There's these new leads. Oh, no. And feel overwhelmed. No. You run it through your system, right? And you'll know right away. You try it out.

You track it, you tweak it, you make some adjustments, and that's it. Okay? Next thing is.

You want to.

Automate.

And systematize your repeats, your referrals and your reviews, your repeats, your referrals and your reviews, your repeat customers, your referral customers and the reviews that you get.

This is not something to just leave up to chance, right?

This is something that needs to be cultivated, it needs to be systematized, and it needs to be given attention and focused on, right? But you could automate this whole thing. Repeat referral customers with, you know, automation, you know, smart moving helps with a lot of this, you know, to be able to get more repeat customers, get more referral customers, get more reviews. You know, the biggest thing you could do to combat any negative reviews, right? Because most people, you know, without being asked, don't really go and post, you know, great reviews.

You know, you might have a lot of great reviews, but there's. I bet you have a lot more customers that had a great experience with you. If we went up with a mic and asked them, how was it, right? You'd have 10 times more people that were happy with your service than probably more than that then actually went and posted a review. So that's why we need to be proactive. We need to ask them. And we just want to systematize this, right? We just want to get it in a system to where you've got a checkpoint at the move where you're going after the review. You've got automation that happens with your CRM, with text messages and emails and phone calls and all that. That's helping to get that review after the fact, right? You've got automation for the customer service. If somebody says, hey, we weren't really happy with the move, we'll talk about that in a couple of days when we get the customer service. But you know, and the same thing for referrals. You know, when I started my moving company, I had the yellow page ad and then I went and pounded the pavement. I went from apartment complex to real estate office, walked in trying to round up business, okay, work great, until I got busy and I stopped nurturing those people.

And it all fell off. Right? And I know there's people on this right now that that's happened to them because I mean, I talked to so many moving company owners every day and it's a, it's a common thing. It's, it's, you know, we're like, okay, we get fired up, yeah, let's get some brochures, we're going to do this, let's go. We're going to, you know, buy this real estate office lunch and we're going to talk to them about something. And you know, all great intentions.

But the referral program is not systematized, meaning it's something that is just loosely thought about and hasn't been completely from start to finish thought through and automated.

Right? This is the triple R compound effect. Now if you understand investing and know about compound interest.

I won't get into it here, you could look it up. But compound interest, okay, when you spend money on marketing, and now for every one of those jobs, you're getting a repeat customer, referrals, five star reviews, you're compounding that money that you spent on marketing. The more money that you get from repeat and referral customers that essentially you're paying zero for, right? Your overall ROI percentage starts to go down. And you know what happens when your ROI percentage goes down? Your profits go up from there, your money goes up, right? From there you could hire people you need. From there you could live the life that you want to live. All right, you see how this all comes together? So important you've got to automate your repeats, your referrals and your reviews. Alright, so next with systematizing your marketing.

We'Ve got make sure you got your ROI based marketing, right? That's the foundation. Once you have the foundation, you manage it by testing, tracking, tweaking, then you automate, right? This extra stuff that's gonna Help compound every dollar you spend.

Then from there.

Put all your focus on sales.

It's very common. Louis, those leads suck. Louis, those leads don't work. Louis, I tried this, I tried that. Okay, let's look at your sales process. Walk me through it.

If you spent more time, energy, focus.

Establishing a real sales process, it'll transform everything people say. Louis, how'd you get. How'd you go from zero to $20 million a year in business Sales? Sales. That's it. That's it. From, from early on, you know, I sat, I built my script. I figured out what to say when they said they're not ready to move with me yet. You know, Then when I built my team, right, I had over 60 people on the phones. How is that possible? Because there's a process behind all of it, right? So, you know, the marketing is good, you know, but if you could have the, you could have the best fuel in the world. But if you're putting that fuel into a beat up Datsun, you're not getting very far, right? Let me give you an example on this, on this marketing here. So I had a client, a private client, who I met at one of these, one of my events. And when I first met with him to figure out, like, what he wanted to do, he was like, you know, I was like, how much money do you want to make personally? He's like, I want to make $100,000 a month. And he just said it in a way that was like, yeah, okay, Louis. Like, you know, if you're asking, if you're gonna act like you're the genie that could grant me my wish, this is what I want. I'm like, okay, cool, wrote it down. And so we started to dive in on the fundamentals. So as we're going through his financials, as we're going through his information, I see he is spending $50,000 a month in marketing. $50,000 a month in Marketing. He was doing $3 million a year.

So obviously those numbers aren't where they need to be, Right? You're talking about. What is that, 20%?

Yeah, I think 20%. If I'm off, I would use my calculator, but it's on Instagram right now. Is the phone 20%? So then we went in, we got his marketing ROI on point, which is what I'm talking to you about. So we could see clearly, we could diagnose the problem. Why are we spending so much and not booking enough to compensate for it? And we went in and we stripped away.

$25,000 a month worth of marketing. So we took his marketing from 50,000amonth to $25,000 a month, but reallocated it like, okay, no, look, look, that's working really well. Let's take the money we're taking from here. Let's put it there. Let's get rid of this, right? And so we start making these adjustments.

He went from.

50,000Amonth in advertising spend to $25,000 a month in advertising spend. He was at $3 million a year.

In business gross revenue. He went to just about $6 million a year with half the budget. Now, part of that was we worked on a sales process as well. Okay, but the point is, you know, we can't just blindly throw money at marketing and pay and pray, right? Like, we can't do that. We need to manage it. We need to systematize it.

All right, my friend, what'd you think of that episode? Did you learn something new? Did it spark some ideas that you can implement your business right away? Did it get the wheels turning? Did you love it? If so, do me a favor, share this episode. Somewhere out there on social media where you know there's some people that will get value from it. Make sure you hashtag the Moving Mastery Podcast so that we'll be able to look you up and find you on Instagram. Sometimes we just randomly pick a few people and send them gifts like free training T shirts, hats, swag, tickets to our three day seminars. So make sure you let us know you're listening and share what you thought about this episode out there on social media.

Thank you so much for joining us on the Moving Mastery Podcast and being a part of this amazing community. And until we talk next time, go out there every single day. Profit in your business, business and thrive in your life. I'll talk to you soon, my friend.