Moving Company Marketing

Foreign.

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

You know, when it comes to marketing.

You know, it's. It's really one of those things that it seems like it's this big mysterious thing, right? I remember when I first, you know, learned about SEO and pay per click, it was, you know, it was. It seemed like the people at the SEO companies were like magic sorcerers, right? Like they had this magic potion and you didn't know anything about it. You couldn't know the terminology. You couldn't know, you know, what they were doing in the background. They were just like, hey, give me money. And I remember the first time I went and did SEO on my website for my moving company, it cost me 30 grand upfront to do it. That was back in 2007, maybe 2008. But when it comes to marketing today, there's so many options and there's so many choices that it really allows for so much opportunity for companies to not only get in the game quicker, but, right, moving companies to kind of jump in the game, but also to be able to.

Tweak their marketing to make it more profitable. Because at the end of the day, it's not about just generating business. It's about making sure that the leads that come in turn into moves and those moves are profitable moves, right? We don't just want a bunch of low paying moves that we have to pay for at any cost, right? It's easy to generate leads if you have an unlimited budget, but the game of business is to generate more money, right? Then you pay out in expenses. So with all the fixed costs and the cost of goods and your labor costs and your trucks and your warehouses, marketing needs to be a piece of that. But it can't be out of control, and it has to be profitable. So I want to start by just addressing what the main purpose of all marketing is. Your moving company. All right? It doesn't have to be so complicated, and it could really be a simple thing. And so there's two things, right? There's two purposes for all of your marketing. And I want you to think about this with everything that you do from here on out with your marketing. And the first purpose is to build trust. Okay? So let's just take, for example, like your website.

And maybe like a direct mail campaign, that page on your website and that postcard or mailer or whatever you're sending out. The first thing that it needs to do is build trust with that potential customer to show them that, hey, we are a company that at least looks and feels and sounds like, based on the things you're saying that we want to do business with, that we're excited about what we see. They still need to call you and they still need to actually go through the getting a quote and that whole process. But that first impression that you kind of put forth with the customer on all of your marketing has to be based on building trust. Okay? You know, this is a very personal process. I mean, when you invite somebody into your home, right? I'm at my home office today. When you invite somebody into your home and you know, let them not only come to an estimate and walk through the house, but now you're gonna actually have them come in and touch all your stuff, right? That's what, you know, as a moving company, that's what happens. Like we don't think about that because on a day to day basis we're just, you know, book and move, service and moves. Book and move, service and moves. But think about the customer. They're inviting you into their home, not only in, but now to touch all their stuff, put it on a truck and then bring it to the new location. So the first thing that needs to happen with all of your marketing pieces, like, you know, things that you design and this could even be your Yelp page, right? Anywhere that you market, anywhere that you advertise. The first purpose is to build trust. So how do you build trust? I mean, you do that by simple things. I mean, you use good pictures, right? Pictures of your staff, friendly looking families. You let them know your experience in the business. You talk about all the stuff that you actually do, right? As part of your service. You let them know your servicing area. There's nothing worse than going on somebody's website. They're a local company that they only service like one particular area. But it doesn't say that information anywhere, right? A customer wants to know you're a local company. So these are just some of the things that you could do to build trust for everybody that lands on your marketing. Because just because they receive your direct mail piece or just because they land on your website doesn't mean it's going to turn into a lead, right? So the second purpose of all of your marketing is to capture leads, all right? So I want you to remember this. Build trust and capture leads. Build trust and capture leads. That's it with all of your marketing, right? You want to make sure that you're able to build that trust and you're able to capture the lead. And what do I mean by capture the lead. Well, first of all, you know, the best way to get any type of lead is to get a phone call, right? Phone calls are like gold and they're getting more and more, you know, sacred, really, because, you know, back in the day we had yellow page ads and the phone just rang and rang and rang and we sat back on the desk with our feet up, you know, and just answered the phone and booked jobs. But now, right, you might get them to request a quote through your web form. You might get them to send in an email off your website. You might have a live chat feature on your website where they, you know, send in some information on the chat. The idea is that you either need to generate a phone call, generate a request for a quote, right, by them. And I, and I know you know this stuff, but I want to just make it really simple, right? And break it down. Because remember, the purpose of all of your marketing, build trust, capture leads. That's it. Okay? So once you capture that lead, now you put that into your sales process, right? I mean, we talked, we touched a little bit on that yesterday. But you know, you have to be able to capture it. So the way that your postcard is designed, the way that your website is designed, the way that your landing page, if you're doing SEO, pay per click, is designed, right? All of that needs to be done in a way where it's to build trust and capture the lead, right? And so, you know, when we look at, you know, for example, pay per click, right? If you're running adword campaigns, or you're running Bing ads, or you're running Facebook ads, or whatever you're doing, that's a pay per click. You want to make sure that you're running that to a landing page and not to your website, alright? People say, louis, I don't. That sounds crazy to me. I have this beautiful website. Why would I send them to a landing page, which is just a single page with, you know, one page, no links, nowhere to go other than to either call you or request a quote. And it's just been proven in years and years of testing that that converts better than sending them to your website. So, you know, once you're able to build trust and capture leads, the next thing that you need to do with all your marketing is manage it. And managing it is really comes down to three things, alright? First, you need to test. You need to test everything, right? There's new lead sources every single day that come out and there's stuff that's been around for A long time. But sometimes, you know, they do really well, and then they fall off, too. You know, like certain, you know, moving lead providers might be doing really, really well providing great leads, but then they have trouble getting leads, so the leads they're giving you aren't as good. So you always want to be testing new stuff to see if it works. But in order to do that, you have to track it. Not only are you going to test it, but you need to make sure that you track it. Because if you're not tracking, then you have no way of knowing if it's actually working or not. You want to break down all of your marketing into very specific marketing ROI reports. That tells you exactly what your return on investment is for each individual source. You know, not necessarily. You know, you. You'll get the whole. As you combine them, right, on a marketing ROI report. But you want to be able to look at each individual source. Hey, what's up, Lauren?

And when you do that, right, it allows you to see what's really working. And once you do that, so once you test everything, once you track it, right, and you're able to see, okay, is this working or is it not working? Right? We tried this new lead source. We tested it. Now we're tracking it, we're checking the roi. Is it working? Is it not working? The next step, the third and final step of managing your marketing is to tweak it. And what does that mean? So, you know, to tweak it basically means, okay, I'm gonna look at, you know, let's say I have lead source A and lead source B, and lead source A is, you know, it's bringing in moves, right? So normally you'd be like, oh, this is great. It's bringing in moves. But when you look at the roi, which the ROI percentage is essentially, how much money did you spend in relation to how much money you made, right? So let's say you made, you know, $100,000, right? On a particular lead source. That's the move revenue that it brought in. But you spent $5,000 to get those leads. Your marketing ROI percentage would be 5%, right? So let's say marketing source A is, you know, let's say that's the example, right? You spent 5,000 to get 100,000 in business, you're spending 5%. And then marketing source B, maybe you spent much less. Maybe you only spent, you know, $1,000. But that thousand dollars maybe brought you in.

You know, let's say 5,000, right? So I think that would be, you know, Check me on the math here. But I think that would be 20%, right? So you're looking at 20%. So now when you look at that, if you're spending 20% on a particular lead source, you can't have profitable moves, right? You've got too many other expenses to that you need to take on in your job costing, right? When you're looking at job costing for each individual move you need to look at, okay, first there's how much are we getting, right? How much are we paying our labor, what's our truck expense, what's our insurance, what's our fuel, right. So on and so forth with your job costing. So you only have so much to spend with your marketing, right? So when we talk about tweaking, right? If you have Lead Source A is 5%, right. Which is really good. And then you have Lead Source B, which is, you know, at 20%, right? So what do you do? You're still spending $1,000, which is much less, on Lead Source B. You're still spending much less. What's up, buddy? You're still spending much less. However, the return that you're getting is not good. So what do you do? Well, for me, first thing I would do is say, okay, can I take that thousand dollars from Lead Source B that's not quite working and can I spend more on Lead Source A? Right. In other words, if it's a, whatever, it's a pay per click campaign, if it's a direct mail campaign, if it's a lead provider, whatever it is, can I spend more money there? Am I maxed out with the read, with the area that I'm covering? Right? Are there more opportunities to.

Spend money on? All right, buddy, I'm doing a live. My dog's going to want some petting right now.

So, you know, are there more opportunities to spend money? Right. Does that lead provider maybe have more leads that you can, you know, spend some money on? Right? So, you know, let me know if you guys are, you know, let me know here in the chat, in the comments what you guys are doing for, you know, marketing. What's your best piece and how you go about tracking that. So basically what it comes down to is when you do the tweak, you say, okay, I'm gonna take the thousand dollars from Lead Source B. Right? And if that Lead Source B is producing 20% as your marketing, as your ROI percentage, that's not good, right? So you're gonna say, okay, maybe I just need to eliminate that, right? If I. You also wanna go in and look at a few other things which we won't dive into today. All right? By the way, if you wanna learn how to do this stuff in depth, you need to be at moving Sales Academy Live, period. Right? I mean, if any of you let me know who's here that's been there before, you know, we go in depth with this. So if this seems like I'm just kind of talking in theory and it's, you know, not really drilling down for like, okay, Louis, what are the actual steps of how to do? You need to click on the link on this page, check out the testimonials that are there, and make sure you get yourself to moving Sales Academy live and set yourself up for this year to be your best year year. All right? It's amazing when certain things become clear to you what you can do with that information. So anyways, to go ahead and tweak, you take that thousand dollars and just say, okay, well, let me put that thousand up on the source that's really working, right? You want to kind of see what's working and put your money there. So when you test, track and tweak, which is an amazing opportunity that we have in 2019 for our marketing that we didn't have in 2001. 2000, 2002, you know, and so on with, you know, all your marketing dollars or let's say in the yellow pages and they're stuck there for a year, well, now you have an opportunity to go, okay, let's see, let's bring in leads, let's try new leads. Let's see what's working. All right, let's track it. We need to make sure that we track it. We know exactly where every lead source came from. So, you know, your CRM should be tracking information for you should be able to kind of see, you know, exactly where all your leads are coming from. When people call in, you should have tracking numbers to know exactly where it came. Right this way, your marketing report is accurate. And then you can make the tweaks, then you can make the adjustments. Alright, so I see. Let's see, we got some questions here. See, we have. Did you, Lauren? What's up, Lauren? Did you get account. Did you get a marketing manager to produce the report or your accountant or did they both work together to get this done? Yeah. So your marketing report is super important. Alright? So I would start, you know, by. Unless you have like a very, you know, large staff. I know you do. Unless you have a very large staff and very competent accountants and marketing managers and things like that I would start by doing it yourself. Right? But you're going to need people to work together. And the most important part with getting your marketing report on point is gathering the data and making sure that it's all correct, right? Your CRM, your moving software should be able to pull the majority of that report and produce it for you. But we did it basically in Excel, right? You have it in Excel, you pull the information out of the CRM, you have it in Excel and yeah, let's see. Been paying a lot for what's up Conrad? Been paying a lot for PPC and noticed sometimes regular leads can be better. You know, I'm all about like trying everything, right? And again, running it through that process, test it, track it, tweak it. So pay per click, if it's not managed correctly, right? Meaning your whole strategy, from, you know, your keyword strategy to your ads themselves, to the landing page that they come on to the thank you page after they submit a request for a quote to the sales process after you receive that lead, if it's not like on point, you could lose a lot of money with pay per clicks. And that probably sounds like what's happening, but if you have all those ducks in a row, it could be very profitable. Now, leads like moving leads, like Equate Media is a great source. You got quote, runner, moving.com, those are moving leads, right?

Their conversion rate, how many you're going to book versus how many actual leads you get is much lower. However, if you're making the dials, if you're making the calls, if you're running them through a solid sales process, which we teach you at Moving Sales Academy, then they could be very, very profitable, right? So there's, you know, different types of leads. There's like, hey, moving leads. Like, we have to work for these. We have to spend some time really making the dials and doing the follow up, which is okay, right? No problem doing that. However, you also have other lead sources that will just produce phone calls, right? You know, so maybe Yelp will produce phone calls, your website, direct mail, right? So if you don't have the staff to make the calls and you're not willing to make the calls, and you just buy moving leads and call them once and that's it. You're not going to see any return on that. So listen, all of this stuff has to work together, right? It's all about having a complete system on how to do it. So I hope this was helpful today. Click on the link and listen, I'm gonna go live again later. We're gonna talk about some other stuff. I gotta eat some breakfast, get in the shower, get to the office, get some things done. And I'll check in with you guys again later. All right. Thanks for being here. I'll see you.

Sam.